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Mean...moody...magnificent!

Christina Rice

"I never was a sex symbol. Not in my head I wasn't." -- Jane Russell

By the early 1950s, Jane Russell (1921--2011) should have been forgotten. Her career was launched on what is arguably the most notorious advertising campaign in cinema history when film goers were invited to watch The Outlaw (1943) and "tussle with Russell," or gawk at two of the reasons for her rise to stardom. Completed by mid-1941, the movie did not premiere until 1943, and its wide release was delayed, gradually rolling out between 1946 and 1950. Throughout the 1940s, Russell was nicknamed the "motionless picture actress" and would only have three films projected in theaters the entire decade. With such an inauspicious and prolonged start to a career, most aspiring actresses would have given up or faded away. But not Jane. Instead, she carved out a place for herself in Hollywood and became one of its most recognizable figures.

In Mean...Moody...Magnificent!: Jane Russell and the Marketing of a Hollywood Legend, author Christina Rice offers a fresh perspective on how Russell learned to embrace the blatant publicizing of her physical appearance. Looking beyond the signature image of Russell lounging on bales of hay while wielding a gun and her Playtex commercials, Rice details a not-so-charmed life impacted by abuse, abortion, infertility, divorce, adoption struggles, and death. While often overshadowed by Marilyn Monroe, her costar in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), Russell led a life and career that was confident and unapologetic. Working alongside actors such as Robert Mitchum, Clark Gable, Vincent Price, and Bob Hope, she was more of a movie personality than a serious actress but could electrify a screen and was a true celebrity of the Golden Age. Despite a movie career that was stalled for nearly a decade, Russell's filmography was respectable, and she had the opportunity to work with some of Hollywood's most talented directors, including Howard Hawks, Raoul Walsh, Nicholas Ray, and Josef von Sternberg. From her attempt to launch a musical career to her devout faith and weekly Bible study for Hollywood stars to her work in creating the WAIF foundation in 1955, an organization to place children with adoptive families, Mean...Moody...Magnificent! reveals Russell's full and fascinating life.

In the aftermath of the #MeToo movement, Rice gives voice to Russell's empowered reactions to the controversies surrounding her films and her feelings about the marketing campaigns promoting her physical appearance. Mean... Moody...Magnificent! will be the first book-length work on this actress who brought a wry wit and intelligence to her characters with a unique take on the playful sex bomb. This work will appeal to film historians and buffs alike.

This project is under consideration for UPK's Screen Classics series.

Christina Rice is senior librarian and archivist at the Los Angeles Public Library. She is the author of Ann Dvorak: Hollywood's Forgotten Rebel (UPK).

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I Ain't Studdin' Ya

Bobby Rush

Experience music history with this memoir by one of the last of the genuine old school Blues and R&B legends, the Grammy-winning dynamic showman Bobby Rush.

This memoir charts the extraordinary rise to fame of living blues legend, Bobby Rush. Born Emmett Ellis, Jr. in Homer, Louisiana, he adopted the stage name Bobby Rush out of respect for his father, a pastor. As a teenager, Rush acquired his first real guitar and started playing in juke joints in Little Rock, Arkansas, donning a fake mustache to trick club owners into thinking he was old enough to gain entry. He led his first band in Arkansas between Little Rock and Pine Bluff in the 1950s. It was there he first had Elmore James play in his band. Rush later relocated to Chicago to pursue his musical career and started to work with Earl Hooker, Luther Allison, and Freddie King, and sat in with many of his musical heroes, such as Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, Jimmy Reed and Little Walter. Rush eventually began leading his own band in the 1960s, crafting his own distinct style of funky blues, and recording a succession of singles for various labels. It wasn't until the early 1970s that Rush finally scored a hit with "Chicken Heads." More recordings followed, including an album which went on to be listed in the Top 10 blues albums of the 1970s by Rolling Stone and a handful of regional jukebox favorites including "Sue" and "I Ain't Studdin' Ya."

And Rush's career shows no signs of slowing down now. The man once beloved for performing in local jukejoints is now headlining major music/blues festivals, clubs, and theaters across the U.S. and as far as Japan and Australia. At age eighty-six, he is still on the road for over 200 days a year. His lifelong hectic tour schedule has earned him the affectionate title "King of the Chitlin' Circuit," from Rolling Stone. In 2007, he earned the distinction of being the first blues artist to play at the Great Wall of China. His renowned stage act features his famed shake dancers, who personify his funky blues and his ribald sense of humor. He was featured in Martin Scorcese's The Blues docuseries on PBS, a documentary film called Take Me to the River, performed with Dan Aykroyd on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, and most recently had a cameo in the Golden Globe nominated Netflix film, Dolemite Is My Name, starring Eddie Murphy. He was recently given the highest Blues Music Award honor of B.B. King Entertainer of the Year. His songs have also been featured in TV shows and films including HBO's Ballers and major motion pictures like Black Snake Moan, starring Samuel L. Jackson.

Considered by many to be the greatest bluesman currently performing, this book will give readers unparalleled access into the man, the myth, the legend: Bobby Rush.

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Fierce Poise

Alexander Nemerov

A dazzling biography of one of the twentieth century's most respected painters, Helen Frankenthaler, as she came of age as an artist in postwar New York

"The magic of Alexander Nemerov's portrait of Helen Frankenthaler in Fierce Poise is that it reads like one of Helen's paintings. His poetic descriptions of her work and his rich insights into the years when Helen made her first artistic breakthroughs are both light and lush, seemingly easy and yet profound. His book is an ode to a truly great artist who, some seventy years after this story begins, we are only now beginning to understand."--Mary Gabriel, author of Ninth Street Women


At the dawn of the 1950s, a promising and dedicated young painter named Helen Frankenthaler, fresh out of college, moved back home to New York City to make her name. By the decade's end, she had succeeded in establishing herself as an important American artist of the postwar period. In the years in between, she made some of the most daring, head-turning paintings of her day and also came into her own as a woman: traveling the world, falling in and out of love, and engaging in an ongoing artistic education. She also experienced anew--and left her mark on--the city in which she had been raised in privilege as the daughter of a judge, even as she left the security of that world to pursue her artistic ambitions.

Brought to vivid life by acclaimed art historian Alexander Nemerov, these defining moments--from her first awed encounter with Jackson Pollock's drip paintings to her first solo gallery show to her tumultuous breakup with eminent art critic Clement Greenberg--comprise a portrait as bold and distinctive as the painter herself. Inspired by Pollock and the other male titans of abstract expressionism but committed to charting her own course, Frankenthaler was an artist whose talent was matched only by her unapologetic determination to distinguish herself in a man's world.

Fierce Poise is an exhilarating ride through New York's 1950s art scene and a brilliant portrait of a young artist through the moments that shaped her.

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Nöthin' But a Good Time

Tom Beaujour

The New York Times Bestseller

The Explosive National Bestseller


"A backstage pass to the wildest and loudest party in rock history—you'll feel like you were right there with us!" —Bret Michaels of Poison

Nothin' But a Good Time is the definitive, no-holds-barred oral history of 1980s hard rock and hair metal, told by the musicians and industry insiders who lived it.

Hard rock in the 1980s was a hedonistic and often intensely creative wellspring of escapism that perfectly encapsulated—and maybe even helped to define—a spectacularly over-the-top decade. Indeed, fist-pumping hits like Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” Mötley Crüe’s “Girls, Girls, Girls,” and Guns N’ Roses’ “Welcome to the Jungle” are as inextricably linked to the era as Reaganomics, Pac-Man, and E.T.

From the do-or-die early days of self-financed recordings and D.I.Y. concert productions that were as flashy as they were foolhardy, to the multi-Platinum, MTV-powered glory years of stadium-shaking anthems and chart-topping power ballads, to the ultimate crash when grunge bands like Nirvana forever altered the entire climate of the business, Tom Beaujour and Richard Bienstock's Nothin' But a Good Time captures the energy and excess of the hair metal years in the words of the musicians, managers, producers, engineers, label executives, publicists, stylists, costume designers, photographers, journalists, magazine publishers, video directors, club bookers, roadies, groupies, and hangers-on who lived it.

Featuring an impassioned foreword by Slipknot and Stone Sour vocalist and avowed glam metal fanatic Corey Taylor, and drawn from over 200 new interviews with members of Van Halen, Mötley Crüe, Poison, Guns N’ Roses, Skid Row, Bon Jovi, Ratt, Twisted Sister, Winger, Warrant, Cinderella, Quiet Riot and others, as well as Ozzy Osbourne, Lita Ford and many more, this is the ultimate, uncensored, and often unhinged chronicle of a time where excess and success walked hand in hand, told by the men and women who created a sound and style that came to define a musical era—one in which the bands and their fans went looking for nothin’ but a good time...and found it.

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What Made Maddy Run

Kate Fagan

The heartbreaking story of college athlete Madison Holleran, whose life and death by suicide reveal the struggle of young people suffering from mental illness today in this #1 New York Times Sports and Fitness bestseller.

If you scrolled through the Instagram feed of 19-year-old Maddy Holleran, you would see a perfect life: a freshman at an Ivy League school, recruited for the track team, who was also beautiful, popular, and fiercely intelligent. This was a girl who succeeded at everything she tried, and who was only getting started. But when Maddy began her long-awaited college career, her parents noticed something changed. Previously indefatigable Maddy became withdrawn, and her thoughts centered on how she could change her life. In spite of thousands of hours of practice and study, she contemplated transferring from the school that had once been her dream.

When Maddy's dad, Jim, dropped her off for the first day of spring semester, she held him a second longer than usual. That would be the last time Jim would see his daughter. What Made Maddy Run began as a piece that Kate Fagan, a columnist for espnW, wrote about Maddy's life. What started as a profile of a successful young athlete whose life ended in suicide became so much larger when Fagan started to hear from other college athletes also struggling with mental illness.

This is the story of Maddy Holleran's life, and her struggle with depression, which also reveals the mounting pressures young people -- and college athletes in particular -- face to be perfect, especially in an age of relentless connectivity and social media saturation.

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The Ultimate Guide to Hiking

Len McDougall

In The Ultimate Guide to Hiking, readers interested in the outdoors are provided with time-tested advice on hiking and backpacking in the wilderness. Some practical tips include:
 

  • How to choose the best gear
  • How to set up a campsite
  • How to interact safely with wildlife
  • How to properly read a map
  • How to forecast the weather
  • Learning practical navigation skills
  • And so much more!

     
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How Boards Work

Dambisa Moyo

A New York Times bestselling author and veteran board member offers an insider's view of corporate boards, their struggles, and why they must adapt to survive. Corporate boards are under great pressure. Scandals and malpractice at companies like Theranos, WeWork, Uber, and Wells Fargo have raised justified questions among regulators, shareholders, and the public about the quality of corporate governance. In How Boards Work, prizewinning economist and veteran board director Dambisa Moyo offers an insider's view of corporate boards as they are buffeted by the turbulence of our times. Moyo argues that corporations need boards that are more transparent, more knowledgeable, more diverse, and more deeply involved in setting the strategic course of the companies they lead. How Boards Work offers a road map for how boards can steer companies through tomorrow's challenges and ensure they thrive to benefit their employees, shareholders, and society at large.

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Be Exceptional

Joe Navarro

"Anyone pursuing success must read this book." --Chris Voss, author of Never Split the Difference

A master class in leadership from the world's top body language expert

From internationally bestselling author and retired FBI agent Joe Navarro, a groundbreaking look at the five powerful principles that set exceptional individuals apart

Joe Navarro spent a quarter century with the FBI, pursuing spies and other dangerous criminals across the globe. In his line of work, successful leadership was quite literally a matter of life or death. Now he brings his hard-earned lessons to you. Be Exceptional distills a lifetime of experience into five principles that outstanding individuals live by:

Self-Mastery: To lead others, you must first demonstrate that you can lead yourself.

Observation: Apply the same techniques used by the FBI to quickly and accurately assess any situation.

Communication: Harness the power of verbal and nonverbal interaction to persuade, motivate, and inspire.

Action: Build shared purpose and lead by example.

Psychological Comfort: Discover the secret ingredient of exceptional individuals.

Be Exceptional is the culmination of Joe Navarro's decades spent analyzing human behavior, conducting more than 10,000 interviews in the field, and making high-stakes behavioral assessments. Drawing upon case studies from history, compelling firsthand accounts from Navarro's FBI career, and cutting-edge science on nonverbal communication and persuasion, this is a new type of leadership book, one that will have the power to transform for years to come.

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Addiction by Design

Natasha Dow Schüll

Recent decades have seen a dramatic shift away from social forms of gambling played around roulette wheels and card tables to solitary gambling at electronic terminals. Slot machines, revamped by ever more compelling digital and video technology, have unseated traditional casino games as the gambling industry's revenue mainstay. Addiction by Design takes readers into the intriguing world of machine gambling, an increasingly popular and absorbing form of play that blurs the line between human and machine, compulsion and control, risk and reward.

Drawing on fifteen years of field research in Las Vegas, anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll shows how the mechanical rhythm of electronic gambling pulls players into a trancelike state they call the "machine zone," in which daily worries, social demands, and even bodily awareness fade away. Once in the zone, gambling addicts play not to win but simply to keep playing, for as long as possible--even at the cost of physical and economic exhaustion. In continuous machine play, gamblers seek to lose themselves while the gambling industry seeks profit. Schüll describes the strategic calculations behind game algorithms and machine ergonomics, casino architecture and "ambience management," player tracking and cash access systems--all designed to meet the market's desire for maximum "time on device." Her account moves from casino floors into gamblers' everyday lives, from gambling industry conventions and Gamblers Anonymous meetings to regulatory debates over whether addiction to gambling machines stems from the consumer, the product, or the interplay between the two.

Addiction by Design is a compelling inquiry into the intensifying traffic between people and machines of chance, offering clues to some of the broader anxieties and predicaments of contemporary life. At stake in Schüll's account of the intensifying traffic between people and machines of chance is a blurring of the line between design and experience, profit and loss, control and compulsion.

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The Truth About Lies

Aja Raden

Why do you believe what you believe?

You’ve been lied to. Probably a lot. We’re always stunned when we realize we’ve been deceived. We can’t believe we were fooled: What was I thinking? How could I have believed that?

We always wonder why we believed the lie. But have you ever wondered why you believe the truth? People tell you the truth all the time, and you believe them; and if, at some later point, you’re confronted with evidence that the story you believed was indeed true, you never wonder why you believed it in the first place. In this incisive and insightful taxonomy of lies and liars, New York Times bestselling author Aja Raden makes the surprising claim that maybe you should.

Buttressed by history, psychology, and science, The Truth About Lies is both an eye-opening primer on con-artistry—from pyramid schemes to shell games, forgery to hoaxes—and also a telescopic view of society through the mechanics of belief: why we lie, why we believe, and how, if at all, the acts differ. Through wild tales of cons and marks, Raden examines not only how lies actually work, but also why they work, from the evolutionary function of deception to what it reveals about our own.

In her previous book, Stoned, Raden asked, “What makes a thing valuable?” In The Truth About Lies, she asks “What makes a thing real?” With cutting wit and a deft touch, Raden untangles the relationship of truth to lie, belief to faith, and deception to propaganda.

The Truth About Lies will change everything you thought you knew about what you know, and whether you ever really know it.

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Body Talk

Katie Sturino

 

Learn to love yourself and your body with this interactive guide from the “shame-free, fun, cheerful, and no-nonsense” (Bustle) body acceptance advocate and influencer who founded Megababe beauty.

“Brilliant, hilarious, adorably illustrated.”—Goop

Can you imagine how much free time you’d have if you didn’t spend so much of it body shaming yourself? Katie Sturino knows all too well what it’s like to shit talk yourself. She spent thirty years of her life feeling ashamed of her body and its self-determined wrongness. Now she doesn’t care what anyone thinks of her; she only cares that she’s happy and comfortable with herself. Body positivity and size inclusivity is still a relatively new phenomenon, but Sturino has dedicated her life to unlearning all that beauty standard BS and uses her blog, Instagram, podcast, and non-toxic, solution-oriented beauty products to share the message that changed her life: YOUR BODY IS NOT THE PROBLEM.  

With Body Talk, an illustrated guide-meets-workbook, Sturino is here to help you stop obsessing about your body issues, focus on self-love, and free up space in your brain for creative and productive energy. Complete with empowering affirmations, relatable anecdotes, and actionable takeaways, as well as space to answer prompts and jot down feelings and inspirations, Body Talk encourages you to spend less time thinking about how you look and what you eat and more time discovering your inner fierceness.

