Healing

Millions of readers have spent hours enmeshed in the stories of Augusten Burroughs's dysfunctional life in such books as "Running With Scissors," "Dry," and "A Wolf at the Table. " Now Burroughs wants to help you. Whether you have problems with love, work, self-esteem, addiction, or a host of other modern-day issues, Burroughs has the answers in his latest book, "This Is How. " Burroughs admits that his life has been liberally seeded with mistakes, "[w]hich is exactly why I am equipped to write this book and tell you how to live.

Whither Dr. Gregory House? Would the cantankerous hero of the Fox medical drama mend his ways or self-destruct for all time? That was the mystery as "House" barreled to its conclusion Monday night. In a recent interview, series star Hugh Laurie had teased that House was coming to the edge of a precipice eight years in the making: "Is he gonna step forward or step back? Is it life or is it death?" Viewers were rewarded with a satisfying answer in the one-hour finale. (Caution: Read no further if you want to preserve the surprise.)

A decade after revelations of clergy sex abuse rocked the Archdiocese of Boston, survivors still come to Cardinal Sean O'Malley in search of healing. Not a month passes, O'Malley said, without a victim asking for an appointment. Nearly nine years into his tenure as archbishop of Boston, the cardinal still ministers to victims, still encourages them to return to the church that so profoundly let them down. He sees his pastoral duty to sex abuse survivors as this: "First of all, to let them know how sad we are that this ever happened," he said.

A woman's poem about being bullied in a California school 25 years ago has brought her former classmates to tears. Now, they've created a scholarship fund in her name and raised $800 to fly her back to California for a class reunion. NBC San Diego ( http://bit.ly/JACpRw) says Lynda Frederick recently wrote a poem talking about her pain and loneliness in the 1980s while attending Orange Glen High School in Escondido. Former classmates say they were reduced to tears after reading the poem on a school reunion Facebook page.

Spanning three countries and 50 years, nonfiction writer and physician Abraham Verghese's debut novel has already been described as an epic. While I quibble with that definition, "Cutting for Stone" is certainly a long book, and a generally engrossing one; not a great work of fiction but an interesting one. More important, it is a passionate, vivid, and informative novel, and those qualities compensate for its shortcomings. Sister Mary Joseph Praise is a Carmelite nun born in Madras.

Members of Sailing Heals, patients, and their caregivers and family ventured out in the vintage yacht Mariella on Marblehead Harbor last Thursday. By Caitlin Rung, Town Correspondent Members of Sailing Heals, cancer patients, and their caretakers took to the water in Marblehead last Thursday aboard a vintage yacht for a day of relaxation. Sailing Heals is a newly chartered independent nonprofit based in Massachusetts. Its mission is to bring cancer patients and thier caretakers out on the water for days of healing and repite.

In the silences that punctuated his Jungian analysis sessions, David Hart gave clients space to find themselves when voices stilled and no one told them how to think or feel. "He was a very quiet, introverted presence, but always present," said Dr. Seth Isaiah Rubin, a Jungian analyst who practices in San Francisco and who was one of Dr. Hart's clients before becoming a colleague. "I don't know how he did it. I think he had an inner process that took in what you said, what you were feeling, and he worked on it in his own way. And...

New York Giants placekicker Lawrence Tynes' bruised right thigh is feeling much better, and there is a chance that he might be able to play against the Chicago Bears next Monday night. Tynes says his thigh is still a little weak from being run into on Saturday night on a blocked field goal attempt, but the leg is improving daily. After leaving the stadium on crutches Saturday, Tynes walked without much of a limp Monday. He did not practice but he hopes to kick either Wednesday or Thursday.

Emotions run high in "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close," the boldest cinematic tackling of Sept. 11 yet. It's a project fraught with obvious peril, with pitfalls of sentimentality, exploitation or, simply, audience reluctance. The source material, Jonathan Safran Foer's 2005 book, is far from normal Hollywood stuff. One of the first novels to take up the tragedy, it's inherently literary and experimental in its fractured storytelling, occasionally drifting by with just a few words on a page.

Patriots star tight end Rob Gronkowski sprained his ankle during Sunday's AFC championship game late, but then came back in the fourth quarter to finish off the game and has plans to play in the Superbowl on February 5th. My daughter sprained her ankle a few years ago in sleepaway camp and was limping around for several weeks, so I was a little surprised that a player could play through a sprain and recover that quickly. But Brigham and Women's Hospital physical therapist Reg Wilcox told me that professional ball...

