This book of autobiographical, autoethnographic illness narratives tackles the intersection between cultural and medical illnesses in present-day Lebanon, in relation to topical issues such as queer home, coming of age, dementia, expatriate trauma, and sexual blackmail, among others. The book’s essays are developed in the backdrop of Lebano-pathography – a dual, potentially adaptable and reusable, narrative intervention (form/method) that does not depoliticise the traumatic subject. Simultaneously, it is a body of writing (text) that seeks to illuminate the different ways one can be ill, and try to recover, in present-day Lebanon. While somatic manifestations of illness and their concomitant patient accounts are central to previous research in narrative medicine and illness writing, Lebano-pathography underscores a more versatile interpretation of illness encompassing cultural practice and/or clinical disease, and exploring in critically informed autobiographical text the two illness categories’ causal interrelationship. In the backdrop of the cadaverous political grid and economic tensions rending the country since the national tragedy of the August 4, 2020 explosion of Beirut Port, this volume unpacks the following thematic clusters: (1) Rewriting Illness: Pathographies of Gender and Sex; (2) The Alzheimer Spectrum: Cognitive and/or Cultural Memory Failure; (3) Walking the City: Medical Malpractice, Pedestrian Injuries, and Claustophobia; (4) The Bones Within: Immigrant Narratives and Vicarious Trauma; and (5) Surviving Trauma: Coping and Mental Health. The chapters in this book were originally published in Life Writing and are accompanied by a new conclusion.

Autoethnography in the 21st Century offers interpretive, analytic, interactive, performative, experiential, and embodied forms of autoethnography from around the globe. Volume I, Colonialism, Immigration, Embodiment, Belonging examines forms of autoethnography as a decolonizing and dehegemonizing practice in the allegedly post-racial, post-colonial, and post-(hetero)sexist twenty-first century. Contributors use autoethnographic methods and practices to interrogate the dominant cultural practices and political exigencies that have shaped their lives, their arts, and their academic work on bicultural, queer, gender-subordinated, or post-colonial experience. It features autobiographical and anthropological poetics, autotheory, and fieldwork grounded in Africa, Argentina, Australia, Canada, China, and the United States. The book will be of interest to students and researchers in the fields of critical autoethnography, communication, cultural and gender studies, and other related disciplines. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Life Writing.

Autoethnography in the 21st Century offers interpretive, analytic, interactive, performative, experiential, and embodied forms of autoethnography from around the globe. Volume II, Genealogy, Memory, Media, Witness examines hybrid ethnographic life-writing genres, including genealogical memoir, cultural autotheory, and family narrative. Contributors actively blur the distinction between emic and etic classifications of ethnographic experience to position themselves as both the active bearers of and critical witnesses of culture to produce and analyze expressive rather than data-driven depictions of selfhood and culture that emerge in the spaces between traditionally self-effacing scientific methods and literary narrative. It features autobiographical and anthropological poetics, autotheory, and fieldwork grounded in Trinidad, Jordan, Mexico, Italy, Australia, Canada, Scotland, Egypt, Turkey, and the United States. The book will be of interest to students and researchers in the fields of critical autoethnography, communication, cultural and gender studies, and other related disciplines. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Life Writing.

“A fascinating history of a public health crisis. Compellingly written and insightful, Keep Out of Reach of Children traces the discovery of Reye’s syndrome, research into its causes, industry’s efforts to avoid warning labels on one suspected cause, aspirin, and the feared disease’s sudden disappearance. Largent’s empathy is with the myriad children and parents harmed by the disease, while he challenges the triumphalist view that labeling solved the crisis.” —ERIK M. CONWAY, coauthor of Merchants of Doubt “Largent’s engaging and honest account explores how medical mysteries are shaped by prevailing narratives about venal drug companies, heroic investigators, and Johnny-come-lately politicians.” —HELEN EPSTEIN, author of The Invisible Cure “Fascinating. . . . Thought-provoking.” —Booklist “Well-researched. . . . A revealing work.” —Kirkus Reviews Reye’s syndrome, identified in 1963, was a debilitating, rare condition that typically afflicted healthy children just emerging from the flu or other minor illnesses. It began with vomiting, followed by confusion, coma, and in 50 percent of all cases, death. Survivors were often left with permanent liver or brain damage. Desperate, terrorized parents and doctors pursued dramatic, often ineffectual treatments. For over fifteen years, many inconclusive theories were posited as to its causes. The Centers for Disease Control dispatched its Epidemic Intelligence Service to investigate, culminating in a study that suggested a link to aspirin. Congress held hearings at which parents, researchers, and pharmaceutical executives testified. The result was a warning to parents and doctors to avoid pediatric use of aspirin, leading to the widespread substitution of alternative fever and pain reducers. But before a true cause was definitively established, Reye’s syndrome simply vanished. A harrowing medical mystery, Keep Out of Reach of Children is the first and only book to chart the history of Reye’s syndrome and reveal the confluence of scientific and social forces that determined the public health policy response, for better or for ill. Mark A. Largent, a survivor of Reye’s syndrome, is the author of Vaccine: The Debate in Modern America and Breeding Contempt: The History of Coerced Sterilization in the United States. He is a historian of science, Associate Professor in James Madison College at Michigan State University, and Associate Dean in Lyman Briggs College at Michigan State University. He lives in Lansing, Michigan.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by The Wellcome Trust. The Diseased Brain and the Failing Mind charts changing cultural understandings of dementia and alzheimer's disease in scientific and cultural texts across the 20th Century. Reading a range of texts from the US, UK, Europe and Japan, the book examines how the language of dementia – regarding the loss of identity, loss of agency, loss of self and life – is rooted in scientific discourse and expressed in popular and literary texts. Following changing scientific understandings of dementia, the book also demonstrates how cultural expressions of the experience and dementia have fed back into the way medical institutions have treated dementia patients. The book includes a glossary of scientific terms for non-specialist readers.

Behind every leader is an instructive life story. It often promotes a public image that inspires others to live by it. And, sometimes, even to live or to die for it. As leadership qualities and image issues gain significance in the public discourse, the psychological study of leadership is a critical factor in any discussion. With its trenchant insights into leaders past and present, The Leader: Psychological Essays, Second Edition, updates a pioneering text in this field and provides a solid basis for ongoing dialogue on this important subject. Within the context of the ever-evolving disciplines of psychoanalysis and psychodynamics, this thought-provoking volume examines the lives of several prominent leaders from ancient Greece through the start of the 21st century. The authors explore how these leaders imposed their individual missions and mystiques on others, thereby fulfilling – and, sometimes, creating – distinct needs in their followers. The volume brings into vivid focus issues with the potential for devastating consequences on the global stage. Coverage includes: Biblical times, ancient Greeks and the seeds of leadership. Lincoln during the 1850s, leading a dividing nation. Thomas A. Kohut on Kaiser Wilhelm II and the German national character. George W. Bush, atonement/redemption narratives and the American Dream. Bin Laden, man and myth. A study of paranoid leadership and its implications for future politics and policy. This must-have Second Edition is indispensable reading for researchers, professors, and graduate students across many disciplines, including political psychology, psychoanalysis, history and political science, psychiatry, anthropology, and personality and social psychology. It is important reading for anyone with an interest in the life stories of leaders past and present and how they affect our world even long after they are gone