 

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Heart of Fire

Mazie K. Hirono

"Heart of Fire is a revelatory, evocative, deeply moving book." --Washington Post

"A beautiful book." --Trevor Noah, The Daily Show

The intimate and inspiring life story of Mazie Hirono, the first Asian-American woman and the only immigrant serving in the U.S. Senate

Mazie Hirono is one of the most fiercely outspoken Democrats in Congress, but her journey to the U.S. Senate was far from likely. Raised on a rice farm in rural Japan, she was seven years old when her mother, Laura, left her abusive husband and sailed with her two elder children to Hawaii, crossing the Pacific in steerage in search of a better life. Though the girl then known as Keiko did not speak or read English when she entered first grade, she would go on to serve as a state representative and as Hawaii's lieutenant governor before winning election to Congress in 2006.

In this deeply personal memoir, Hirono traces her remarkable life from her earliest days in Hawaii, when the family lived in a single room in a Honolulu boarding house while her mother worked two jobs to keep them afloat, to her emergence as a highly effective legislator whose determination to help the most vulnerable was grounded in her own experiences of economic insecurity, lack of healthcare access, and family separation. Finally, it chronicles Hirono's recent transformation from dogged yet soft-spoken public servant into the frank and fiery advocate we know her as today.

For the vast majority of Mazie Hirono's five decades in public service, even as she fought for the causes she believed in, she strove to remain polite and reserved. Steeped in the nonconfrontational cultures of Japan and Hawaii, and aware of the expectations of women in politics--chiefly, that they should never show an excess of emotion--she had schooled herself to bite her tongue, even as her male colleagues continually underestimated her. After the 2016 election, however, she could moderate herself no longer. In the face of a dangerous administration--and amid crucial battles with lasting implications for our democracy, from the Kavanaugh hearings to the impeachment trial--Senator Hirono was called to give voice to the fire that had always been inside her.

The compelling and moving account of a woman coming into her own power over the course of a lifetime in public service, and of the mother whose courageous choices made her life possible, Heart of Fire is the story of a uniquely American journey, told by one of those fighting hardest to ensure that a story like hers is still possible in this country.

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Paris Without Her

Gregory Curtis

In this moving, tender memoir of losing a beloved spouse, the longtime editor of Texas Monthly, newly widowed, returns alone to a city whose enchantment he's only ever shared with his wife, in search of solace, memories, and the courage to find a way forward.

At the age of sixty-six, after thirty-five years of marriage, Gregory Curtis finds himself a widower. Tracy--with whom he fell in love the first time he saw her--has succumbed to a long battle with cancer. Paralyzed by grief, agonized by social interaction, Curtis turns to watching magic lessons on DVD--"a pathetic, almost comical substitute" for his evenings with Tracy.

To break the spell, he returns to the place he had the "best and happiest times" of his life. As he navigates the storied city and contemplates his new future, Curtis relives his days in Paris with Tracy, piecing together the portrait of a woman, a marriage, parenthood, and his life's great love through the memories of six unforgettable trips to the City of Lights.

Alone in Paris, Curtis becomes a tireless wanderer, exploring the city's grand boulevards and forgotten corners as he confronts the bewildering emotional state that ensues after losing a life partner. Paris Without Her is a work of tremendous courage and insight--an ode to the lovely woman who was his wife, to a magnificent city, and to the self we might invent, and reinvent, there.

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Lilyville

Tovah Feldshuh

This heartwarming and funny memoir from a beloved actress tells the story of a mother and daughter whose narrative reflects American cultural changes and the world's shifting expectations of women.

From Golda to Ginsburg, Yentl to Mama Rose, Tallulah to the Queen of Mean, Tovah Feldshuh has always played powerful women who aren't afraid to sit at the table with the big boys and rule their world. But offstage, Tovah struggled to fulfill the one role she never auditioned for: Lily Feldshuh's only daughter.

Growing up in Scarsdale, NY in the 1950s, Tovah—known then by her given name Terri Sue—lived a life of piano lessons, dance lessons, shopping trips, and white-gloved cultural trips into Manhattan. In awe of her mother's meticulous appearance and perfect manners, Tovah spent her childhood striving for Lily's approval, only to feel as though she always fell short. Lily's own dreams were beside the point; instead, she devoted herself to Tovah's father Sidney and her two children. Tovah watched Lily retreat into the roles of the perfect housewife and mother and swore to herself, I will never do this.

When Tovah shot to stardom with the Broadway hit Yentl, winning five awards for her performance, she still did not garner her mother's approval. But, it was her success in another sphere that finally gained Lily's attention. After falling in love with a Harvard-educated lawyer and having children, Tovah found it was easier to understand her mother and the sacrifices she had made during the era of the women's movement, the sexual revolution, and the subsequent mandate for women to "have it all."

Beloved as he had been by both women, Sidney's passing made room for the love that had failed to take root during his life. In her new independence, Lily became outspoken, witty, and profane. "Don't tell Daddy this," Lily whispered to Tovah, "but these are the best years of my life." She lived until 103. 

In this insightful, compelling, often hilarious and always illuminating memoir, Tovah shares the highs and lows of a remarkable career that has spanned five decades, and shares the lessons that she has learned, often the hard way, about how to live a life in the spotlight, strive for excellence, and still get along with your mother. Through their evolving relationship we see how expectations for women changed, with a daughter performing her heart out to gain her mother's approval and a mother becoming liberated from her confining roles of wife and mother to become her full self. 

A great gift for Mother's Day—or any day when women want a joyous and meaningful way to celebrate each other. 

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Rethinking Competitive Advantage

Ram Charan

 

How do you gain an edge in the digital world order?
"Another book for the ages from a master! . . . Particularly insightful is his emphasis on how the end-to-end individual consumer experience will separate winners from losers in our new digital age."--Fred Hassan, chairman, Caret Group; former CEO, Schering-Plough and Pharmacia

The old ways of creating competitive advantage for your business--such as building moats to ward off competitors--have become dangerous. Giants like Amazon and Alibaba are creating vast new market spaces through a deft combination of tools like machine learning and business savvy that reimagines customer experiences while generating immense shareholder value.

A handful of traditional companies, including Fidelity Investments, Walmart, and B2W, have adopted these new approaches to reinvigorate their businesses. Most, however, are stalled--and the clock is running out.

In this lively, accessible guide, Ram Charan, bestselling author and adviser to some of the world's top CEOs and boards, redefines competitive advantage for the digital-first era, offering a set of new rules to get ahead:

* Create an ecosystem with third-party partners to revolutionize and personalize the customer experience.
* Empower teams focused on a single task, building a "social engine" that drives constant innovation, fast execution, and customer satisfaction.
* Attract funders who understand the big picture: that beyond a certain scale, major upfront spending will turn into a cash-generation machine.

Filled with stories that peek behind the curtain of digital behemoths as well as traditional companies that have transformed their organizations, Rethinking Competitive Advantage offers concrete advice and methods to help you conceive of new market spaces and moneymaking models.

Competing against digital giants might seem daunting, if not impossible. The necessary computing power is within any company's reach. By borrowing from these digital winners' playbooks, traditional companies and upstarts alike can gain an upper hand. Whether you're in the C-suite or brainstorming the next big idea from your garage, Rethinking Competitive Advantage is the ultimate guide to creating competitive advantage today.

 

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Risk Management

Paul Hopkin

Risk management is not just a topic for risk professionals. Managers and directors at all levels must be equipped with an understanding of risk and the tools and processes required to assess and manage it successfully. Risk Management offers a practical and structured approach while avoiding jargon, theory and many of the complex issues that preoccupy risk management practitioners but have little relevance for non-specialists. Supported by online templates and with real-life examples throughout, this is a straightforward and engaging guide to the practice and the benefits of good risk management. Coverage includes: the nature of risk; the relevance of risk management to the business model; essential elements of the risk management process; different approaches to risk assessment; strategy, tactics, operations and compliance requirements; how to build a risk-aware culture; and the importance of risk governance.

Online supporting resources for this book include downloadable templates including risk agenda, risk response and risk communication.

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Believe IT

Jamie Kern Lima

#1 WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • USA TODAY BESTSELLER

ARE YOU READY TO BELIEVE IN YOU?

“Game-changing. Authentic. A must-read for every woman! Jamie is the real deal—and that’s rare.” —Glennon Doyle, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Untamed

“Raw. Real. Powerful. Filled with vulnerability and grit. This book will inspire you to believe in your own power. It’s a book every woman needs!” —Sara Blakely, Founder Spanx

Imagine overcoming the things holding you back, breaking through the barrier of self-doubt and fully becoming the person YOU were BORN TO BE!

In Believe IT, Jamie Kern Lima, founder of IT Cosmetics, shares the wild but true story of how a once struggling waitress turned her against-the-grain idea into an international bestselling sensation, eventually selling the company for over a billion dollars and becoming the first female CEO of a brand in L’Oréal’s 100+ year history. Faced with self-doubt, body-doubt, God-doubt, down to her last few dollars and told “No one is going to buy makeup from someone who has your body,” Jamie reveals for the first time what really went down, how she almost didn’t make it, how she learned to trust herself, and the powerful lessons you, too, can use to go from underestimated to unstoppable.

With radical vulnerability and honesty, Jamie takes you on a journey through deeply personal stories of heartbreak and resilience—including accidentally finding out she was adopted when she was in her twenties and the reverberations this has had on all aspects of her life. Jamie also pulls back the curtain on her fight to change the beauty industry’s use of unrealistic images, on behalf of all the little girls who are about to start doubting themselves, and all of the grown women who still do. Spellbinding, riveting, with raw vulnerability and down-to-earth warmth, Believe IT shakes your soul and shows you that you, too, have what it takes to believe in yourself, trust yourself, and go from doubting you’re enough to knowing you’re enough! Do you have big goals, hopes, and dreams but let rejection get in the way? Do you struggle with feeling like you’re not enough and like success is something that happens to other people, but have a hard time believing it’s possible for you? Do you let past mistakes and failures hold you back? Do you know deep down inside that you were created for more, but somehow still doubt yourself?

In Believe IT you’ll discover how to...
-Overcome self-doubt
-Gain the courage to take risks, an empower yourself and others
-Tune into and trust your own intuition
-Let go of your mistakes and insecurities
-Turn down the volume on your inner critic
-Handle the rejection, the haters, and the mean girls
-Boost your confidence
-Start your dream (and keep going!)
-And much more…

If you’ve ever doubted yourself or felt truly underestimated, this book will inspire a new kind of belief and confidence in you and your dreams!

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The Lost Art of Doing Nothing

Maartje Willems

“The best thing about niksen is the absence of a goal. It doesn’t serve a purpose, but it’s wonderful.”

Don’t you think it’s time for a break? Plagued—as we are!—by nonstop pings and notifications, we have lost the knack of zoning out. Kicking back. Slacking off. Even when pandemic-induced lockdowns forcibly cleared our calendars, many who thought I’m free! filled their days with Netflix and doomscrolling. How can we reclaim our free time (planned or not) to truly rest and reset?

The Dutch have it figured out: with niksen. Perhaps their best-kept lifestyle secret, niksen is the art of doing, well, nothing. It’s the opposite of productivity, and it’s incredibly good for your . . .

  • MIND—it makes you calmer.
  • BODY—it offers rest on hectic days.
  • CREATIVITY—it clears a space for brilliant ideas.
  • WALLET—it’s free!

If you’re waiting for an invitation to go lie down in the sunshine, this book is it.

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The Inevitable

Katie Engelhart

“A remarkably nuanced, empathetic, and well-crafted work of journalism, [The Inevitable] explores what might be called the right-to-die underground, a world of people who wonder why a medical system that can do so much to try to extend their lives can do so little to help them end those lives in a peaceful and painless way.”—Brooke Jarvis, The New Yorker

More states and countries are passing right-to-die laws that allow the sick and suffering to end their lives at pre-planned moments, with the help of physicians. But even where these laws exist, they leave many people behind. The Inevitable moves beyond margins of the law to the people who are meticulously planning their final hours—far from medical offices, legislative chambers, hospital ethics committees, and polite conversation. It also shines a light on the people who help them: loved ones and, sometimes, clandestine groups on the Internet that together form the “euthanasia underground.”

Katie Engelhart, a veteran journalist, focuses on six people representing different aspects of the right to die debate. Two are doctors: a California physician who runs a boutique assisted death clinic and has written more lethal prescriptions than anyone else in the U.S.; an Australian named Philip Nitschke who lost his medical license for teaching people how to end their lives painlessly and peacefully at “DIY Death” workshops. The other four chapters belong to people who said they wanted to die because they were suffering unbearably—of old age, chronic illness, dementia, and mental anguish—and saw suicide as their only option.

Spanning North America, Europe, and Australia, The Inevitable offers a deeply reported and fearless look at a morally tangled subject. It introduces readers to ordinary people who are fighting to find dignity and authenticity in the final hours of their lives.

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Notes on Grief

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

 

From the globally acclaimed, best-selling novelist and author of We Should All Be Feminists, a timely and deeply personal account of the loss of her father.

"Essential." —Booklist

Notes on Grief is an exquisite work of meditation, remembrance, and hope, written in the wake of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's beloved father’s death in the summer of 2020. As the COVID-19 pandemic raged around the world, and kept Adichie and her family members separated from one another, her father succumbed unexpectedly to complications of kidney failure. 
 
Expanding on her original New Yorker piece, Adichie shares how this loss shook her to her core. She writes about being one of the millions of people grieving this year; about the familial and cultural dimensions of grief and also about the loneliness and anger that are unavoidable in it. With signature precision of language, and glittering, devastating detail on the page—and never without touches of rich, honest humor—Adichie weaves together her own experience of her father’s death with threads of his life story, from his remarkable survival during the Biafran war, through a long career as a statistics professor, into the days of the pandemic in which he’d stay connected with his children and grandchildren over video chat from the family home in Abba, Nigeria.

In the compact format of We Should All Be Feminists and Dear Ijeawele, Adichie delivers a gem of a book—a book that fundamentally connects us to one another as it probes one of the most universal human experiences. Notes on Grief is a book for this moment—a work readers will treasure and share now more than ever—and yet will prove durable and timeless, an indispensable addition to Adichie's canon.

 

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Between Hope and Fear

Michael Kinch

If you have a child in school, you may have heard stories of long-dormant diseases suddenly reappearing—cases of measles, mumps, rubella, and whooping cough cropping up everywhere from elementary schools to Ivy League universities because a select group of parents refuse to vaccinate their children. Between Hope and Fear tells the remarkable story of vaccine-preventable infectious diseases and their social and political implications. While detailing the history of vaccine invention, Kinch reveals the ominous reality that our victories against vaccine-preventable diseases are not permanent—and could easily be undone. In the tradition of John Barry’s The Great Influenza and Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies, Between Hope and Fear relates the remarkable intersection of science, technology, and disease that has helped eradicate many of the deadliest plagues known to man.

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On Extinction

Melanie Challenger

Realizing the link between her own estrangement from nature and the cultural shifts that led to a dramatic rise in extinctions, award–winning writer Melanie Challenger travels in search of the stories behind these losses. From an exploration of an abandoned mine in England to an Antarctic sea voyage to South Georgia's old whaling stations, from a sojourn in South America to a stay among an Inuit community in Canada, she uncovers species, cultures, and industries touched by extinction. Accompanying her on this journey are the thoughts of anthropologists, biologists, and philosophers who have come before her. Drawing on their words as well as firsthand witness and ancestral memory, Challenger traces the mindset that led to our destructiveness and proposes a path of redemption rooted in our emotional responses. This sobering yet illuminating book looks beyond natural devastation to examine "why" and "what's next."

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The Plague Cycle

Charles Kenny

A vivid, sweeping history of mankind's battles with infectious disease, for readers of the #1 New York Times bestsellers Yuval Harari's Sapiens and John Barry's The Great Influenza.

For four thousand years, the size and vitality of cities, economies, and empires were heavily determined by infection. Striking humanity in waves, the cycle of plagues set the tempo of civilizational growth and decline, since common response to the threat was exclusion--quarantining the sick or keeping them out. But the unprecedented hygiene and medical revolutions of the past two centuries have allowed humanity to free itself from the hold of epidemic cycles--resulting in an urbanized, globalized, and unimaginably wealthy world.

