A child crashes to the ground from the monkey bars head-first. A high school student prepares for months to take the SAT. A grandmother slowly slips away from her family through the deadly progression of Alzheimer’s Disease. Whether we realize it or not, the importance of brain health to our daily lives goes far beyond just being able to walk and talk. The Dana Guide to Brain Health offers the first comprehensive home medical reference book on the brain, providing an unparalleled, authoritative guide to improving the fitness of our brains and, ultimately, enriching our lives.

With contributions from over one hundred of the most prominent scientists and clinicians in the United States, The Dana Guide to Brain Health is an extensive and wholly accessible manual on the workings of the human brain. This richly illustrated volume contains a wealth of facts and advice, on simple yet effective ways to take care of our brains; the intimate connection between brain health and body health; brain development from the prenatal period through adulthood; and how we learn, remember, and imagine.

The brain is far too important to be excluded any longer from our daily health concerns. The Dana Guide to Brain Health remedies this oversight with a clearly written, definitive map to our brains that reveals how we can take care of them in order to sustain a long and rich life.

Dead Weight chronicles the improbable turnaround of a drug smuggler who, after being sentenced to eight years in state prison, returned to society to earn a PhD in creative writing and become the only tenured professor in the United States with seven felony convictions. Horton’s visceral essays highlight the difficulties of trying to change one’s life for the better, how the weight of felony convictions never dissipates.
 
The memoir begins with a conversation between Horton and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man statue in New York City. Their imagined dialogue examines the psychological impact of racism on Black men and boys, including Horton’s separation from his mother, immediately after his birth, in a segregated Alabama hospital. From his current life as a professor and prison reformer, Horton looks back on his experiences as a drug smuggler and trafficker during the 1980s–1990s as well as the many obstacles he faced after his release. He also examines the lasting impact of his drug activity on those around him, reflecting on the allure of economic freedom and the mental escapism that cocaine provided, an allure so strong that both sellers and users were willing to risk prison. Horton shares historical context and vivid details about people caught in the war on drugs who became unsuspecting protagonists in somebody else’s melodrama.
 
Lyrical and gripping, Dead Weight reveals the lifelong effects of one man’s incarceration on his psyche, his memories, and his daily experience of American society.
 

 
“Old stories are universal and want to be told.  To bring those stories out into the world as a vehicle for navigating sobriety and recovery is a glorious thing.
I was hired to be an addictions counselor for the therapeutic community at the Frederick County Adult Detention Center. Susan Gordon encouraged me to tell them stories. I thought she was crazy, but I trusted her judgment and told them stories. The impact those stories had on those men changed my life. I worked in addictions for 15 years, taking those stories with me to very agency in which I worked.  The women at the Center 4 Clean Start in Salisbury, MD were every bit as receptive to story as the men who were in jail.”
            --Beth Ohlsson
 

With Drawing Your Stress Away and Hello, This Is Your Body Talking, art therapist and educator Dr. Lucia Capacchione presents a new concept in adult coloring: the draw-it-yourself coloring book. Forty years ago, Capacchione originated the Creative Journal Method to help clients and students reduce stress, heal trauma, and unleash creativity. Since then, her research-based techniques have been used internationally in schools, counseling centers, support groups, addiction recovery centers, and programs for veterans. Drawing Your Stress Away and Hello, This Is Your Body Talking are a wonderful introduction to Capacchione’s methods which include drawing, coloring, and writing with the non-dominant hand to help the user shed inhibitions and rediscover the artistic spontaneity of childhood. Capacchione gently guides readers to use drawing for meditation, stress release, and self-care. In Hello, This Is Your Body Talking, simple breathing, drawing, and writing prompts encourage physical awareness and relaxation. Drawing Your Stress Away helps reduce tension through emotional expression, self-nurturing, and artistic discovery. Unlike traditional coloring books, which require fine motor control in highly detailed predetermined patterns, Capacchione’s “anti-coloring books” provide the inspiration for users to make their own art, tune out their inner critics, and take the training wheels off their natural creativity.

The glitter and excitement that tourists associate with casinos is only a facade. To the gaming industry's front-line employees, its dealers, the casino is a far less glamorous environment, a workplace full of emotional tension, physical and mental demands, humor and pathos. Author H. Lee Barnes, who spent many years as a dealer in some of Las Vegas's best-known casinos, shows us this world from the point of view of the table-games dealer. Told in the voices of dozens of dealers, male and female, young and old, Dummy Up and Deal takes us to the dealer's side of the table. We observe the "breaking in" that constitutes a dealer's training, where the hands learn the motions of the game while the mind undergoes the requisite hardening to endure long hours of concentration and the demands of often unreasonable and sometimes abusive players. We discover how dealers are hired and assigned to shifts and tables, how they interact with each other and with their supervisors, and how they deal with players—the winners and the losers, the "Sweethearts" and the "Dragon Lady," the tourists looking for a few thrills and the mobsters showing off their "juice." We observe cheaters on both sides of the table and witness the exploits of such high-rollers as Frank Sinatra and Colonel Parker, Elvis's manager. And we learn about the dealers' lives after-hours, how some juggle casino work with family responsibilities while others embrace the bohemian lifestyle of the Strip and sometimes lose themselves to drugs, drink, or sex. It's a life that invites cynicism and bitterness, that can erode the soul and deaden the spirit. But the dealer's life can also offer moments of humor, encounters with generous and kindly players, moments of pride or humanity or professional solidarity. Barnes writes with the candor of a keen observer of his profession, someone who has seen it all—many times—but has never lost his capacity to wonder, to sympathize, or to laugh. Dummy Up and Deal is a colorful insider's view of the casino industry, a fascinating glimpse behind the glitter into the real world of the casino worker.