Tammet, an autistic savant, shares his incredible mental powers—he sees numbers as shapes, colors and textures; he can speak new languages fluently, from scratch—in this inspiring memoir. (amazon.com)

In 1518, "Frau Troffea stepped outside and began to dance. So far as we can tell no music was playing and she showed no signs of joy as her skirts flew up around her rapidly moving legs," writes Walker in this gripping account of the Dancing Plague, a bizarre epidemic of mass hysteria in which as many as 100 people danced to their deaths in medieval Europe. (amazon.com)

The actress opens up about her battle with postpartum depression in this smart, startlingly honest memoir. (amazon.com)

At 42, British journalist Gabriel opted to have her healthy ovaries removed after learning that she had the BRCA1 gene. But seven months later, despite the preventive measure, doctors found malignant tumors in her breast tissue. In this fiercely emotional memoir (amazon.com), Gabriel, a mother to two young daughters, blends the story of her personal medical odyssey with the history of the disease. —Ellen Emry Heltzel

Mukherjee's undeniably human, superbly written biography of cancer details the history of the disease that humans have lived with for the past five thousand years. (amazon.com)

"Before Kim ended her life, I thought, like most people, that someone who would take his or her own life was somehow different from the rest of us," writes Bialosky. "I was wrong." In this compassionate memoir, Bialosky combines her sister Kim's diaries with family memoir and the works of doctors and pyschologists to explore the depths of the human spirit. (amazon.com)

"I accepted the certainty of my untimely death with gallows humor and a calculator," writes Hansen in this funny, absorbing account of her exteme attempts to quit smoking. "I'd read somewhere that each cigarette you smoke knocks seven minutes off your time on the planet. To amuse myself, I did the math: 153,000 cigarettes=two years of my life, up in smoke." (amazon.com)

A study in navigating the uncertainty of illness, Groopman details eight gripping clinical dramas. (amazon.com)

Self-centered, short-tempered and oblivious to all the useful things he might be doing around the house if he weren't such an inconsiderate boob—that could describe any number of about-to-be-ex-husbands. But amp up the bad behavior and add a few warning bells and whistles (phobias, fixations, a tendency to quack), and you may have a guy with Asperger syndrome, a form of autism. Luckily, Finch's wife, who works with children on the spectrum, caught on to the fact that her husband's brain was simply wired differently—and together they set out to rescue their teetering marriage. In this funny, endearing, lesson-packed memoir, Finch shows what a couple can accomplish with acceptance, forbearance, determination and love. —Amanda Lovell (amazon.com)

In her debut memoir, Sellers describes a harrowing childhood: Her mom was an impoverished paranoid schizophrenic, her dad a cross-dresser. Adding to those challenges was Sellers’s inability to recognize faces, even those of the people she knew. Decades later, buoyed by the love of a good man, she decides to make peace with her parents. Their reunion sheds light on the depth of a daughter’s love; it also leads Sellers to a ­diagnosis of her condition—prosopagnosia, or face ­blindness—while turning up different, darker insights about her marriage. But even in the midst of divorce, Sellers is resilient: “If I could love these people,” she writes of her family, “who could I not love?” (amazon.com)

Don't miss out on MORE great articles like this one. Click here to sign up for our fabulous weekly newsletter!

For a slideshow of 20 inspirational quotes from famous authors, click here.