However, our development has lately become precarious. Climate and population fluctuations and aspects of our prosperity such as global trade have left us more vulnerable than ever to newly emerging plagues. Greater global cooperation toward sustainable health is urgently required--such as the international efforts to harvest a Covid-19 vaccine--with millions of lives and trillions of dollars at stake.

Written as colorful history, The Plague Cycle reveals the relationship between civilization, globalization, prosperity, and infectious disease over the past five millennia. It harnesses history, economics, and public health, and charts humanity's remarkable progress, providing a fascinating and timely look at the cyclical nature of infectious disease.

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The Premonition

Michael Lewis

Fortunately, we are still a nation of skeptics. Fortunately, there are those among us who study pandemics and are willing to look unflinchingly at worst-case scenarios. Michael Lewis's taut and brilliant nonfiction thriller pits a band of medical visionaries against the wall of ignorance that was the official response of the Trump administration to the outbreak of COVID-19.

The characters you will meet in these pages are as fascinating as they are unexpected. A thirteen-year-old girl's science project on transmission of an airborne pathogen develops into a very grown-up model of disease control. A local public-health officer uses her worm's-eye view to see what the CDC misses, and reveals great truths about American society. A secret team of dissenting doctors, nicknamed the Wolverines, has everything necessary to fight the pandemic: brilliant backgrounds, world-class labs, prior experience with the pandemic scares of bird flu and swine flu...everything, that is, except official permission to implement their work.

Michael Lewis is not shy about calling these people heroes for their refusal to follow directives that they know to be based on misinformation and bad science. Even the internet, as crucial as it is to their exchange of ideas, poses a risk to them. They never know for sure who else might be listening in.

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Letter to a Young Female Physician: Notes from a Medical Life

Suzanne Koven

A poignant and funny exploration of authenticity in work and life by a woman doctor.

In 2017, Dr. Suzanne Koven published an essay describing the challenges faced by female physicians, including her own personal struggle with "imposter syndrome"—a long-held secret belief that she was not smart enough or good enough to be a “real” doctor. Accessed by thousands of readers around the world, Koven’s “Letter to a Young Female Physician” has evolved into a deeply felt reflection on her career in medicine.

Koven tells candid and illuminating stories about her pregnancy during a grueling residency in the AIDS era; the illnesses of her child and aging parents during which her roles as a doctor, mother, and daughter converged, and sometimes collided; the sexism, pay inequity, and harassment that women in medicine encounter; and the twilight of her career during the COVID-19 pandemic. As she traces the arc of her life, Koven finds inspiration in literature and faces the near-universal challenges of burnout, body image, and balancing work with marriage and parenthood.

Shining with warmth, clarity, and wisdom, Letter to a Young Female Physician reveals a woman forging her authentic identity in a modern landscape that is as overwhelming and confusing as it is exhilarating in its possibilities. Koven offers an indelible account, by turns humorous and profound, from a doctor, mother, wife, daughter, teacher, and writer who sheds light on our desire to find meaning, and on a way to be our own imperfect selves in the world.

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Come on Over

Jeff Mauro

Bursting with personality and mouthwatering dishes, a cookbook for family and friendly gatherings from celebrity chef Jeff Mauro, co-host of Food Network's The Kitchen.



When Jeff Mauro was growing up in his big Italian American family in Chicago, his mother would often be on the phone talking to cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and family friends. Her favorite phrase? Come on over! When Jeff heard those three words, he and his siblings knew company was coming and there would be good food to accompany their visit. A boy who loved to eat and make people laugh, Jeff was in heaven.

Now the host of the Emmy-nominated The Kitchen on Food Network, Jeff still loves entertaining with his family. For Jeff, there's no better way to create shared memories than over a good meal. In Come on Over he invites everyone to share in the fun, providing delicious recipes for all occasions, from game day to birthdays to brunch, along with fun stories from his life. Whatever the get-together, Jeff has the perfect food to make it memorable--and make everyone feel like family--with recipes such as:

Early Bird Gets the Brunch . . . Come On Over

  • Sausage, Egg, and Cheese "MoMuffins"
  • Marjorie Alice Ross Jones' Fried Pork Chops . . . for Breakfast

Hey Bro, We're Watching the Game . . . Come On Over . . . And Pick Up Some Ice on the Way

  • BLT Sliders with Candied Bacon
  • Pancetta and Parm Popcorn

Come On Over . . . I'm Throwing an Island Party
 

  • Crispy Plantain Chips
  • Takeout-Style Chinese Spare Ribs

Do You Smell That Meat Smoke? That's Right, It's Coming from my Backyard . . . Come On Over

  • Smoked Cheez-Its
  • Smoked Honey-Glazed Cedar Plank Salmon

Sarah's Baking . . . Come On Over

  • Sarah's Famous Sea Salt Pecan Chocolate Chip Cookies
  • No-Bake Cookie Butter Pie

Overflowing with Jeff's big personality, celebration-ready food for friends and family, and gorgeous food and lifestyle color photographs, this laugh-out-loud-funny cookbook will inspire you to pick up the phone and invite your favorite people to share good times, eat good food, and make wonderful memories.

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The No-Fuss Family Cookbook

Ryan Scott

Your new go-to collection of easy, family-friendly recipes, from popular chef and television personality Ryan Scott

Emmy Award-winning celebrity chef (and dad) Ryan Scott knows well that family life is wonderful, but can be a very hectic business--stressing over mealtime shouldn't add to the madness! This heartfelt collection comes straight from his home kitchen's regular rotation into yours. Reflecting Ryan's colorful personality and practical approach, the recipes are kid-friendly and packed with clever hacks and pro tips for getting meals on the table (and cleaning up) quickly. There are no fussy cooking techniques or long ingredient lists; instead, the focus is on family-centered meals for even the busiest of days--irresistible recipes like Turkey Reuben Meatloaf, Broccoli-Cheddar Bow Ties, and Naturally Sweet PB&J Pancakes. Even crowd-pleasing desserts like Everything-But-the-Kitchen-Sink Cookies and Butterscotch Marshmallow Squares remain delightfully simple, for minimal stress and maximum fun.

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World Travel

Anthony Bourdain

A guide to some of the world’s most fascinating places, as seen and experienced by writer, television host, and relentlessly curious traveler Anthony Bourdain

Anthony Bourdain saw more of the world than nearly anyone. His travels took him from the hidden pockets of his hometown of New York to a tribal longhouse in Borneo, from cosmopolitan Buenos Aires, Paris, and Shanghai to Tanzania’s utter beauty and the stunning desert solitude of Oman’s Empty Quarter—and many places beyond.

In World Travel, a life of experience is collected into an entertaining, practical, fun and frank travel guide that gives readers an introduction to some of his favorite places—in his own words. Featuring essential advice on how to get there, what to eat, where to stay and, in some cases, what to avoid, World Travel provides essential context that will help readers further appreciate the reasons why Bourdain found a place enchanting and memorable.

Supplementing Bourdain’s words are a handful of essays by friends, colleagues, and family that tell even deeper stories about a place, including sardonic accounts of traveling with Bourdain by his brother, Christopher; a guide to Chicago’s best cheap eats by legendary music producer Steve Albini, and more. Additionally, each chapter includes illustrations by Wesley Allsbrook.

For veteran travelers, armchair enthusiasts, and those in between, World Travel offers a chance to experience the world like Anthony Bourdain.

 

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Poole's

Ashley Christensen

From the James Beard Award–winning chef Ashley Christensen comes a bold and revelatory reinvention of Southern food, as told through the recipes and stories from her iconic and beloved restaurant, Poole’s Diner. 

Ashley Christensen is the new face of Southern cooking, and her debut cookbook, Poole’s, honors the traditions of this celebrated cuisine, while introducing a new vernacular—elevated simple side dishes spiked with complex vinaigrettes, meatless mains showcasing vibrant vegetables, and intensified flavors through a cadre of back-pocket recipes that will become indispensable in your kitchen. Recipes like Turnip Green Fritters with Whipped Tahini; Heirloom Tomatoes with Crushed Olives, Crispy Quinoa, and White Anchovy Dressing; and Warm Broccoli Salad with Cheddar and Bacon Vinaigrette share the menu with the definitive recipe for Pimento Cheese, a show-stopping Macaroni au Gratin, and crave-worthy Challah Bread Pudding with Whiskey Apples and Creme Fraiche, all redefining what comfort food can be.

Poole’s is also the story of how Christensen opened a restaurant, and in the process energized Raleigh’s downtown. By fostering a network of farmers, cooks, and guests, and taking care of her people by feeding them well, she built a powerful community around the restaurant. The cookbook is infused with Christensen’s generous spirit and belief that great cooking is fundamental to good living.

With abundant, dramatically beautiful photography and a luxe presentation, Poole’s is a landmark addition to the cookbook canon, a collection from which readers will cook and find inspiration, and pass down for generations to come.

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Mother Grains

Roxana Jullapat

As the head baker and owner of a beloved Los Angeles bakery, Roxana Jullapat knows the difference local, sustainable flour can make: brown rice flour lightens up a cake, rustic rye adds unexpected chewiness to a bagel, and ground toasted oats enrich doughnuts. Her bakery, Friends & Family, works with dedicated farmers and millers around the country to source and incorporate the eight mother grains in every sweet, bread, or salad on the menu. In her debut cookbook, Roxana shares her greatest hits, over 90 recipes for reinventing your favorite cakes, cookies, pies, breads, and more.

Her chocolate chip cookie recipe can be made with any of the eight mother grains, each flour yielding a distinct snap, crunch, or chew. Her mouthwatering buckwheat pancake can reinvent itself with grainier cornmeal. One-bowl recipes such as Barley Pumpkin Bread and Spelt Blueberry Muffins will yield fast rewards, while her Cardamom Buns and Halvah Croissants are expertly laid out to grow a home baker's skills. Recipes are organized by grain to ensure you get the most out of every purchase.

Roxana even includes savory recipes for whole grain salads made with sorghum, Kamut or freekeh, or easy warm dishes such as Farro alla Pilota, Toasted Barley Soup, or Gallo Pinto which pays homage to her Costa Rican upbringing. Sunny step-by-step photos, a sourcing guide, storage tips, and notes on each grain's history round out this comprehensive cookbook.

Perfect for beginner bakers and pastry pros alike, Mother Grains proves that whole grains are the secret to making any recipe so much more than the sum of its parts.

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The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge

Peter B. Kaufman

 

 

How do we create a universe of truthful and verifiable information, available to everyone?In The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge, MIT Open Learning’s Peter B. Kaufman describes the powerful forces that have purposely crippled our efforts to share knowledge widely and freely.

Popes and their inquisitors, emperors and their hangmen, commissars and their secret police—throughout history, all have sought to stanch the free flow of information. Kaufman writes of times when the Bible could not be translated—you’d be burned for trying; when dictionaries and encyclopedias were forbidden; when literature and science and history books were trashed and pulped—sometimes along with their authors; and when efforts to develop public television and radio networks were quashed by private industry.

In the 21st century, the enemies of free thought have taken on new and different guises—giant corporate behemoths, sprawling national security agencies, gutted regulatory commissions. Bereft of any real moral compass or sense of social responsibility, their work to surveil and control us are no less nefarious than their 16th- and 18th- and 20th- century predecessors. They are all part of what Kaufman calls the Monsterverse.

The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge maps out the opportunities to mobilize for the fight ahead of us. With the Internet and other means of media production and distribution—video especially—at hand, knowledge institutions like universities, libraries, museums, and archives have a special responsibility now to counter misinformation, disinformation, and fake news—and especially efforts to control the free flow of information. 

A film and video producer and former book publisher, Kaufman begins to draft a new social contract for our networked video age. He draws his inspiration from those who fought tooth and nail against earlier incarnations of the Monsterverse—including William Tyndale in the 16th century; Denis Diderot in the 18th; untold numbers of Soviet and Central and East European dissidents in the 20th—many of whom paid the ultimate price. Their successors? Advocates of free knowledge like Aaron Swartz, of free software like Richard Stallman, of an enlightened public television and radio network like James Killian, of a freer Internet like Tim Berners-Lee, of fuller rights and freedoms like Edward Snowden. All have been striving to secure for us a better world, marked by the right balance between state, society, and private gain. 

The concluding section of the book, its largest piece, builds on their work, drawing up a progressive agenda for how today’s free thinkers can band together now to fight and win. With everything shut and everyone going online, The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge is a rousing call to action that expands the definition of what it means to be a citizen in the 21st century.

 

 

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Give Them Lala

Lala Kent

USA TODAY BESTSELLER

The Vanderpump Rules breakout star and provocateur brings her signature sharp wit to the page with this collection of humorous and brutally honest essays exploring her rocky road to fame, sobriety, and beyond.

What does “Give them Lala” mean? It means giving the truest, most honest version of yourself to the world. It means being authentic, bold, adventurous, and having an unapologetic approach to life.

Hollywood is where Lauren Burningham, aspiring actress from Utah, fully embraced her alter-ego Lala Kent, entrepreneur, entertainer, and film and television star. Some say she’s rude; Lala says she claps back. Some say she’s spontaneous; Lala says “eat up the drama.” Some say she’s too bold; Lala knows she’s reality TV gold. Truth is, without giving them Lala, Lauren could never have become the woman she is today.

In her debut collection of essays, Lala shares how you, too, can embrace the best version of yourself and never feel guilty for deserving more. As she leads us on her bumpy journey from suburban boredom to Hollywood glamour, she’ll explain how women can—and should—feel just as free as men when it comes to sex, how sobriety saved her life and relationship, and how we should treasure every day we have with those we love.

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Sacrifice

Michelle Black

The shocking and affecting memoir from a gold-star widow searching for the truth behind her Green Beret husband's death, this book bears witness to the true sacrifices made by military families.

When Green Beret Bryan Black was killed in an ambush in Niger in 2017, his wife Michelle saw her worst nightmare become a reality. She was left alone with her grief and with two young sons to raise. But what followed Bryan's death was an even more difficult journey for the young widow. After receiving very few details about the attack that took her husband's life, it was up to Michelle to find answers. It became her mission to learn the truth about that day in Niger--and Sacrifice is the result of that mission.

In this heartbreaking and revelatory memoir, Michelle uses exclusive interviews with the survivors of her husband's unit, research into the military leadership and accountability, and her own unique vantage point as a gold-star widow to tell a previously unknown story. Sacrifice is both an honest, emotional look inside a military marriage and a searing investigation of the people and decisions at the heart of the US military.

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The Price of Peace

Zachary D. Carter

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - An "outstanding new intellectual biography of John Maynard Keynes [that moves] swiftly along currents of lucidity and wit" (The New York Times), illuminating the world of the influential economist and his transformative ideas

"A timely, lucid and compelling portrait of a man whose enduring relevance is always heightened when crisis strikes."--The Wall Street Journal

WINNER OF THE HILLMAN PRIZE FOR BOOK JOURNALISM - FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD AND THE SABEW BEST IN BUSINESS BOOK AWARD - NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY PUBLISHERS WEEKLY AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times - The Economist - Bloomberg - Mother Jones

At the dawn of World War I, a young academic named John Maynard Keynes hastily folded his long legs into the sidecar of his brother-in-law's motorcycle for an odd, frantic journey that would change the course of history. Swept away from his placid home at Cambridge University by the currents of the conflict, Keynes found himself thrust into the halls of European treasuries to arrange emergency loans and packed off to America to negotiate the terms of economic combat. The terror and anxiety unleashed by the war would transform him from a comfortable obscurity into the most influential and controversial intellectual of his day--a man whose ideas still retain the power to shock in our own time.

Keynes was not only an economist but the preeminent anti-authoritarian thinker of the twentieth century, one who devoted his life to the belief that art and ideas could conquer war and deprivation. As a moral philosopher, political theorist, and statesman, Keynes led an extraordinary life that took him from intimate turn-of-the-century parties in London's riotous Bloomsbury art scene to the fevered negotiations in Paris that shaped the Treaty of Versailles, from stock market crashes on two continents to diplomatic breakthroughs in the mountains of New Hampshire to wartime ballet openings at London's extravagant Covent Garden.

Along the way, Keynes reinvented Enlightenment liberalism to meet the harrowing crises of the twentieth century. In the United States, his ideas became the foundation of a burgeoning economics profession, but they also became a flash point in the broader political struggle of the Cold War, as Keynesian acolytes faced off against conservatives in an intellectual battle for the future of the country--and the world. Though many Keynesian ideas survived the struggle, much of the project to which he devoted his life was lost.