Bobby Brown says it took him a long time to come out with a new album because he's spent so much time trying to get his life on track. Now on tour with bandmates New Edition, Brown says he's ready to return to his solo career with the album "Masterpiece," due out June 5. "It's what I've been through throughout my life, and just trying to heal myself through my music," the 43-year-old singer said in a recent interview. "Masterpiece" is Brown's first album in 14 years.

MORE RESERVES: Spain ordered its banks on Friday to set aside another (EURO)30 billion ($40 billion) to cover potential losses on real estate and called for an independent audit of their debts. CONFIDENCE SOUGHT: The moves are aimed at restoring confidence in a sector at the heart of the country's financial crisis. After Spain's property market collapsed in 2008, banks have been saddled with bad loans and foreclosed property, estimated at around (EURO)184 billion as of the end of 2011.

For the past decade, the Virginia Thurston Healing Garden in Harvard has welcomed cancer patients and their families for support, information, counseling, therapy, and comfort. And this year, as it celebrates its 10th anniversary, the center offers something else: live music. The Healing Garden's concert series began earlier this spring and welcomes renowned jazz musician Stan Strickland, accompanied by Laszlo Gardony, for a special Mothers' Day concert this Sunday at 3 p.m. As Elizabeth Bernstein, special events and marketing coordinator for the Healing...

RE "BMC will put house calls to the test" (Metro, April 27): Kudos to Boston Medical Center for testing the cost-effectiveness of house calls. In addition to allowing providers to see "the video" of a patient's life at home, rather than just "a snapshot" in the doctor's office, house calls also help transform the power dynamics of the patient-provider relationship to one that is more patient-centered. How many times have you gone to a health care appointment with a long list of questions and concerns only to forget most of them the moment the provider walks in the room?

An ex-Marine filmmaker whose unit carried pocket digital cameras into some of the worst fighting in Iraq is using that footage, and post-war interviews, to open viewers' eyes about combat and help himself deal with the lasting emotional impact. The videos are stark. One Marine is so badly hurt he filmed himself giving himself the Last Rites. Some of the fighters seem unaffected years later in civilian life, while others have gone through severe bouts of post-traumatic stress and one man, who in Iraq saved fellow Marines' lives, wound up in prison back home.

GREENLAND, N.H. - Inside a simple white church Sunday morning, 65 parishioners prayed for Michael Maloney, the police chief killed little more than a week before he was set to retire. They prayed for the four other officers wounded Thursday in one of the most shocking police shootings in New Hampshire history. Parishioners also urged each other to pray for Cullen Mutrie, the 29-year-old who allegedly shot at the police officers - who were at his home to serve a warrant - before apparently killing his former girlfriend, Brittany Tibbetts, and shooting...

Sex Rehab With Dr. Drew Tomorrow at 10 p.m., VH1 Oh good lord. The sequel series to “Celebrity Rehab With Dr. Drew’’ premieres tomorrow night, with eight sex addicts sharing their stories in hopes of healing (and, of course, national attention, which is not healing). Whatever. The group includes porn actress Penny Flame, Playboy Playmate Nicole Narain, and drummer Phil Varone. Styl’d Tomorrow at 10 p.m., MTV A bunch of aspiring fashion stylists compete for a contract with the Margaret Maldonado agency in Los Angeles.

2011 NEW ENGLAND PHOTOGRAPHY BIENNIAL ELSA DORFMAN: Art and Healing JEFFREY BISHOP - ASB: Memory and Healing WILLARD TRAUB: Recovery KARL BADEN: Every Day: A Long Year At: the Danforth Museum of Art, 123 Union Ave., Framingham. The biennial runs through Nov. 13, the other shows through Nov. 6. 508-620-0500, www.danforthmuseum.org. FRAMINGHAM - A good biennial requires two conditions. The first is obvious, quality. The second is obvious, too - except that it isn't.

NEW YORK - Earnings reports from two major banks Friday painted a picture of a healing housing market, with more Americans taking out mortgages, paying them on time, and taking advantage of low interest rates to refinance. At JPMorgan Chase, the biggest bank in the United States, income from new home loans set a record from January through March. The bank issued 6 percent more mortgages than a year ago and got 33 percent more applications. Wells Fargo, which issues the most home loans, booked the most mortgage fees since 2009.

Four months after a hunter's slug struck her in the hip as she walked her dogs through a wooded trail in Norton on New Year's Eve, 66-year-old Cheryl Blair said her health is halfway restored. But her recovery - plagued with repeated bacterial infections and frequent hospital visits - has been a struggle. Blair, a self-proclaimed athlete, celebrated her graduation from a walker to a cane this week. "I'm 50 percent back," she said in a phone interview on Friday. "I just want to get my life back.