<p>Dr. Heafitz's conviction that spiritual strength influences physical health does not jibe with most approaches emphasized in medical school. Weakened by chemotherapy, she was told she could no longer see patients in her pediatrics practice. Then, she decided she had things to teach. The 54-year-old cancer patient started teaching at Harvard Medical School a course designed to encourage compassion in future doctors, as her fight for life provided testimony that charts and statistics never could. At the same time she published this book containing a series of poems.</p>

In Darkness and in Light: A Physician's Journey into Spiritual Healing

Literature & Fiction

Heafitz, Lesley B.

Poetry

First Person Pr

It's not unusual for a guy from L.A. to dream about becoming a big Hollywood honcho with employees who jump when you bark, a blond trophy wife, a driver, a showplace house, and TV deals all over town. Now, what if you achieve all that -- plus a globetrotting, risk-taking lifestyle – after you were a penniless quadriplegic not expected to see 30. That was Gordon Zahler.   With chutzpah and cunning, he lifted himself and his mother off welfare in the early-1950s by selling canned music to anyone willing to buy it. What began with Ed Wood Jr’s infamous Plan Nine From Outer Space and a Doris Day/MGM romantic comedy ended 20 years later with Gordon deep in network television, foreign films and dreams of super-wealth.   In Wheeler-Dealer, Zahler’s nephew, Chip Jacobs, puts his career on hold as a zealous investigative reporter to chronicle the uncle he once despised. When Gordon broke his neck in a horrifying school-gym accident in October 1941, it hit like a bomb. The accident rendered the 14-year-old daredevil permanently paralyzed, obliterated his parent’s marriage, and reduced his family to a life on handouts. Nobody expected the boy would make it out of intensive care, let alone head one of Hollywood’s busiest independent post-production studios.   Played out against the backdrop of Ed Wood Jr.'s B-movie showbiz and later 1960s network TV, Wheeler-Dealer introduces readers to a barrelful of action-loving personalities, from Western stars to the creator of Gentle Ben, who orbit the little mogul in a wheelchair. Part biography, part memoir, Jacobs unearths family secrets he battled his own mother to disclose: double murders concealed for 50 years, fortunes won and lost, and the betrayal of Gordon's mother (the author’s grandmother), discarded when her immobile son wooed a bride. By the end, Jacobs comes to understand the collateral costs of disability, while recognizing the triumph of Gordon's self-absorbed, but ultimately dazzling, appetite for life. It's a story too improbable to fabricate.

Wheeler-dealer: The Rip-roaring Adventures of My Uncle Gordon, a Quadriplegic in Hollywood

Biographies & Memoirs

Jacobs, Chip

Arts & Literature

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