In this riveting biography, veteran journalist Zachary D. Carter unearths the lost legacy of one of history's most fascinating minds. The Price of Peace revives a forgotten set of ideas about democracy, money, and the good life with transformative implications for today's debates over inequality and the power politics that shape the global order.

LONGLISTED FOR THE CUNDILL HISTORY PRIZE

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Women in White Coats

Olivia Campbell

For fans of Hidden Figures and Radium Girls comes the remarkable story of three Victorian women who broke down barriers in the medical field to become the first women doctors, revolutionizing the way women receive health care.

In the early 1800s, women were dying in large numbers from treatable diseases because they avoided receiving medical care. Examinations performed by male doctors were often demeaning and even painful. In addition, women faced stigma from illness—a diagnosis could greatly limit their ability to find husbands, jobs or be received in polite society.

Motivated by personal loss and frustration over inadequate medical care, Elizabeth Blackwell, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Sophia Jex-Blake fought for a woman’s place in the male-dominated medical field. For the first time ever, Women in White Coats tells the complete history of these three pioneering women who, despite countless obstacles, earned medical degrees and paved the way for other women to do the same. Though very different in personality and circumstance, together these women built women-run hospitals and teaching colleges—creating for the first time medical care for women by women.

With gripping storytelling based on extensive research and access to archival documents, Women in White Coats tells the courageous history these women made by becoming doctors, detailing the boundaries they broke of gender and science to reshape how we receive medical care today.

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Get Big Things Done

Erica Dhawan

Connectional Intelligence unlocks the 21st-century secret to getting "big things done," regardless of who you are, where you live, or what you do.

We typically associate success and leadership with smarts, passion and luck. But in today's hypercompetitive world, even those gifts aren't enough. Get Big Things Done argues that the game changer is a thoroughly modern skill called Connectional Intelligence. Virtually anyone can maximize his or her potential, and achieve breakthrough performance, by developing this crucial ability.

So, what is it? Put simply, Connectional Intelligence is the ability to combine knowledge, ambition and human capital, forging connections on a global scale that create unprecedented value and meaning. As radical a concept as Emotional Intelligence was in the 90s, Connectional Intelligence is changing everything from business and sports to academics, health and politics by quickly, efficiently and creatively helping people enlist supporters, drive innovation, develop strategies and implement solutions to big problems.

Can a small-town pumpkin grower affect the global food crisis? A Fortune 500 executive change her company's outdated culture through video storytelling? A hip-hop artist launch an international happiness movement? Or a scientist use virtual reality games to lower pain for burn victims? The answer, you'll read, is a resounding yes. Each of these individuals is using Connectional Intelligence to become a power player to get big things done.

Erica Dhawan and Saj-nicole Joni's Get Big Things Done unlocks the secrets of how the world's movers and shakers use Connectional Intelligence to achieve their personal and professional goals--no matter how ambitious.

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The Carrot Principle

Adrian Gostick

Newly updated to include information for the UK, The Carrot Principle illustrates how ordinary organizations have made themselves extraordinary through the use of strategic employee recognition. The authors show how great organizations and great managers succeed through living the Carrot Principle.

Featuring case studies of effective recognition in some of the world's most successful organizations, such as DHL, Avis, Pepsi, etc and demonstrating how recognition has led to improved employee commitment and bottom line results in these companies, the book also shows how a Carrot Culture is not created by the CEO, senior leadership team or HR department, but manager by manager.

The book provides examples of leaders - from around the globe - who lead through the Carrot Principle: providing plentiful how-to's for managers wishing to get started or hoping to enhance their recognition abilities.

Overall, there has never been a book in the recognition or motivation space that has had this type of quantitative or case study support.

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The Reindeer Chronicles

Judith D. Schwartz

In a time of uncertainty about our environmental future—an eye-opening global tour of some of the most wounded places on earth, and stories of how a passionate group of eco-restorers is leading the way to their revitalization.

Award-winning science journalist Judith D. Schwartz takes us first to China’s Loess Plateau, where a landmark project has successfully restored a blighted region the size of Belgium, lifting millions of people out of poverty. She journeys on to Norway, where a young indigenous reindeer herder challenges the most powerful orthodoxies of conservation—and his own government. And in the Middle East, she follows the visionary work of an ambitious young American as he attempts to re-engineer the desert ecosystem, using plants as his most sophisticated technology.

Schwartz explores regenerative solutions across a range of landscapes: deserts, grasslands, tropics, tundra, Mediterranean. She also highlights various human landscapes, the legacy of colonialism and industrial agriculture, and the endurance of indigenous knowledge.

The Reindeer Chronicles demonstrates how solutions to seemingly intractable problems can come from the unlikeliest of places, and how the restoration of local water, carbon, nutrient, and energy cycles can play a dramatic role in stabilizing the global climate. Ultimately, it reveals how much is in our hands if we can find a way to work together and follow nature’s lead.

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Every Conversation Counts

Riaz Meghji

You are one conversation away from changing your life. We all crave connection. We were never meant to live alone or communicate only in "likes" and retweets. In Every Conversation Counts, TV host and human connection keynote speaker Riaz Meghji digs deep into the dangers of isolation and loneliness, our social pandemic, that have been brought into sharp relief by the coronavirus crisis. He tackles a uniquely modern question: why are we so connected, and yet so alone--and how can we reconnect?

Sharing personal insights from powerful interviews and years of on-air experience, Meghji offers 5 simple habits for building extraordinary relationships. He explains how to spark authentic conversations, win trust, create new business, and collaborate effectively. Meghji points a way forward to a better future--one in which we express genuine curiosity about others, listen with our whole hearts, show up as our authentic selves, and make every conversation count.

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Wintering

Katherine May

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! AS HEARD ON NPR MORNING EDITION AND ON BEING WITH KRISTA TIPPETT

“Katherine May opens up exactly what I and so many need to hear but haven't known how to name.” —Krista Tippett, On Being

“Every bit as beautiful and healing as the season itself. . . . This is truly a beautiful book.” —Elizabeth Gilbert

 
"Proves that there is grace in letting go, stepping back and giving yourself time to repair in the dark...May is a clear-eyed observer and her language is steady, honest and accurate—capturing the sense, the beauty and the latent power of our resting landscapes." —Wall Street Journal

An intimate, revelatory book exploring the ways we can care for and repair ourselves when life knocks us down.


Sometimes you slip through the cracks: unforeseen circumstances like an abrupt illness, the death of a loved one, a break up, or a job loss can derail a life. These periods of dislocation can be lonely and unexpected. For May, her husband fell ill, her son stopped attending school, and her own medical issues led her to leave a demanding job. Wintering explores how she not only endured this painful time, but embraced the singular opportunities it offered.

A moving personal narrative shot through with lessons from literature, mythology, and the natural world, May's story offers instruction on the transformative power of rest and retreat. Illumination emerges from many sources: solstice celebrations and dormice hibernation, C.S. Lewis and Sylvia Plath, swimming in icy waters and sailing arctic seas.

Ultimately Wintering invites us to change how we relate to our own fallow times. May models an active acceptance of sadness and finds nourishment in deep retreat, joy in the hushed beauty of winter, and encouragement in understanding life as cyclical, not linear. A secular mystic, May forms a guiding philosophy for transforming the hardships that arise before the ushering in of a new season.

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The Way of Integrity

Martha Beck

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

"This radiant book will not only change your life, but perhaps even save it."--Elizabeth Gilbert, #1 New York Times bestselling author


"Martha Beck's genius is that her writing is equal parts comforting and challenging. A teacher, a mother, a sage, she holds our hand as she leads us back home to ourselves."--Glennon Doyle, #1 New York Times bestselling author

Bestselling author, life coach and sociologist Martha Beck explains why "integrity"--needed now more than ever in these tumultuous times--is the key to a meaningful and joyful life


As Martha Beck says in her book, "Integrity is the cure for psychological suffering. Period."

In The Way of Integrity, Beck presents a four-stage process that anyone can use to find integrity, and with it, a sense of purpose, emotional healing, and a life free of mental suffering. Much of what plagues us--people pleasing, staying in stale relationships, negative habits--all point to what happens when we are out of touch with what truly makes us feel whole.

Inspired by The Divine Comedy, Beck uses Dante's classic hero's journey as a framework to break down the process of attaining personal integrity into small, manageable steps. She shows how to read our internal signals that lead us towards our true path, and to recognize what we actually yearn for versus what our culture sells us.

With techniques tested on hundreds of her clients, Beck brings her expertise as a social scientist, life coach and human being to help readers to uncover what integrity looks like in their own lives. She takes us on a spiritual adventure that not only will change the direction of our lives, but bring us to a place of genuine happiness.

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The Quarter-Life Breakthrough

Adam Smiley Poswolsky

How do you actually find meaning in the workplace? How do you find work that makes your heart sing, creates impact, and pays your rent?
 
After realizing that his well-paying, prestigious job was actually making him miserable, Adam "Smiley" Poswolsky started asking these big questions. The Quarter-Life Breakthrough provides fresh, honest, counterintuitive, and inspiring career advice for anyone stuck in a quarter-life crisis (or third-life crisis), trying to figure out what to do with your life. Smiley shares the stories of many twenty- and thirty-somethings who are discovering how to work with purpose (and still pay the bills).

Brimming with practical exercises and advice, this book is essential reading for millennial career changers and anyone passionate about getting unstuck, pursuing work that matters, and changing the world.

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How to Do the Work

Dr. Nicole LePera

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ·  INSTANT INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER

From Dr. Nicole LePera, creator of "the holistic psychologist"—the online phenomenon with more than two million Instagram followers—comes a revolutionary approach to healing that harnesses the power of the self to produce lasting change.

As a clinical psychologist, Dr. Nicole LePera often found herself frustrated by the limitations of traditional psychotherapy. Wanting more for her patients—and for herself—she began a journey to develop a united philosophy of mental, physical and spiritual wellness that equips people with the interdisciplinary tools necessary to heal themselves. After experiencing the life-changing results herself, she began to share what she’d learned with others—and soon “The Holistic Psychologist” was born.

Now, Dr. LePera is ready to share her much-requested protocol with the world. In How to Do the Work, she offers both a manifesto for SelfHealing as well as an essential guide to creating a more vibrant, authentic, and joyful life. Drawing on the latest research from a diversity of scientific fields and healing modalities, Dr. LePera helps us recognize how adverse experiences and trauma in childhood live with us, resulting in whole body dysfunction—activating harmful stress responses that keep us stuck engaging in patterns of codependency, emotional immaturity, and trauma bonds. Unless addressed, these self-sabotaging behaviors can quickly become cyclical, leaving people feeling unhappy, unfulfilled, and unwell. 

In How to Do the Work, Dr. LePera offers readers the support and tools that will allow them to break free from destructive behaviors to reclaim and recreate their lives. Nothing short of a paradigm shift, this is a celebration of empowerment that will forever change the way we approach mental wellness and self-care.

 

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Bringing Up Race

Uju Asika

"Uju Asika has written a necessary book for our times."—Chika Unigwe, author of On Black Sisters' Street

You can't avoid it, because it's everywhere. In the looks Black kids get in certain spaces, the manner in which some people speak to them, the stuff that goes over their heads. Stuff that makes them cry even when they don't know why. How do you bring up your kids to be kind and happy when there is so much out there trying to break them down?

Bringing Up Race is an important book, for all families whatever their race or ethnicity. It's for everyone who wants to instil a sense of open-minded inclusivity in their kids, and those who want to discuss difference instead of shying away from tough questions. Uju Asika draws on often shocking personal stories of prejudice along with opinions of experts, influencers, and fellow parents to give prescriptive advice in this invaluable guide.

Bringing Up Race explores:

  • When children start noticing ethnic differences (hint: much earlier than you think)
  • What to do if your child says something racist (try not to freak out)
  • How to have open, honest, age-appropriate conversations about race
  • How children and parents can handle racial bullying
  • How to recognize and challenge everyday racism, aka microaggressions

Bringing Up Race is a call to arms for all parents as our society works to combat white supremacy and dismantle the systemic racism that has existed for hundreds of years.

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Fourteen Talks by Age Fourteen

Michelle Icard

The fourteen essential conversations to have with your tween and early teenager to prepare them for the emotional, physical, and social challenges ahead, including scripts and advice to keep the communication going and stay connected during this critical developmental window.

"This book is a gift to parents and teenagers alike."--Lisa Damour, PhD, author of Untangled and Under Pressure

Trying to convince a middle schooler to listen to you can be exasperating. Indeed, it can feel like the best option is not to talk! But keeping kids safe--and prepared for all the times when you can't be the angel on their shoulder--is about having the right conversations at the right time. From a brain growth and emotional readiness perspective, there is no better time for this than their tween years, right up to when they enter high school.

Distilling Michelle Icard's decades of experience working with families, Fourteen Talks by Age Fourteen focuses on big, thorny topics such as friendship, sexuality, impulsivity, and technology, as well as unexpected conversations about creativity, hygiene, money, privilege, and contributing to the family. Icard outlines a simple, memorable, and family-tested formula for the best approach to these essential talks, the BRIEF Model: Begin peacefully, Relate to your child, Interview to collect information, Echo what you're hearing, and give Feedback. With wit and compassion, she also helps you get over the most common hurdles in talking to tweens, including:

* What phrases invite connection and which irritate kids or scare them off
* The best places, times, and situations in which to initiate talks
* How to keep kids interested, open, and engaged in conversation
* How to exit these chats in a way that keeps kids wanting more

Like a Rosetta Stone for your tween's confounding language, Fourteen Talks by Age Fourteen is an essential communication guide to helping your child through the emotional, physical, and social challenges ahead and, ultimately, toward teenage success.

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Driven

Alex Davies

Alex Davies tells the dramatic, colorful story of the quest to develop driverless cars—and the fierce competition between Google, Uber, and other companies in a race to revolutionize our lives.

The self-driving car has been one of the most vaunted technological breakthroughs of recent years. But early promises that these autonomous vehicles would soon be on the roads have proven premature. Alex Davies follows the twists and turns of this story from its origins to today.

The story starts with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which was charged with developing a land-based equivalent to the drone, a vehicle that could operate in war zones without risking human lives. DARPA issued a series of three “Grand Challenges” that attracted visionaries, many of them students and amateurs, who took the technology from Jetsons-style fantasy to near-reality. The young stars of the Challenges soon connected with Silicon Valley giants Google and Uber, intent on delivering a new way of driving to the civilian world.

Soon the automakers joined the quest, some on their own, others in partnership with the tech titans. But as road testing progressed, it became clear that the challenges of driving a car without human assistance were more formidable than anticipated.

Davies profiles the industry’s key players from the early enthusiasm of the DARPA days to their growing awareness that while this spin on artificial intelligence isn’t yet ready for rush-hour traffic, driverless cars are poised to remake how the world moves. Driven explores this exciting quest to transform transportation and change our lives.

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Thomas Day

Patricia Phillips Marshall

Thomas Day (1801-61), a free man of color from Milton, North Carolina, became the most successful cabinetmaker in North Carolina--white or black--during a time when most blacks were enslaved and free blacks were restricted in their movements and activities. His surviving furniture and architectural woodwork still represent the best of nineteenth-century craftsmanship and aesthetics.

In this lavishly illustrated book, Patricia Phillips Marshall and Jo Ramsay Leimenstoll show how Day plotted a carefully charted course for success in antebellum southern society. Beginning in the 1820s, he produced fine furniture for leading white citizens and in the 1840s and '50s diversified his offerings to produce newel posts, stair brackets, and distinctive mantels for many of the same clients. As demand for his services increased, the technological improvements Day incorporated into his shop contributed to the complexity of his designs.

Day's style, characterized by undulating shapes, fluid lines, and spiraling forms, melded his own unique motifs with popular design forms, resulting in a distinctive interpretation readily identified to his shop. The photographs in the book document furniture in public and private collections and architectural woodwork from private homes not previously associated with Day. The book provides information on more than 160 pieces of furniture and architectural woodwork that Day produced for 80 structures between 1835 and 1861.

Through in-depth analysis and generous illustrations, including over 240 photographs (20 in full color) and architectural photography by Tim Buchman, Marshall and Leimenstoll provide a comprehensive perspective on and a new understanding of the powerful sense of aesthetics and design that mark Day's legacy.
 

