In this engrossing and informative book, National Public Radio commentator Tim Brookes conducts a passionate inquest into the origins and treatment of asthma. His motives are both journalistic -- some 12 million Americans have asthma -- and personal: Brookes himself is asthmatic and nearly died from an attack. Catching My Breath records Brooke's mystifying and sometimes infuriating encounters with doctors, insurance companies, and homeopathic healers. He peers into a living human lung, undergoes homeopathic injections of silver and tobacco leaf in his back and neck, and even sees a psychic to ask otherworldly spirits about the causes of asthma. He surveys the dubious history of treatments (which include the use of decayed flesh and cockroach intestines) and grapples with an insurance company that agrees to cover him only if he doesn't get sick. A thoroughly unconventional exploration of illness from a patient's point of view, Catching My Breath is also the first book to give serious attention to the social roots of asthma, and raises profound questions about our attitudes toward illness in general.

Catching My Breath: An Asthmatic Explores His Illness

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Brookes, Tim

Diseases & Physical Ailments

Vintage

Guitar: An American Life

How did a small, humble folk instrument become an American icon? How did the guitar come to represent freedom, the open road, protest and rebellion, the blues, youth, lost love, and sexuality? In this intensely personal memoir and informative history, Tim Brookes recounts his quest to build the perfect guitar. Pairing up with a master artisan from the Green Mountains of Vermont, Brookes sees how a rare piece of cherry wood is hued, sawn, dovetailed, and worked with rasps and files. As his prized instrument takes shape, he narrates the long and winding history of the guitar in the United States. Arriving with conquistadors and the colonists, the guitar has found itself in an extraordinary variety of hands: miners and society ladies, lumberjacks and presidents wives. In time, the guitar became America s vehicle of self-expression its modern soundtrack. Guitar is a rare glimpse of one man s search for music. It is sure to resonate with musicians and non-musicians alike."

Arts & Photography

Blackstone Pub

'A Hell of a Place to Lose a Cow': An American Hitchhiking Odyssey

A noted cultural critic and NPR essayist offers a lively and provocative account of his hitchhiking odyssey across the United States, documenting his experiences along the way and reexamining America's onetime love affair with the road trip.

Travel

Canada

National Geographic

A noted cultural critic and NPR essayist offers a lively and provocative account of his hitchhiking odyssey across the United States, documenting his experiences along the way and reexamining America's onetime love affair with the road trip. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.

Travel Writing

The author's quest to unravel the symbolic associations a guitar holds for so many takes him across America to talk with historians, curators, and guitar makers in an exploration of the folk instrument that became an American icon.

Music

GROVE PRESS

How did a small, humble folk instrument become an American icon? How did the guitar come to represent freedom, the open road, protest and rebellion, the blues, youth, lost love, and sexuality? In this intensely personal memoir and informative history, National Public Radio commentator and essayist Tim Brookes recounts his quest to build the perfect guitar. Pairing up with a master artisan from the Green Mountains of Vermont, Brookes sees how a rare piece of cherry wood is hued, dovetailed, and worked on with saws, rasps, and files. As his prized instrument takes shape, Brookes also narrates the long and winding history of the guitar in the United States. Arriving with conquistadors and the colonists, the guitar has found itself in an extraordinary variety of hands: miners and society ladies, lumberjacks and presidents’ wives. In time, the guitar became America’s vehicle of self-expression, its modern soundtrack. Guitar is a rare glimpse of one man’s search for music. It is sure to resonate with musicians and non-musicians alike.

A journalist and lifelong asthmatic provides an informative look at the mysteries of this epidemic illness and offers thought-provoking questions about modern health care and chronic illness. 25,000 first printing.

Crown

"For a nation obsessed with the happy ending, we give remarkably little thought to our own," writes journalist Tim Brookes. "Our fictions are full of the desire to shape these final mythic moments -- the good dying peacefully, or tragically, the bad falling from a great height onto sharp objects, the death perfectly or ironically illustrating the quality and virtue of the life. Yet in real life we'll do anything to avoid even mentioning death, let alone anticipating it. The only encouragement we get to plan for our death is from life insurance companies who will go bankrupt if we don't." Brookes initially intended to follow a methodical plan in order to gain insight into the mystery of our final days. He would volunteer at a local hospice to learn all he could about this growing movement -- one that promotes a new level of emotional and physical care for the dying and that has become a powerful alternative to the often dehumanizing experience of death in a hospital or nursing home. He would also interview patients and experts in hospice care in hopes of limning the difficult decisions imminent death brings to the surface. But Brookes's plans changed shape dramatically when, shortly after he'd begun research for his book, his mother called to report her diagnosis of terminal pancreatic cancer. What began as an investigative report evolved to embrace the author's intimate account of meeting -- and accepting -- his mother's death on its own terms. Slowly Brookes began to fill in the outlines of what he'd learned about hospice with the subtle shadings of his mother's experiences. Abstractions about death with dignity, the role of hope, and the need for family became powerful and immediate realities. Yet amid the sorrows came unexpected and joyful signs of life: a reconnection with long-forgotten relatives, a new opportunity to get to know his mother more deeply than ever before, and even laughs as the whole family struggled through a journey we will all take one day. Signs of Life blends insightful reportage of a revolutionary program for helping the dying and a son's frank account of coping with the fears, concern, and love he holds for his dying mother and his growing appreciation of mortality. Brookes discovered that the hospice experience imbued his mother's dying with profound meaning; her death and the process of grieving enabled his family to grow closer together even as they came to recognize the levels of distance among them. With intimacy and eloquence, Tim Brookes has written a deeply personal travel guide for the road that lies ahead. While not shying away from the difficulties of such a time, Signs of Life shows us that some of the most important revelations and changes are possible only near the end of life, when not only the dying but the survivors are completing a journey towards the deepest intimacy they may ever have known, a journey of discovering and letting go, and of coming home.

Signs of Life:: A Memoir of Dying and Discovery

Biographies & Memoirs

Professionals & Academics

Times Books

St Albans Cathedral (Pitkin Guides)

Architecture

Jarrold Publishing

Brookes, known for his mastery of the English language, turns an account of the death of his mother into a work hailed as literature by book critics, and as moving testimony of the value of hospice care by leaders of the hospice movement.

Signs of Life: A Memoir of Dying and Discovery

Parenting & Relationships

Upper Access, Inc.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Brookes, Tim. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Brookes, Tim

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Brookes, Tim. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Catching My Breath: An Asthmatic Explores His Illness

Guitar: An American Life

'A Hell of a Place to Lose a Cow': An American Hitchhiking Odyssey

'A Hell of a Place to Lose a Cow': An American Hitchhiking Odyssey

Guitar: An American Life

Guitar: An American Life

Catching My Breath: An Asthmatic Explores His Illness

Signs of Life:: A Memoir of Dying and Discovery

St Albans Cathedral (Pitkin Guides)

Signs of Life: A Memoir of Dying and Discovery