Now more than ever, American dads act as hands-on caregivers who are devoted to keeping themselves and their families healthy. Yet, men are also disproportionately likely to neglect their own health care, diets, and exercise routines—bad habits that they risk passing on to their children. 

In Dads, Kids, and Fitness, William Marsiglio challenges dads to become more health-conscious in how they live and raise their children. His conclusions are drawn not only from his revealing interviews with a diverse sample of dads and pediatric healthcare professionals, but also from his own unique personal experiences—as a teenage father who, thirty-one years later, became a later-life dad to a second son. Marsiglio’s research highlights the value of treating dads as central players in what he calls the social health matrix, which can serve both healthy children and those with special needs. He also outlines how schools, healthcare facilities, religious groups, and other organizations can help dads make a positive imprint on their families’ health, fitness, and well-being.  

Anchored in compelling life stories of joy, tragedy, and resilience, Dads, Kids, and Fitness extends and deepens public conversation about health at a pivotal historical moment. Its progressive message breathes new life into discussions about fathering, manhood, and health.

Highlighting the ingenuity and resourcefulness of caregivers, the book brims with inspirational stories, practical advice, and creative approaches to problem-solving. Among the issues addressed are:

Becoming a caregiver, whether for a spouse or parent
Dealing with the personality changes caused by dementia, from anxiety and paranoia to hallucinations and impulsive behavior
Keeping dementia sufferers meaningfully involved in life
Handling the emotions and stresses of caregiving
Seeking help through support groups and other sources, including medical professionals, clergy, and other family members The authors, who have both been caregivers themselves, augment their interviewees' stories with connective commentary and their own personal stories. A useful resource section is included to refer readers to associations and help-lines.

You’ve argued politics with your aunt since high school, but failing eyesight now prevents her from keeping current with the newspaper. Your mother fractured her hip last year and is confined to a wheelchair. Your father has Alzheimer’s and only occasionally recognizes you. Someday, as Muriel Gillick points out in this important yet unsettling book, you too will be old. And no matter what vitamin regimen you’re on now, you will likely one day find yourself sick or frail. How do you prepare? What will you need?

With passion and compassion, Gillick chronicles the stories of elders who have struggled with housing options, with medical care decisions, and with finding meaning in life. Skillfully incorporating insights from medicine, health policy, and economics, she lays out action plans for individuals and for communities. In addition to doing all we can to maintain our health, we must vote and organize—for housing choices that consider autonomy as well as safety, for employment that utilizes the skills and wisdom of the elderly, and for better management of disability and chronic disease.

Most provocatively, Gillick argues against desperate attempts to cure the incurable. Care should focus on quality of life, not whether it can be prolonged at any cost. “A good old age,” writes Gillick, “is within our grasp.” But we must reach in the right direction.

A uniquely personal record of a great artist’s experience of mental illness

In his prime, Vaslav Nijinsky (1889-1950) was the most celebrated man in Western ballet--a virtuoso and a dramatic dancer such as European and American audiences had never seen before. After his triumphs in such works as The Specter of the Rose and Petrouchka, he set out to make ballets of his own, and with his Afternoon of a Faun and The Rite of Spring, created within a year of each other, he became ballet’s first modernist choreographer. 

For six weeks in early 1919, as his tie to reality was giving way, Nijinsky kept a diary--the only sustained daily record we have, by a major artist, of the experience of entering psychosis. In some entries he is filled with hope. He is God; he will save the world. In other entries, he falls into a black despair. He is dogged by sexual obsessions and grief over World War I. Furthermore, he is afraid that he is going insane.

The diary was first published in 1936, in a version heavily bowdlerized by Nijinsky’s wife. The new edition, translated by Kyril FitzLyon, is the first complete and accurate English rendering of this searing document. In her introduction, noted dance critic Joan Acocella tells Nijinsky’s story and places it in the context of early European modernism.

A critical exploration of how Gothic tropes infiltrate wellness discourse, revealing the rhetorical forces behind our cultural obsession with food, health, and bodily control.

Disgustatory! A Gothic Rhetoric of Consumption unearths the darkness behind modern obsessions with food, health, and bodily optimization. In this provocative and richly interdisciplinary work, Jeremy Tirrell and Kate Maddalena argue that contemporary discourses around food, medicine, and the body are steeped in Gothic rhetoric—where the promise of purity and control is shadowed by monstrosity, abjection, and the uncanny.

From Soylent and nootropics to probiotics and lab-grown meat, Tirrell and Maddalena show how wellness discourse is haunted by Gothic tropes: body horror, hybridity, and existential dread. Wellness culture, they argue, is not merely pseudoscience or fraud but a complex, persuasive rhetoric that blurs science and myth, purity and decay, medicine and mysticism.

Disgustatory! offers a fresh framework: a “Gothic rhetoric of consumption” that explains why we are drawn to weird diets, digital detoxes, and miracle cures. Through case studies of strange substances and stranger practices—Reddit fasting rituals, magic dirt supplements, fecal transplants— Tirrell and Maddalena reveal how fear, fascination, and the fantasy of bodily control animate our health choices. Each chapter explores a rhetorical element—quantification, hybridity, abjection, optimization, and regulation—to show how food becomes a site of cultural anxiety and existential longing. This book will appeal to rhetoricians, scholars of science and technology studies, cultural theorists, and anyone interested in the strange intersections of health, horror, and persuasion.

In her early thirties, Rachel Weaver woke up dizzy and unable to function. She spent the next ten years seeing more than thirty medical practitioners before receiving a diagnosis, and then another eight years before finding relief from her condition. Dizzy is amedical mystery and a cautionary tale about our broken healthcare system. It is a story about learning to live with life's uncertainty, persevering in the pursuit of answers, and striving to find joy in an imperfect yet beautiful world.

For decades, Katie D’Angelo and Valerie Harrison engaged in conversations about race and racism. However, when Katie and her husband, who are white, adopted Gabriel, a biracial child, Katie’s conversations with Val, who is black, were no longer theoretical and academic. The stakes grew from the two friends trying to understand each other’s perspectives to a mother navigating, with input from her friend, how to equip a child with the tools that will best serve him as he grows up in a white family. 

Through lively and intimate back-and-forth exchanges, the authors share information, research, and resources that orient parents and other community members to the ways race and racism will affect a black child’s life—and despite that, how to raise and nurture healthy and happy children. These friendly dialogues about guarding a child’s confidence and nurturing positive racial identity form the basis for Do Right by Me. Harrison and D’Angelo share information on transracial adoption, understanding racism, developing a child’s positive racial identity, racial disparities in healthcare and education, and the violence of racism. 

Do Right by Me also is a story about friendship and kindness, and how both can be effective in the fight for a more just and equitable society.