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The Miracle of Castel Di Sangro

Joe McGinniss

Master storyteller Joe McGinniss travels to Italy to cover the unlikely success of a ragtag minor league soccer team--and delivers a brilliant and utterly unforgettable story of life in an off-the-beaten-track Italian village.

When Joe McGinniss sets out for the remote Italian village of Castel di Sangro one summer, he merely intends to spend a season with the village's soccer team, which only weeks before had, miraculously, reached the second-highest-ranking professional league in the land. But soon he finds himself embroiled with an absurd yet irresistible cast of characters, including the team's owner, described by the New York Times as "straight out of a Mario Puzo novel," and coach Osvaldo Jaconi, whose only English word is the one he uses to describe himself: "bulldozer."

As the riotous, edge-of-your-seat season unfolds, McGinniss develops a deepening bond with the team, their village and its people, and their country. Traveling with the miracle team, from the isolated mountain region where Castel di Sangro is located to gritty towns as well as grand cities, McGinniss introduces us to an Italy that no tourist guidebook has ever described, and comes away with a "sad, funny, desolating, and inspiring story--everything, in fact, a story should be" (Los Angeles Times).

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The Mighty Bean: 100 Easy Recipes That Are Good for Your Health, the World, and Your Budget (Countryman Know How)

Judith Choate

A comprehensive guide to selecting, cooking, and serving dozens of beans and legumes.

Beans. Affordable, full of high-value protein, with a long-lasting shelf life, beans are versatile—equally delicious in stews or salads. And now we are learning to appreciate their worth as sustainability staples. Once pushed aside by Whole30 and Plant Paradox dieters, legumes have been rediscovered by home cooks everywhere. From common classics like black and pinto to heirloom beans like Appaloosa and Dapple Greys, The Mighty Bean, written by author Judith Choate, provides a never-ending collection of recipes to showcase these plant-based powerhouses.

Including vegetarian, vegan, and meat-friendly recipes, The Mighty Bean inspires a new outlook on legumes. Enjoy them as appetizers such as a Spicy Bean Dip, savor nourishing mains like Ayocote Negro Chili, and delight in desserts including White Bean-Orange Cake. No matter the dish or time of day, the flexibility of beans is undeniable and, with vibrant color photography, irresistible.

 

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Kill Shot

Jason Dearen

An award-winning investigative journalist's horrifying true crime story of America's deadliest drug contamination outbreak and the greed and deception that fueled it.

Two pharmacists sit in a Boston courtroom accused of murder. The weapon: the fungus Exserohilum rostratum. The death count: 100 and rising. Kill Shot is the story of their hubris and fraud, discovered by a team of medical detectives who raced against the clock to hunt the killers and the fungal meningitis they'd unleashed.

Bloodthirsty is how doctors described the fungal microbe that contaminated thousands of drug vials produced by the New England Compounding Center (NECC). Though NECC chief Barry Cadden called his company the Ferrari of Compounders, it was a slapdash operation of unqualified staff, mold-ridden lab surfaces, and hastily made medications that were injected into approximately 14,000 people. Once inside some of its human hosts, the fungus traveled through the tough tissue around the spine and wormed upward to the deep brain, our control center for balance, breath, and the vital motor functions of life.

Now, investigative journalist Jason Dearen turns a spotlight on this tragedy--the victims, the heroes, and the perpetrators--and the legal loopholes that allowed it to occur. Kill Shot forces a powerful but unchecked industry out of the shadows.

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Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel's Autism

Peter J. Hotez

In 1994, Peter J. Hotez's nineteen-month-old daughter, Rachel, was diagnosed with autism. Dr. Hotez, a pediatrician-scientist who develops vaccines for neglected tropical diseases affecting the world's poorest people, became troubled by the decades-long rise of the influential anti-vaccine community and its inescapable narrative around childhood vaccines and autism.

In Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel's Autism, Hotez draws on his experiences as a pediatrician, vaccine scientist, and father of an autistic child. Outlining the arguments on both sides of the debate, he examines the science that refutes the concerns of the anti-vaccine movement, debunks current conspiracy theories alleging a cover-up by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and critiques the scientific community's failure to effectively communicate the facts about vaccines and autism to the general public, all while sharing his very personal story of raising a now-adult daughter with autism.

A uniquely authoritative account, this important book persuasively provides evidence for the genetic basis of autism and illustrates how the neurodevelopmental pathways of autism are under way before birth. Dr. Hotez reminds readers of the many victories of vaccines over disease while warning about the growing dangers of the anti-vaccine movement, especially in the United States and Europe. Now, with the anti-vaccine movement reenergized in our COVID-19 era, this book is especially timely. Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel's Autism is a must-read for parent groups, child advocates, teachers, health-care providers, government policymakers, health and science policy experts, and anyone caring for a family member or friend with autism.

"When Peter Hotez—an erudite, highly trained scientist who is a true hero for his work in saving the world's poor and downtrodden—shares his knowledge and clinical insights along with his parental experience, when his beliefs in the value of what he does are put to the test of a life guiding his own child's challenges, then you must pay attention. You should. This book brings to an end the link between autism and vaccination."—from the foreword by Arthur L. Caplan, NYU School of Medicine

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How to Be Animal

Melanie Challenger

“A brilliant, thought-provoking book.” —Matt Haig, New York Times bestselling author of The Midnight Library
 
A wide-ranging take on why humans have a troubled relationship with being an animal, and why we need a better one


Human are the most inquisitive, emotional, imaginative, aggressive, and baffling animals on the planet. But we are also an animal that does not think it is an animal. How well do we really know ourselves?

How to Be Animal tells a remarkable story of what it means to be human and argues that at the heart of our existence is a profound struggle with being animal. We possess a psychology that seeks separation between humanity and the rest of nature, and we have invented grand ideologies to magnify this. As well as piecing together the mystery of how this mindset evolved, Challenger's book examines the wide-reaching ways in which it affects our lives, from our politics to the way we distance ourselves from other species. We travel from the origin of homo sapiens through the agrarian and industrial revolutions, the age of the internet, and on to the futures of AI and human-machine interface. Challenger examines how technology influences our sense of our own animal nature and our relationship with other species with whom we share this fragile planet.

That we are separated from our own animality is a delusion, according to Challenger. Blending nature writing, history, and moral philosophy, How to Be Animal is both a fascinating reappraisal of what it means to be human, and a robust defense of what it means to be an animal.

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How to Feel

Sushma Subramanian

We are out of touch. Many people fear that we are trapped inside our screens, becoming less in tune with our bodies and losing our connection to the physical world. But the sense of touch has been undervalued since long before the days of digital isolation. Because of deeply rooted beliefs that favor the cerebral over the corporeal, touch is maligned as dirty or sentimental, in contrast with supposedly more elevated modes of perceiving the world.

How to Feel explores the scientific, physical, emotional, and cultural aspects of touch, reconnecting us to what is arguably our most important sense. Sushma Subramanian introduces readers to the scientists whose groundbreaking research is underscoring the role of touch in our lives. Through vivid individual stories—a man who lost his sense of touch in his late teens, a woman who experiences touch-emotion synesthesia, her own efforts to become less touch averse—Subramanian explains the science of the somatosensory system and our philosophical beliefs about it. She visits labs that are shaping the textures of objects we use every day, from cereal to synthetic fabrics. The book highlights the growing field of haptics, which is trying to incorporate tactile interactions into devices such as phones that touch us back and prosthetic limbs that can feel. How to Feel offers a new appreciation for a vital but misunderstood sense and how we can use it to live more fully.

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What Do I Eat Now?

Patricia Geil

The DIY approach to a diabetes diet!

What Do I Eat Now? is the single best resource for people with diabetes to learn how to eat right and eat healthy with diabetes. Each chapter explains a vital concept of diabetes nutrition in easy-to-understand language. “Tell Me What to Eat” meal plans and recipes at the end of each chapter get readers started on a lifetime of healthy eating. Don’t waste time trying to figure everything out from scratch when What Do I Eat Now? gives readers a step-by-step plan for understanding how to eat right. Learn as you go by cooking healthy, nutritious, and flavorful diabetic meals!

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Marbles

Ellen Forney

Cartoonist Ellen Forney explores the relationship between “crazy” and “creative” in this graphic memoir of her bipolar disorder, woven with stories of famous bipolar artists and writers.

 

Shortly before her thirtieth birthday, Forney was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Flagrantly manic and terrified that medications would cause her to lose creativity, she began a years-long struggle to find mental stability while retaining her passions and creativity.
 

Searching to make sense of the popular concept of the crazy artist, she finds inspiration from the lives and work of other artists and writers who suffered from mood disorders, including Vincent van Gogh, Georgia O’Keeffe, William Styron, and Sylvia Plath. She also researches the clinical aspects of bipolar disorder, including the strengths and limitations of various treatments and medications, and what studies tell us about the conundrum of attempting to “cure” an otherwise brilliant mind.
 

Darkly funny and intensely personal, Forney’s memoir provides a visceral glimpse into the effects of a mood disorder on an artist’s work, as she shares her own story through bold black-and-white images and evocative prose.

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The Secret to Superhuman Strength

Alison Bechdel

From the author of Fun Home, a profoundly affecting graphic memoir of Bechdel's lifelong love affair with exercise, set against a hilarious chronicle of fitness fads in our times

Comics and cultural superstar Alison Bechdel delivers a deeply layered story of her fascination, from childhood to adulthood, with every fitness craze to come down the pike: from Jack LaLanne in the 60s ("Outlandish jumpsuit! Cantaloupe-sized guns!") to the existential oddness of present-day spin class. Readers will see their athletic or semi-active pasts flash before their eyes through an ever-evolving panoply of running shoes, bicycles, skis, and sundry other gear. But the more Bechdel tries to improve herself, the more her self appears to be the thing in her way. She turns for enlightenment to Eastern philosophers and literary figures, including Beat writer Jack Kerouac, whose search for self-transcendence in the great outdoors appears in moving conversation with the author's own. This gifted artist and not-getting-any-younger exerciser comes to a soulful conclusion. The secret to superhuman strength lies not in six-pack abs, but in something much less clearly defined: facing her own non-transcendent but all-important interdependence with others.

A heartrendingly comic chronicle for our times.

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The Comic Book Guide to Growing Food

Joseph Tychonievich

The first graphic novel guide to growing a successful vegetable garden, from planning, prepping, and planting, to troubleshooting, care, and harvesting.

"A fun read packed with practical advice, it's the perfect resource for new gardeners, guiding you through every step to plant, grow, and harvest a thriving and productive food garden."--Joe Lamp'l, founder and creator of the Online Gardening Academy

Like having your own personal gardening mentor at your side, The Comic Book Guide to Growing Food is the story of Mia, an eager young professional who wants to grow her own vegetables but doesn't know where to start, and George, her retired neighbor who loves gardening and walks her through each step of the process. Throughout the book, "cheat sheets" sum up George's key facts and techniques, providing a handy quick reference for anyone starting their first vegetable garden, including how to find the best location, which vegetables are easiest to grow, how to pick out the healthiest plants at the store, when (and when not) to water, how to protect your plants from pests, and what to do with extra produce if you grow too much.

If you are a visual learner, beginning gardener, looking for something new, or have struggled to grow vegetables in the past, you'll find this unique illustrated format ideal because many gardening concepts--from proper planting techniques to building raised beds--are easier to grasp when presented visually, step by step. Easy and entertaining, The Comic Book Guide to Growing Food makes homegrown vegetables fun and achievable.

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Hard Line

Ken Ellingwood

The Southwestern border is one of the most fascinating places in America, a region of rugged beauty and small communities that coexist across the international line. In the past decade, the area has also become deadly as illegal immigration has shifted into some of the harshest territory on the continent, reshaping life on both sides of the border.

In Hard Line, Ken Ellingwood, a correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, captures the heart of this complex and fascinating land, through the dramatic stories of undocumented immigrants and the border agents who track them through the desert, Native Americans divided between two countries, human rights workers aiding the migrants and ranchers taking the law into their own hands. This is a vivid portrait of a place and its people, and a moving story of the West that has major implications for the nation as a whole.

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Murder at the Mission

Blaine Harden

"Terrific." -Timothy Egan, The New York Times

"A riveting investigation of both American myth-making and the real history that lies beneath." -Claudio Saunt, author of Unworthy Republic

From the New York Times bestselling author of Escape From Camp 14, a "terrifically readable" (Los Angeles Times) account of one of the most persistent "alternative facts" in American history: the story of a missionary, a tribe, a massacre, and a myth that shaped the American West

In 1836, two missionaries and their wives were among the first Americans to cross the Rockies by covered wagon on what would become the Oregon Trail. Dr. Marcus Whitman and Reverend Henry Spalding were headed to present-day Washington state and Idaho, where they aimed to convert members of the Cayuse and Nez Perce tribes. Both would fail spectacularly as missionaries. But Spalding would succeed as a propagandist, inventing a story that recast his friend as a hero, and helped to fuel the massive westward migration that would eventually lead to the devastation of those they had purportedly set out to save.

As Spalding told it, after uncovering a British and Catholic plot to steal the Oregon Territory from the United States, Whitman undertook a heroic solo ride across the country to alert the President. In fact, he had traveled to Washington to save his own job. Soon after his return, Whitman, his wife, and eleven others were massacred by a group of Cayuse. Though they had ample reason - Whitman supported the explosion of white migration that was encroaching on their territory, and seemed to blame for a deadly measles outbreak - the Cayuse were portrayed as murderous savages. Five were executed.

This fascinating, impeccably researched narrative traces the ripple effect of these events across the century that followed. While the Cayuse eventually lost the vast majority of their territory, thanks to the efforts of Spalding and others who turned the story to their own purposes, Whitman was celebrated well into the middle of the 20th century for having saved Oregon. Accounts of his heroic exploits appeared in congressional documents, The New York Times, and Life magazine, and became a central founding myth of the Pacific Northwest.

Exposing the hucksterism and self-interest at the root of American myth-making, Murder at the Mission reminds us of the cost of American expansion, and of the problems that can arise when history is told only by the victors.

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The Wisdom of Crowds

James Surowiecki

In this fascinating book, New Yorker business columnist James Surowiecki explores a deceptively simple idea: Large groups of people are smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant—better at solving problems, fostering innovation, coming to wise decisions, even predicting the future.

 

With boundless erudition and in delightfully clear prose, Surowiecki ranges across fields as diverse as popular culture, psychology, ant biology, behavioral economics, artificial intelligence, military history, and politics to show how this simple idea offers important lessons for how we live our lives, select our leaders, run our companies, and think about our world.

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We Are Each Other's Harvest

Natalie Baszile

From the author of Queen Sugar--now a critically acclaimed series on OWN directed by Ava Duvernay--comes a beautiful exploration and celebration of black farming in America.



In this impressive anthology, Natalie Baszile brings together essays, poems, photographs, quotes, conversations, and first-person stories to examine black people's connection to the American land from Emancipation to today. In the 1920s, there were over one million black farmers; today there are just 45,000. Baszile explores this crisis, through the farmers' personal experiences. In their own words, middle aged and elderly black farmers explain why they continue to farm despite systemic discrimination and land loss. The "Returning Generation"--young farmers, who are building upon the legacy of their ancestors, talk about the challenges they face as they seek to redress issues of food justice, food sovereignty, and reparations.

These farmers are joined by other influential voices, including noted historians Analena Hope Hassberg and Pete Daniel, and award-winning author Clyde W. Ford, who considers the arrival of Africans to American shores; and James Beard Award-winning writers and Michael Twitty, reflects on black culinary tradition and its African roots. Poetry and inspirational quotes are woven into these diverse narratives, adding richness and texture, as well as stunning four-color photographs from photographers Alison Gootee and Malcom Williams, and Baszile's personal collection.

As Baszile reveals, black farming informs crucial aspects of American culture--the family, the way our national identity is bound up with the land, the pull of memory, the healing power of food, and race relations. She reminds us that the land, well-earned and fiercely protected, transcends history and signifies a home that can be tended, tilled, and passed to succeeding generations with pride. We Are Each Other's Harvest elevates the voices and stories of black farmers and people of color, celebrating their perseverance and resilience, while spotlighting the challenges they continue to face. Luminous and eye-opening, this eclectic collection helps people and communities of color today reimagine what it means to be dedicated to the soil.

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The Art of Punch Needle Embroidery

Marie Suarez

Discover the delights of punch needle embroidery in this gorgeous practical book, with France's favorite embroiderer and crafter, Marie Suarez.

