"It was probably because I was so often taken away from Cambridge when I was young that I loved it as much as I did . . . " So begins this novel-from-life by the bestselling author of Girl, Interrupted, an exploration of memory and nostalgia set in the 1950s among the academics and artists of Cambridge, Massachusetts. London, Florence, Athens: Susanna, the precocious narrator of Cambridge, would rather be home than in any of these places. Uprooted from the streets around Harvard Square, she feels lost and excluded in all the locations to which her father's career takes the family. She comes home with relief-but soon enough wonders if outsiderness may be her permanent condition. Written with a sharp eye for the pretensions-and charms-of the intellectual classes, Cambridge captures the mores of an era now past, the ordinary lives of extraordinary people in a singular part of America, and the delights, fears, and longings of childhood.

Product Description: In 1967, after a session with a psychiatrist she'd never seen before, eighteen-year-old Susanna Kaysen was put in a taxi and sent to McLean Hospital.  She spent most of the next two years on the ward for teenage girls in a psychiatric hospital as renowned for its famous clientele--Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, James Taylor, and Ray Charles--as for its progressive methods of treating those who could afford its sanctuary...read more

The author of Girl Interrupted takes the reader on a sometimes surreal journey through the health-care system, meeting internists, gynecologists, alternative health experts, and many others as she explores the big issues surrounding health care in America. Reprint. 35,000 first printing.

Jonathan Brand visits a group of Scandinavian islands in order to do his anthropology fieldwork, but in adjusting to the local culture, he finds himself caught up in the supposedly simple way of life

Dinah Sachs relives the history of her relationship with Asa Thayer, the handsome editor of the magazine where she works, and in doing so, describes the failure of passion and the creativity and transcendence inherent in love