Punch needle embroidery is a traditional technique that came out of the US in the 19th century and is similar to rug hooking. A strand of thread is pushed through loose-weave fabric, making a 'loop' on the other side. Repeated several times, this simple action creates a stunning, decorative, tactile design.

Starting with the key materials and equipment you'll need, as well as the basic punch-needle stitches and techniques, go straight into making the 20 charming projects inside - including flower-adorned pillows, pretty wall hangings and stylish bags!

All the projects are accompanied by beautiful photographs, diagrams to help you work out what to stitch first, and templates for you to trace off for quick-and-easy needle punching.

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Runner's World Run Less Run Faster

Bill Pierce

The groundbreaking plan that helps runners of all levels to improve their race times while actually training less--now fully revised and updated for today's runners

In today's busy, fast-paced world, all runners have the same objective: to run the best they can with the limited amount of time at their disposal. Bill Pierce and Scott Murr made that goal possible with their revolutionary FIRST (Furman Institute of Running and Scientific Training) training program. FIRST's unique training philosophy makes running easier and more accessible, limits overtraining and burnout, and substantially cuts the risk of injury while producing faster race times. The key feature of the detailed training plans for 5k, 10k, half-marathon, and marathon is the 3PLUS2 program, which consists of:

- 3 quality runs, including track repeats, the tempo run, and the long run, which are designed to improve endurance, lactate-threshold running pace, and leg speed
- 2 aerobic cross-training workouts, such as swimming, rowing, or pedaling a stationary bike, which are designed to improve endurance while helping to avoid burnout

With tips for goal-setting, recovery, injury rehab and prevention, strength training, and nutrition, Run Less, Run Faster has changed the way runners think about and train for competitive races. This revised third edition includes a new preface, training plans tailored to the new qualifying times for the Boston Marathon, new exercise photos, charts that will help runners adjust training practices to their elevation and climate, and updated nutritional recommendations.

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The Musical Human

Michael Spitzer

"Michael Spitzer has pulled off the impossible: a Guns, Germs and Steel for music." --Daniel Levitin

A colossal history spanning cultures, time, and space to explore the vibrant relationship between music and the human species.

165 million years ago saw the birth of rhythm.
66 million years ago was the first melody.
40 thousand years ago Homo sapiens created the first musical instrument.

Today music fills our lives. How we have created, performed and listened to this music throughout history has defined what our species is and how we understand who we are. Yet music is an overlooked part of our origin story. The Musical Human takes us on an exhilarating journey across the ages – from Bach to BTS and back – to explore the vibrant relationship between music and the human species. With insights from a wealth of disciplines, world-leading musicologist Michael Spitzer renders a global history of music on the widest possible canvas, looking at music in our everyday lives; music in world history; and music in evolution, from insects to apes, humans to AI. Through this journey we begin to understand how music is central to the distinctly human experiences of cognition, feeling and even biology, both widening and closing the evolutionary gaps between ourselves and animals in surprising ways.

The Musical Human boldly puts the case that music is the most important thing we ever did; it is a fundamental part of what makes us human.

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Light in the Dark

David Thomson

In little more than a century of cinema - Birth of a Nation was one hundred years old in 2015 - our sense of what a film director is, or should be, has shifted in fascinating ways. A director was once a functionary; then an important but not decisive part of an industrial process; then accepted as the person who was and should be in charge, because he was an artist and a hero. But the world has changed. In a nutshell, the change takes the form of a question: Who directed The Sopranos or Homeland? Hardly anyone knows, because we don't tend to read TV credits and the director has returned to a more subservient and anonymous role. Directors now try to be efficient, the deliverers of profitable films, and are often involved as producers, like Steven Spielberg.David Thomson's brilliant A LIGHT IN THE DARK personalises each chapter through an individual: Jean Renoir, Howard Hawks, Jean-Luc Godard, Alfred Hitchcock, Luis Bunuel, Orson Welles, Fritz Lang, Jane Campion, Stephen Frears and Quentin Tarantino. Through these characters (and other directors not mentioned here), David Thomson relates an imaginative new history of a medium that has changed the world.

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Atlas of a Lost World

Craig Childs

In Atlas of a Lost World, Craig Childs upends our notions of where these people came from and who they were. How they got here, persevered, and ultimately thrived is a story that resonates from the Pleistocene to our modern era. The lower sea levels of the Ice Age exposed a vast land bridge between Asia and North America, but the land bridge was not the only way across. Different people arrived from different directions, and not all at the same time. The first explorers of the New World were few, their encampments fleeting. The continent they reached had no people but was inhabited by megafauna-mastodons, giant bears, mammoths, saber-toothed cats, five-hundred-pound panthers, enormous bison, and sloths that stood one story tall. The first people were hunters-Paleolithic spear points are still encrusted with the proteins of their prey-but they were wildly outnumbered and many would themselves have been prey to the much larger animals. Atlas of a Lost World chronicles the last millennia of the Ice Age, the violent oscillations and retreat of glaciers, the clues and traces that document the first encounters of early humans, and the animals whose presence governed the humans' chances for survival. A blend of science and personal narrative reveals how much has changed since the time of mammoth hunters, and how little. Across unexplored landscapes yet to be peopled, readers will see the Ice Age, and their own age, in a whole new light.

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Bee People and the Bugs They Love

Frank Mortimer

"A successful and funny book that is sure to swell the ranks of the world's beekeepers."
--New York Times

A fascinating foray into the obsessions, friendships, scientific curiosity, misfortunes and rewards of suburban beekeeping--through the eyes of a Master Beekeeper . . .

Who wants to keep bees? And why? For the answers, Master Beekeeper Frank Mortimer invites readers on an eye-opening journey into the secret world of bees, and the singular world of his fellow bee-keepers. There's the Badger, who introduces Frank to the world of bees; Rusty, a one-eyed septuagenarian bee sting therapist certain that honey will be the currency of the future after the governments fail; Scooby the "dude" who gets a meditative high off the awesome vibes of his psychedelia-painted hives; and the Berserker, a honeybee hitman who teaches Frank a rafter-raising lesson in staving off the harmful influences of an evil queen: "Squash her, mash her, kill, kill, kill!"

Frank also crosses paths with those he calls the Surgeons (precise and protected), the Cowboys (improvisational and unguarded) and the Poseurs, ex-corporate cogs, YouTube-informed and ill-prepared for the stinging reality of their new lives. In connecting with this club of disparate but kindred spirits, Frank discovers the centuries-old history of the trade; the practicality of maintaining it; what bees see, think, and feel (emotionless but sometimes a little defensive); how they talk to each other and socialize; and what can be done to combat their biggest threats, both human (anti-apiarist extremists) and mite (the Varroa Destructor).

With a swarm of offbeat characters and fascinating facts (did that bee just waggle or festoon?), Frank the Bee Man delivers an informative, funny, and galvanizing book about the symbiotic relationship between flower and bee, and bee and the beekeepers who are determined to protect the existence of one of the most beguiling and invaluable creatures on earth.

"A very entertaining book."
--American Bee Journal


"A playful storyteller... A compelling memoir."
--Foreword Reviews


"A useful how-to guide as well as an affectionate ode to nature's pollinators and honey makers."
--Publishers Weekly


"This book includes great humor and a use of allegory that reveals tremendous background knowledge."
--San Francisco Book Review


"Frank's personal stories of his beekeeping journey are entertaining, well written, and will quickly have you happily lost in the world of bees."
--Paleo Magazine


Bee People and the Bugs They Love is the bee's knees and getting a ton of buzz. Bee smart, people, and read this un-BEE-lievably interesting look at the quirky world of beekeeping.
--Harlan Coben, #1 New York Times bestselling author

"A delightful portrayal for non-beekeepers of what life is like for those of us who are always thinking about bees."
--Tom Seeley, author of The Lives of Bees


"A fun and exciting tale of the wonder-filled world of beginner beekeeping."
--Noah Wilson-Rich, author of Bee: A Natural History, and CEO and partner The Best Bees Company

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Brave Green World

Chris Forman

How we can harness cutting-edge biology and manufacturing to fight waste and pollution.

In Nature, there is little chemical waste; nearly every atom is a resource to be utilized by organisms, ensuring that all the available matter remains in a perpetual cycle. By contrast, human systems of energy production and manufacturing are linear; the end product is waste. In Brave Green World, Chris Forman and Claire Asher show what our linear systems can learn from the efficient circularity of ecosystems. They offer an unblinkered yet realistic and positive vision of a future in which we can combine biology and manufacturing to solve our central problems of waste and pollution.

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Into the Deep

Robert D. Ballard

The legendary explorer of Titanic and Lusitania looks back on his life behind his famous exploits and unveils a major new discovery on the occasion of the 35th anniversary of the Titanic find.

Best known for finding the wreck of the Titanic, celebrated adventurer Robert Ballard has a lifetime of stories about exploring the ocean depths. From discovering new extremophile life-forms thriving at 750°F hydrothermal vents in 1977 to finding famous shipwrecks including the Bismarck and PT 109, Ballard has made history. Now the captain of E/V Nautilus, a state-of-the-art scientific exploration vessel rigged for research in oceanography, geology, biology, and archaeology,leads young scientists as they map the ocean floor, collect artifacts from ancient shipwrecks, and relay live-time adventures from remote-controlled submersibles to reveal amazing sea life. For the first time, Robert Ballard gets personal, telling the inside stories of his adventures and challenges as a midwestern kid with dyslexia who became an internationally renowned ocean explorer. Here is the definitive story of the danger and discovery, conflict and triumph that make up his remarkable life.

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Ida B. the Queen

Michelle Duster

Journalist. Suffragist. Antilynching crusader. In 1862, Ida B. Wells was born enslaved in Holly Springs, Mississippi. In 2020, she won a Pulitzer Prize.

Ida B. Wells committed herself to the needs of those who did not have power. In the eyes of the FBI, this made her a “dangerous negro agitator.” In the annals of history, it makes her an icon.

Ida B. the Queen tells the awe-inspiring story of an pioneering woman who was often overlooked and underestimated—a woman who refused to exit a train car meant for white passengers; a woman brought to light the horrors of lynching in America; a woman who cofounded the NAACP. Written by Wells’s great-granddaughter Michelle Duster, this “warm remembrance of a civil rights icon” (Kirkus Reviews) is a unique visual celebration of Wells’s life, and of the Black experience.

A century after her death, Wells’s genius is being celebrated in popular culture by politicians, through song, public artwork, and landmarks. Like her contemporaries Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony, Wells left an indelible mark on history—one that can still be felt today. As America confronts the unfinished business of systemic racism, Ida B. the Queen pays tribute to a transformational leader and reminds us of the power we all hold to smash the status quo.

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Mixed Plate

Jo Koy

A stunning, hilarious memoir from beloved comedian Jo Koy, "far and away one of the funniest people out there" (Chelsea Handler). Mixed Plate illuminates the burning drive and unique humor that make Jo Koy one of today's most successful comedians. Includes never-before-seen photos.

Well guys, here it is--my story. A funny, sad, at times pathetic but also kick-ass tale of how a half-Filipino, half-white kid whose mom thought (and still thinks) his career goal was to become a clown became a success. Not an overnight success, because that would have made for a really short read, but an All-American success who could give my immigrant mom the kind of life she hoped for when she came to this country, and my son the kind of life I wished I'd had as a kid. With all the details of what it felt like to get the doors closed in my face, to grind it out on the road with my arsenal of dick jokes, and how my career finally took off once I embraced the craziness of my family, which I always thought was uniquely Filipino but turns out is as universal as it gets.

In this book, I'll take you behind the mic, behind the curtain--OK, way behind it. From growing up with a mom who made me dance like Michael Jackson at the Knights of Columbus, to some real dark stuff, the stuff we don't talk about often enough as immigrants. Mental health, poverty, drinking. And show you the path to my American Dream. Which was paved with a lot of failure, department store raffle tickets to win free color televisions, bad jokes, old VHS tapes, a motorcycle my mom probably still hates, the only college final I aced (wasn't math), and getting my first laugh on stage. There's photo evidence of it all here, too.

In this book, I get serious about my funny. And I want to make you laugh a little while I do it. I'm like Hawaii's favorite lunch--the mixed plate. Little bit of this, a little bit of that. My book Mixed Plate is too.

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Think Like a Breadwinner

Jennifer Barrett

A new kind of manifesto for the working woman, with tips on building wealth and finding balance, as well as inspiration for harnessing the freedom and power that comes from a breadwinning mindset.

Nearly half of working women in the United States are now their household's main breadwinner. And yet, the majority of women still aren't being brought up to think like breadwinners. In fact, they're actually discouraged--by institutional bias and subconscious beliefs--from building their own wealth, pursuing their full earning potential, and providing for themselves and others financially. The result is that women earn less, owe more, and have significantly less money saved and invested for the future than men do. And if women do end up the main breadwinners, they've been conditioned to feel reluctant and unprepared to manage the role.

In Think Like a Breadwinner, financial expert Jennifer Barrett reframes what it really means to be a breadwinner. By dismantling the narrative that women don't--and shouldn't--take full financial responsibility to create the lives they want, she reveals not only the importance of women building their own wealth, but also the freedom and power that comes with it. With concrete practical tools, as well as examples from her own journey, Barrett encourages women to reclaim, rejoice in, and aspire to the role of breadwinner like never before.

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Resetting the Table

Robert Paarlberg

A bold, science-based corrective to the groundswell of misinformation about food and how it's produced, examining in detail local and organic food, food companies, nutrition labeling, ethical treatment of animals, environmental impact, and every other aspect from farm to table

Consumers want to know more about their food--including the farm from which it came, the chemicals used in its production, its nutritional value, how the animals were treated, and the costs to the environment. They are being told that buying organic foods, unprocessed and sourced from small local farms, is the most healthful and sustainable option. Now, Robert Paarlberg reviews the evidence and finds abundant reason to disagree. He delineates the ways in which global food markets have in fact improved our diet, and how "industrial" farming has recently turned green, thanks to GPS-guided precision methods that cut energy use and chemical pollution. He makes clear that America's serious obesity crisis does not come from farms, or from food deserts, but instead from "food swamps" created by food companies, retailers, and restaurant chains. And he explains how, though animal welfare is lagging behind, progress can be made through continued advocacy, more progressive regulations, and perhaps plant-based imitation meat. He finds solutions that can make sense for farmers and consumers alike and provides a road map through the rapidly changing worlds of food and farming, laying out a practical path to bring the two together.

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Don't Go Broke in Retirement

Steve Vernon

Make Smart Choices with Your Social Security and Savings!

Are you thinking about retiring soon, or have you recently retired? Don't Go Broke in Retirement, the latest in a series of acclaimed books by trusted retirement expert Steve Vernon, gets right to the point and shares an easy-to-follow, three-step plan that helps you answer these critical questions:

  • Have you saved enough money to retire?
  • When should you start your Social Security benefits?
  • What's the best way to build lifetime income that's protected from financial crises?
  • What living expenses should you reduce to make retirement more affordable?

Based on the "Spend Safely in Retirement Strategy," the plan was developed from new research by the Stanford Center on Longevity and the Society of Actuaries. Learn why this strategy has garnered national attention and discover how the recent financial turmoil successfully stress-tested this plan, proving its effectiveness for managing retirement funds.

Don't Go Broke in Retirement provides the information and tools you need to generate the most retirement income from your Social Security benefits and retirement savings, including:

  • A simple, step-by-step checklist to help you put your plans into action
  • Modifications to personalize the strategy for your goals and circumstances
  • Access to bonus chapters to help you apply the strategies outlined in the book, including investing in retirement, navigating tax rules, and finding professional help with retirement funding strategies
  • A list of helpful resources and research to learn more

Don't worry about your retirement! Instead, develop solid financial strategies so you can confidently enjoy your retirement years.

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One Decision

Mike Bayer

A New York Times Bestseller

From Dr. Phil show regular and author of the New York Times bestselling Best Self: Be You, Only Better, a plan for taking immediate steps to improving your life

Foreword by Dr. Phil McGraw

It is estimated that we make 35,000 decisions every day. Right now, at least one decision we make will have a powerful ripple effect across all aspects of our life. But One Decision isn't about taking one overwhelming big step; it's about starting with a single, important choice we can make every day: the decision to be authentic. It is the decision to know who you are, to be who you are, and express yourself authentically.

Whether you find yourself up against a new challenge, deciding on a change in direction, or in need of a total reinvention, Coach Mike has created a powerful blueprint to help you connect with your authenticity so that your life reflects who you truly are. With the tools in this book, you can transform what the obstacles in your life into new opportunities. He shows you how to stop constantly over-thinking the big decisions and reconnect with your gut instincts and make all of your decisions with confidence and peace of mind. And, this book helps you navigate the forces that routinely drive your decision making, ensuring that you're motivated by facts instead of fears, clarity over confusion, and evidence over emotion.

One Decision is an inspiring and practical action plan to help you improve your life, find your purpose, improve your mental health and relationships, work on your physical health, and even make more money. Drawing on twenty years of experience helping individuals from all walks of life make real and lasting change, Coach Mike has a refreshing approach for motivating you to take a risk, be bold, and take real action toward a better life.

A PENGUIN LIFE TITLE

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When Nietzsche Wept

Irvin D. Yalom

In nineteenth-century Vienna, a drama of love, fate, and will is played out amid the intellectual ferment that defined the era. Josef Breuer, one of the founding fathers of psychoanalysis, is at the height of his career. Friedrich Nietzsche, Europe's greatest philosopher, is on the brink of suicidal despair, unable to find a cure for the headaches and other ailments that plague him.

When he agrees to treat Nietzsche with his experimental “talking cure,” Breuer never expects that he too will find solace in their sessions. Only through facing his own inner demons can the gifted healer begin to help his patient. In When Nietzsche Wept, Irvin Yalom blends fact and fiction, atmosphere and suspense, to unfold an unforgettable story about the redemptive power of friendship.

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This Book Will Make You Kinder

Henry James Garrett

From the creator of Drawings of Dogs, a warmly illustrated and thoughtful examination of empathy and the necessity of being kinder

The kindness we owe one another goes far beyond the everyday gestures of feeding someone else's parking meter--although it's important not to downplay those small acts. Kindness can also mean much more. In this timely, insightful guide, Henry James Garrett lays out the case for developing a strong, courageous, moral kindness, one that will help you fight cruelty and make the world a more empathetic place.

So, how could a book possibly make you kinder? It would need to answer two questions:

* Why are you kind at all? and,
* Why aren't you kinder?

In these pages, building on his academic studies in metaethics and using his signature-sweet animal cartoons, Henry James Garrett sets out to do just that, exploring the sources and the limitations of human empathy and the many ways, big and small, that we can work toward being our best and kindest selves for the people around us and the society we need to build.

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My Houseplant Changed My Life

David Domoney

Use the power of houseplants to protect you from the pollution and stresses of modern life.

Everyday products pollute the air in our homes, and our mental wellbeing is threatened like never before - but help is at hand from the humble houseplant!

Drawing on groundbreaking scientific research, this book reveals the 50 most life-enhancing houseplants and shows how they can actively purify the air, and improve your mental wellbeing through their color, scent, habit, and nurturing needs.

Build a thriving collection of houseplants to create a detoxifying, re-energizing environment in the home, full of opportunities for mindfulness.

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SAM

Jonathan Waldman

A true story of innovation, centered on a scrappy team of engineers—far from the Silicon Valley limelight—and their quest to achieve a surprisingly difficult technological feat: building a robot that can lay bricks.

Humans have landed men on the moon, programmed cars to drive themselves, and put the knowledge of our entire civilization in your back pocket. But no one—from MIT nerds to Army Corps engineers—has ever built a robot that can lay bricks as well as a mason. Unlike the controlled conditions of a factory line, where robots are now ubiquitous, no two construction sites are alike, and a day’s work involves countless variables—bricks that range in size and quality, temperamental mortar mixes, uneven terrain, fickle weather, and moody foremen.

Twenty-five years ago, on a challenging construction job in Syracuse, architect Nate Podkaminer had a vision of a future full of efficient, automated machines that freed men from the repetitive, toilsome burden of laying bricks. (Bricklayers lift the equivalent of a Ford truck every few days.) Offhandedly, he mentioned the idea to his daughter’s boyfriend, and after some inspired scheming, the architect and engineer—soon to be in-laws—cofounded a humble start-up called Construction Robotics. Working out of a small trailer, they recruited a boldly unconventional team of engineers to build the Semi-Automated Mason: SAM. In classic American tradition, a small, unlikely, and eccentric family-run start-up sought to reimagine the behemoth $1 trillion construction industry—the second biggest industry in America—in bootstrap fashion.

In the tradition of Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine, SAM unfolds as an engineering drama, full of trials and setbacks, heated showdowns between meticulous scientists and brash bricklayers (and their even more opinionated union), and hard-earned milestone achievements. Jonathan Waldman, acclaimed author of Rust, brings readers inside the world of the renegade company revolutionizing the most traditional trade.

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Liftoff

Eric Berger

This is as important a book on space as has ever been written and it's a riveting page-turner, too. --Homer Hickam, #1 New York Times Bestselling Author of Rocket Boys

The dramatic inside story of the historic flights that launched SpaceX--and Elon Musk--from a shaky startup into the world's leading-edge rocket company

SpaceX has enjoyed a miraculous decade. Less than 20 years after its founding, it boasts the largest constellation of commercial satellites in orbit, has pioneered reusable rockets, and in 2020 became the first private company to launch human beings into orbit. Half a century after the space race it is private companies, led by SpaceX, standing alongside NASA pushing forward into the cosmos, and laying the foundation for our exploration of other worlds.

But before it became one of the most powerful players in the aerospace industry, SpaceX was a fledgling startup, scrambling to develop a single workable rocket before the money ran dry. The engineering challenge was immense; numerous other private companies had failed similar attempts. And even if SpaceX succeeded, they would then have to compete for government contracts with titans such as Lockheed Martin and Boeing, who had tens of thousands of employees and tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue. SpaceX had fewer than 200 employees and the relative pittance of $100 million in the bank.

In Liftoff, Eric Berger, senior space editor at Ars Technica, takes readers inside the wild early days that made SpaceX. Focusing on the company's first four launches of the Falcon 1 rocket, he charts the bumpy journey from scrappy underdog to aerospace pioneer. We travel from company headquarters in El Segundo, to the isolated Texas ranchland where they performed engine tests, to Kwajalein, the tiny atoll in the Pacific where SpaceX launched the Falcon 1. Berger has reported on SpaceX for more than a decade, enjoying unparalleled journalistic access to the company's inner workings. Liftoff is the culmination of these efforts, drawing upon exclusive interviews with dozens of former and current engineers, designers, mechanics, and executives, including Elon Musk. The enigmatic Musk, who founded the company with the dream of one day settling Mars, is the fuel that propels the book, with his daring vision for the future of space.

Filled with never-before-told stories of SpaceX's turbulent beginning, Liftoff is a saga of cosmic proportions.

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When Your Child Has a Chronic Medical Illness

Frank J. Sileo

Written by leading mental health professionals, this warm and accessible parenting book for children with chronic illnesses offers clear, practical guidance for all aspects of the journey. It is recommended by professionals at the American Diabetes Association, Invisible Disabilities Association, the Crohn's Colitis Foundation, and other expert national and regional sources.

For all its joys, parenting is a complex job, and when your child has a chronic illness, the stress can feel overwhelming. When your child is diagnosed, you begin a parenting journey filled with strong emotions, difficult choices, confusing words, and interactions with numerous professionals and specialists.

You're focused on ensuring your child gets the best possible treatments for their symptoms, so it's easy to overlook or dismiss the impact the illness can have on your relationships and emotions. This book places your psychological well-being front and center, so you can be the best caregiver possible for your child.

Along with suggestions for making laughter and mindfulness part of your daily self-care routine, it offers guidance for choosing the right therapist for your family, should extra support be needed. Every family's journey with chronic illness is unique, but you don't have to go it alone.

"This is an outstanding book that addresses the challenges of chronic disease in children from multiple viewpoints with a great deal of practical knowledge. Given that Diabetes is one of the most common chronic diseases of childhood, this work will serve to guide families in navigating the sometimes challenging journey to ensure the best possible outcomes for all."--Robert Gabbay, MD, PhD, Chief Scientific and Medical Officer for the American Diabetes Association

"The journey with a chronic illness can be overwhelming, and often calls for education, support, and self-empowerment. Parents and caregivers of children with chronic diseases often take on the critical role of preparing their children for the journey toward, and often extending into, adulthood. Every parent wants to ensure that their child is well-equipped to manage their own care when that time comes. The Crohn's & Colitis Foundation recognizes this guide's value in helping parents along this challenging road. The journey for every child is different, and having a chronic illness adds another layer of complication. This book is a great resource to help families manage mental health, school accommodations, social activities, medical management, and everyday experiences for all with a chronic illness. Parents will appreciate the depth of information offered by this book, and it can serve as a helpful guide in preparing for the journey they will tread together with their children."--Crohn's and Colitis Foundation

"Dr. Sileo and Carol Potter's book is a heartfelt and transparent look at the emotional journey as a parent and full-time caregiver for a child with chronic illness. Frank offers practical advice and personal insight from the experience of dealing with his own invisible disabilities diagnosed in his early twenties. Carol offers her experience with caregiving for her husband who had terminal cancer. The authors provide wisdom and tangible guidance for managing this emotional roller coaster caring for a child that will help anyone dealing with these situations. Their tips and wise counsel for accepting the "new normal" and having a PLAN (Putting Life into Action Now!) are life-giving, as well as their advice for speaking up ("If you don't ask, you don't get") for keeping your engine running along with your health and welfare. This book is a "must-have" for parents in a caregiving role for a child with chronic illness and pain or any disability."--Jess Stainbrook, Executive Director - Invisible Disabilities(R) Association

"When your child is diagnosed with a chronic illness like type 1 diabetes as happened in our family, your world stops. You must learn life sustaining care for your child from people who have spent years, if not decades, learning and practicing their medical skills that you have days, perhaps weeks, to master. This can be overwhelming as the days lead to months and then to years. When Your Child Has a Chronic Medical Illness, written by Dr. Frank Sileo and Carol Potter, MFT and published by the American Psychological Association, is a comprehensive guide to help parents in their journey as they embark upon a life different from what they had expected. This book is extremely thorough, and you will find advice, guidance, and comfort regardless of your family's situation. Among the nearly 400 pages, one sentence stands out: "The clearer your vision of your child thriving with their chronic illness is, the more likely you will be to take action to help them get there." This is the essence of the role of a parent of a child with a chronic illness, and with the help of Sileo and Potter, you will learn to focus on your family and not on the illness to give your child, and your family, the best life possible." --Jeff Hitchcock, President, Children with Diabetes

"As a physician, I have often been in the position of delivering the diagnosis of a child's chronic illness to their parents and family members. While this can be a regular part of my work, it never leaves my thoughts that this news has changed the course of a family's life. In those moments, I often wish I could provide them with support and resources beyond just medical care. This lovely and poignant text by Dr Frank Sileo and Carol Potter, MFT does just that, and I will be using it as a reference for patient's and their families as I develop my practice for years to come. I am so grateful for the attention and support they have brought to this issue." --Miriam E. Goldblum, MD, Psychiatry resident, Weill Cornell Medicine/New York Presbyterian Hospital

"Authors Sileo and Potter bring parents a timely road map for how to navigate raising a child with a chronic illness. The book is jam-packed with practical information and guidance about a variety of topics that affect ill children and the families that care for them--everything from coping with hospitalization to schooling, and even taking a vacation. The authors translate medical and educational concepts into layperson's terms, making the information highly accessible and understandable. Praises for a much needed book that takes a holistic approach to a lifelong parenting experience, addressing the needs of heart, body, mind and soul for the whole family."--Deborah Vilas, MS, CCLS, LMSW

"Dr. Frank Sileo and Carol Potter, MFT have created an instrumental guide for parents caring for a child with a chronic medical illness. Within the challenges and complexities of the healthcare journey, parents learn the importance of taking time to reflect, connect, and honor their feelings with a sense of hope and support. This book provides an opportunity to recognize your capacity for self-care and self-compassion, choose renewing emotions, and create a plan to greet the challenges before you with a new perspective of possibilities. Tools and techniques to nurturing your mind, body, and spirit are shared to promote a shift towards greater resiliency. Taking small steps to improve sleep, nutrition, and activity will profoundly impact feelings of purpose and well-being, moving beyond your ability to cope and create a pathway to thrive." --Kelly Briggs, RN, NE-BC, HNB-BC, RYT-500 is the director of Integrative Health & Medicine at Hackensack Meridian Health Network.

"This book is an essential resource for families living the daily obstacles and uncertainties of caring for their child with a chronic medical illness. With sheer compassion and a desire to help, the authors bring hope as well as effective techniques to navigate through the day to day challenges. Along with practical advice for everyday living, readers are empowered to understand and uncover their own personal needs, desires, beliefs, attitudes and feelings. The physical and emotional well-being of the caregiver is often sidelined or simply forgotten when addressing the care of a child. Sileo and Potter not only bring this to the forefront, but they provide resources and tools such as mindfulness, spirituality and humor to nurture the caregiver. This book provides a well-rounded approach to caring, parenting and loving your child with a chronic medical illness." --Allison Morgan MA, OTR, E-RYT- Founder of Zensational Kids


"An extremely informative guide on navigating pediatric chronic illness for anyone involved in a child's care, from parents and teachers to medical practitioners. This comprehensive book provides an insightful perspective on the emotional and logistical challenges for families in navigating chronic illness from diagnosis through treatment and beyond. Frank and Carol's personal and professional experiences provide a deeper appreciation for the many aspects and impacts of chronic illness, and enable me to be a more compassionate practitioner with children and their families when I am lucky enough to be involved in their continuum of care. A truly impressive resource that will become a staple on my bookshelf." --Julia S. Buckley, MS RDN; owner, Julia S. Buckley Nutrition

"Dr. Frank Sileo and Carol Potter have inspired me with their new book. This book is crucial for parents as well as to all of those involved in caring for or knowing someone with a chronic medical illness. Dr. Sileo and Ms. Potter walk the reader through the "journey" of navigating the life of a parent of a child with a chronic illness. As an adult child with a chronic illness, I wish this book had been around to help my parents in our journey. As a professional, I will utilize this book to help my clients navigate their own journeys." --Lisa B. D'Acierno, LCSW, Founder and Director of D'Acierno and Associates Psychotherapy

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My House Is Killing Me!

Jeffrey C. May

In this thoroughly revised edition of My House Is Killing Me! Jeffrey C. and Connie L. May draw on the dramatic personal stories of their clients to help readers understand the links between indoor environmental conditions and human health. Explaining how air conditioning, finished basements, and other home features affect indoor air quality, the authors offer a step-by-step approach to identifying, controlling, and even eliminating the sources of indoor pollutants and allergens. This new edition includes

• more than 60 color photographs
• expanded coverage on the dangers posed by volatile organic compounds (VOCs) produced by such common items as paint, carpet, and household cleaning products
• up-to-date information on the potential risks of installing spray polyurethane foam (SPF) insulation
• completely new case studies of people who improved their indoor air quality by following the authors' advice
• brand-new chapters, including " 'Trojan Horse' Allergens," "The Three Ps—Pets, Pests, and People," "Indoor Air Quality in Multi-Unit Buildings," and "Testing and Remediation."

Reading My House Is Killing Me! lets you see your house the way an expert would. Along with offering a wealth of practical advice and proven solutions for various problems, the Mays include a glossary of terms and a list of valuable resources. This book is a must for all home occupants as well as perfect for those contemplating moving to or purchasing a property.

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The Food of Oaxaca

Alejandro Ruiz

A groundbreaking cookbook celebrating the distinctive cuisine and culture of Oaxaca, from one of Mexico's most revered chefs. With a foreword by Enrique Olvera.

In The Food of Oaxaca, chef Alejandro Ruiz introduces home cooks to the vibrant foods of his home state--"the culinary capital of Mexico" (CNN)--with fifty recipes both ancestral and original. Divided into three parts, the book covers the traditional dishes of the region, the cuisine of the Oaxacan coast, and the food he serves today at his acclaimed restaurant, Casa Oaxaca. Here are rustic recipes for making your own tortillas, and for preparing memelas, tamales, and moles, as well as Ruiz's own creations, such as Duck Tacos with Coloradito; Jicama Tacos; Shrimp, Nopal, Fava Bean, and Pea Soup; Catch of the Day with Tomato Marmalade; and Oaxacan Chocolate Mousse. Interspersed are thoughtful essays on dishes, ingredients, kitchen tools, and local traditions that transport the reader to Oaxaca, along with an extensive glossary to help American readers understand the culinary culture of Mexico. Also included are recommendations for the best places to eat in Oaxaca, making this an indispensable volume for home cooks and travelers alike.

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Oasis

iO Tillett Wright

Welcome to the desert. Welcome home. This visually stunning tour of the world’s most amazing desert homes will inspire you to create an oasis with “desert vibes” wherever you are. 

Creatives are drawn in by the extreme landscapes and limited resources of the desert; in fact, they’re inspired by them, and the homes they’ve built here prove the power of an oasis. From renovated Airstreams to sprawling, modern stucco, desert has become the new beachfront.

In Oasis, artist iO Tillett Wright captures the best of this specific culture that emphasizes living simply, beautifully, and in connection with the earth. He highlights the homes that define this desert mindset, featuring the classics like Georgia O’Keefe’s in Abiquiu, New Mexico, alongside more modern homes such as Michael Barnard’s Solar House in Marfa, Texas. With Casey Dunn’s stunning photography, Oasis will transport you to these relaxing refuges, where you’ll learn what elements create the balance of intentionality, ease, style, and function that these homes exude.

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The New York Times Cooking No-Recipe Recipes

Sam Sifton

The debut cookbook from the popular New York Times website and mobile app NYT Cooking, featuring 100 vividly photographed No Recipe Recipes to make weeknight cooking more inspired and delicious.

Sam Sifton, an assistant managing editor of The New York Times and founding editor of NYT Cooking, has inspired millions of home cooks with his informal, improvisational No Recipe Recipes, published in his beloved regular newsletter, "What to Cook." Sifton's argument is a simple one: Cooking without a recipe is a kitchen skill every home cook can develop, it's easier than you think, and it's a way to make nightly cooking more satisfying and fun.

Now NYT Cooking is making it truly easy for all home cooks to build their intuitive cooking confidence with a stylish, compact handbook of 100 no-recipe-required meals, each photographed and described beautifully and laid out with minimal suggestions of ingredients and approximate amounts, like a "glug" and a "fistful." With dishes like Weeknight Fried Rice, Fettuccine with Minted Ricotta, and Smothered Pork Chops with Onions and Sautéed Greens, this handy volume brings the brilliance of NYT Cooking's unfussy, delicious, improvisational approach to the dinner table night after night.

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Simplicity at Home

Yumiko Sekine

A gorgeous guide to creating a beautiful, comfortable home based on Japanese traditions from the founder of the beloved lifestyle brand Fog Linen Work.

For anyone who dreams of a home filled with well-organized closets, eye-catching flower arrangements, perfectly draped blankets, and thoughtfully curated shelves, here is a guide to cultivating an elegant home.

Yumiko Sekine, founder of the internationally celebrated lifestyle brand Fog Linen Work, shares lovely rituals and simple techniques based on Japanese traditions, including practices for decorating, organizing, preparing food, and more. From the kitchen to the bedroom and every space in between, here are tips for refreshing a home each season--arranging and displaying fresh flowers in spring, choosing the right sheets and linens for summer, taking warm herbal baths in autumn, and draping blankets and layering rugs to cozy up a space for winter. Brimming with easy-to-follow tips for elevating any space and packed with hundreds of photographs showcasing gorgeous interiors, this book is an invitation to create a home that nourishes, rejuvenates, and inspires--all year long.

- CELEBRATED AUTHOR: Yumiko Sekine is the founder of Fog Linen Work, a Japanese home goods brand sold throughout the world and beloved by home cooks, interior decorators, and design enthusiasts. Her products are known for their simplicity, beauty, and ability to elevate any space. In this book, Sekine distills all her secrets to creating a home that exudes simple elegance.
- ORGANIZATION MADE EASY: This book gives readers easy, elegant ways to declutter their homes and organize their belongings, whether they live in an apartment or house, and includes simple tips for tidying and curating objects to bring order and simplicity to every room.
- JAPANESE TRADITIONS: Yumiko presents Japanese traditions for preparing food, arranging flowers, entertaining, organizing, and more. The combination of ancient practices and modern techniques makes this the perfect companion for anyone curious about Japanese culture and aesthetics.
- GIFT WORTHY: Presented in a linen-wrapped case and brimming with hundreds of gorgeous photographs and inspired advice for every home, this book is a perfect addition to any bookshelf and a lovely gift for new homeowners, newlyweds, and fans of organization and interior design.

Perfect for:

- Interior designers, minimalists, and fans of sustainability
- People who are into organizing their space
- Fans of Fog Linen Work

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And Now I Spill the Family Secrets

Margaret Kimball

In the spirit of Alison Bechdel's Fun Home and Roz Chast's Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, Margaret Kimball's AND NOW I SPILL THE FAMILY SECRETS begins in the aftermath of a tragedy.

In 1988, when Kimball is only four years old, her mother attempts suicide on Mother's Day--and this becomes one of many things Kimball's family never speaks about. As she searches for answers nearly thirty years later, Kimball embarks on a thrilling visual journey into the secrets her family has kept for decades.

 

 

Using old diary entries, hospital records, home videos, and other archives, Margaret pieces together a narrative map of her childhood--her mother's bipolar disorder, her grandmother's institutionalization, and her brother's increasing struggles--in an attempt to understand what no one likes to talk about: the fractures in her family.

 

Both a coming-of-age story about family dysfunction and a reflection on mental health, AND NOW I SPILL THE FAMILY SECRETS is funny, poignant, and deeply inspiring in its portrayal of what drives a family apart and what keeps them together.

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Our Team

Luke Epplin

The riveting story of four menLarry Doby, Bill Veeck, Bob Feller, and Satchel Paigewhose improbable union on the Cleveland Indians in the late 1940s would shape the immediate postwar era of Major League Baseball and beyond.

In July 1947, not even three months after Jackie Robinson debuted on the Brooklyn Dodgers, snapping the color line that had segregated Major League Baseball, Larry Doby would follow in his footsteps on the Cleveland Indians. Though Doby, as the second Black player in the majors, would struggle during his first summer in Cleveland, his subsequent turnaround in 1948 from benchwarmer to superstar sparked one of the wildest and most meaningful seasons in baseball history.

In intimate, absorbing detail, Luke Epplin's Our Team traces the story of the integration of the Cleveland Indians and their quest for a World Series title through four key participants: Bill Veeck, an eccentric and visionary owner adept at exploding fireworks on and off the field; Larry Doby, a soft-spoken, hard-hitting pioneer whose major-league breakthrough shattered stereotypes that so much of white America held about Black ballplayers; Bob Feller, a pitching prodigy from the Iowa cornfields who set the template for the athlete as businessman; and Satchel Paige, a legendary pitcher from the Negro Leagues whose belated entry into the majors whipped baseball fans across the country into a frenzy.

Together, as the backbone of a team that epitomized the postwar American spirit in all its hopes and contradictions, these four men would captivate the nation by storming to the World Series--all the while rewriting the rules of what was possible in sports.

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The Oak Park Studio of Frank Lloyd Wright

Lisa D. Schrenk

Between 1898 and 1909, Frank Lloyd Wright’s residential studio in the idyllic Chicago suburb of Oak Park served as a nontraditional work setting as he matured into a leader in his field and formulized his iconic design ideology. Here, architectural historian Lisa D. Schrenk breaks the myth of Wright as the lone genius and reveals new insights into his early career.

With a rich narrative voice and meticulous detail, Schrenk tracks the practice’s evolution: addressing how the studio fit into the Chicago-area design scene; identifying other architects working there and their contributions; and exploring how the suburban setting and the nearby presence of Wright’s family influenced office life. Built as an addition to his 1889 shingle-style home, Wright’s studio was a core site for the ideological development of the prairie house, one of the first truly American forms of residential architecture. Schrenk documents the educational atmosphere of Wright’s office in the context of his developing design ideology, revealing three phases as he transitioned from colleague to leader. This heavily illustrated book includes a detailed discussion of the physical changes Wright made to the building and how they informed his architectural thinking and educational practices. Schrenk also addresses the later transformations of the building, including into an art center in the 1930s, its restoration in the 1970s and 80s, and its current use as a historic house museum.

Based on significant original and archival research, including interviews with Wright’s family and others involved in the studio and 180 images, The Oak Park Studio of Frank Lloyd Wright offers the first comprehensive look at the early independent office of one of the world’s most influential architects.

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My Year Abroad

Chang-rae Lee

INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER

"A manifesto to happiness--the one found when you stop running from who you are." -New York Times Book Review

"An extraordinary book, acrobatic on the level of the sentence, symphonic across its many movements--and this is a book that moves...My Year Abroad is a wild ride--a caper, a romance, a bildungsroman, and something of a satire of how to get filthy rich in rising Asia." - Vogue

From the award-winning author of Native Speaker and On Such a Full Sea, an exuberant, provocative story about a young American life transformed by an unusual Asian adventure - and about the human capacities for pleasure, pain, and connection.

Tiller is an average American college student with a good heart but minimal aspirations. Pong Lou is a larger-than-life, wildly creative Chinese American entrepreneur who sees something intriguing in Tiller beyond his bored exterior and takes him under his wing. When Pong brings him along on a boisterous trip across Asia, Tiller is catapulted from ordinary young man to talented protégé, and pulled into a series of ever more extreme and eye-opening experiences that transform his view of the world, of Pong, and of himself.

In the breathtaking, "precise, elliptical prose" that Chang-rae Lee is known for (The New York Times), the narrative alternates between Tiller's outlandish, mind-boggling year with Pong and the strange, riveting, emotionally complex domestic life that follows it, as Tiller processes what happened to him abroad and what it means for his future. Rich with commentary on Western attitudes, Eastern stereotypes, capitalism, global trade, mental health, parenthood, mentorship, and more, My Year Abroad is also an exploration of the surprising effects of cultural immersion--on a young American in Asia, on a Chinese man in America, and on an unlikely couple hiding out in the suburbs. Tinged at once with humor and darkness, electric with its accumulating surprises and suspense, My Year Abroad is a novel that only Chang-rae Lee could have written, and one that will be read and discussed for years to come.

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The Iconic American House

Dominic Bradbury

Some of the world's greatest architects, including Walter Gropius, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, have used their talents to create groundbreaking innovations in American residential architecture over the past 120 years. Though wide-ranging in style, these houses share a remarkable sensitivity to site and context; appreciation of local materials; experimentation with form, materials, and technology; and understanding of clients' needs. Spanning the length and breadth of the United States, The Iconic American House features fifty of the most important, timeless, and recognizable houses designed since 1900.

With concise, informative text and fresh, vibrant illustrations, this book presents a lavish array of architectural masterpieces designed by architects such as Philip Johnson, Richard Neutra, Peter Eisenman, and Thomas Gluck. Specially commissioned and stunning photographs, floor plans, drawings, and architect biographies ensure that this book is perfect for students, professionals, design aficionados, and anyone who dreams of building a house of their own.

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Brave Green World

Chris Forman

How we can harness cutting-edge biology and manufacturing to fight waste and pollution.

In Nature, there is little chemical waste; nearly every atom is a resource to be utilized by organisms, ensuring that all the available matter remains in a perpetual cycle. By contrast, human systems of energy production and manufacturing are linear; the end product is waste. In Brave Green World, Chris Forman and Claire Asher show what our linear systems can learn from the efficient circularity of ecosystems. They offer an unblinkered yet realistic and positive vision of a future in which we can combine biology and manufacturing to solve our central problems of waste and pollution.

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Children Under Fire

John Woodrow Cox

One of The New York Times’ 16 New Books to Watch for in March

One of Publishers Weekly’s Most Anticipated Books of the Year

One of Newsweek’s Most Highly Anticipated Books of The Year

One of Buzzfeed’s Most Anticipated Books the Year

Based on the acclaimed series—a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize—an intimate account of the devastating effects of gun violence on our nation’s children, and a call to action for a new way forward

In 2017, seven-year-old Ava in South Carolina wrote a letter to Tyshaun, an eight-year-old boy from Washington, DC. She asked him to be her pen pal; Ava thought they could help each other. The kids had a tragic connection—both were traumatized by gun violence. Ava’s best friend had been killed in a campus shooting at her elementary school, and Tyshaun’s father had been shot to death outside of the boy’s elementary school. Ava’s and Tyshaun’s stories are extraordinary, but not unique. In the past decade, 15,000 children have been killed from gunfire, though that number does not account for the kids who weren’t shot and aren’t considered victims but have nevertheless been irreparably harmed by gun violence.

In Children Under Fire, John Woodrow Cox investigates the effectiveness of gun safety reforms as well as efforts to manage children’s trauma in the wake of neighborhood shootings and campus massacres, from Columbine to Marjory Stoneman Douglas. Through deep reporting, Cox addresses how we can effect change now, and help children like Ava and Tyshaun. He explores their stories and more, including a couple in South Carolina whose eleven-year-old son shot himself, a Republican politician fighting for gun safety laws, and the charlatans infiltrating the school safety business.

In a moment when the country is desperate to better understand and address gun violence, Children Under Fire offers a way to do just that, weaving wrenching personal stories into a critical call for the United States to embrace practical reforms that would save thousands of young lives. 

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Quantum Reality

Jim Baggott

Quantum mechanics is an extraordinarily successful scientific theory. It is also completely mad. Although the theory quite obviously works, it leaves us chasing ghosts and phantoms; particles that are waves and waves that are particles; cats that are at once both alive and dead; and lots of seemingly spooky goings-on. But if we're prepared to be a little more specific about what we mean when we talk about 'reality' and a little more circumspect in the way we think a scientific theory might represent such a reality, then all the mystery goes away. This shows that the choice we face is actually a philosophical one.

Here, Jim Baggott provides a quick but comprehensive introduction to quantum mechanics for the general reader, and explains what makes this theory so very different from the rest. He also explores the processes involved in developing scientific theories and explains how these lead to different philosophical positions, essential if we are to understand the nature of the great debate between Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein. Moving forwards, Baggott then provides a comprehensive guide to attempts to determine what the theory actually means, from the Copenhagen interpretation to many worlds and the multiverse.

Richard Feynman once declared that 'nobody understands quantum mechanics'. This book will tell you why.

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The Wise Men

Walter Isaacson

A captivating blend of personal biography and public drama, The Wise Men introduces the original best and brightest, leaders whose outsized personalities and actions brought order to postwar chaos: Averell Harriman, the freewheeling diplomat and Roosevelt's special envoy to Churchill and Stalin; Dean Acheson, the secretary of state who was more responsible for the Truman Doctrine than Truman and for the Marshall Plan than General Marshall; George Kennan, self-cast outsider and intellectual darling of the Washington elite; Robert Lovett, assistant secretary of war, undersecretary of state, and secretary of defense throughout the formative years of the Cold War; John McCloy, one of the nation's most influential private citizens; and Charles Bohlen, adroit diplomat and ambassador to the Soviet Union.

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Under Our Roof

Madeleine Dean

"For the first time, a Congresswoman and her son reveal how he survived a ten-year battle with opioid abuse--and what their family's journey to recovery can teach us about finding hope amidst the unspeakable. When Madeleine Dean discovered that her son, Harry, was stealing from the family to feed a painkiller addiction, she was days away from taking the biggest risk of her life: running for statewide office in Pennsylvania. For years, she had thought something was wrong. Harry was losing weight and losing friends. He had lost the brightness in his eyes and voice, changing from a young boy with boundless enthusiasm for life to a shadow of himself, chasing something she could not see. At first, she chalked it up to maternal worry, but now her worst fears had come to bear. Under Our Roof is the story of a national crisis suffered in the intimacy of so many homes, told with incredible candor through the dual perspectives of a mother rising in politics and a son living a double life, afraid of what would happen if his secret were exposed. Madeleine and Harry reflect on how addiction can ensnare anyone--even those born into stable, loving homes. They discuss the patterns of a family dealing with an unspoken disease, the fear that keeps addicts hiding in shame, and the moments of honesty, faith, and personal insight that led to Harry's recovery. In a country searching for answers to the devastating effects of opioids and drug abuse, Under Our Roof is a ray of hope in the darkness. It is not only a love story between mother and son but an honest account of our most pressing crisis by a family affecting change on a national level"--

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Betting on You

Laurie Ruettimann

"Indispensable reading for anyone seeking to improve their professional selves."
—Daniel H. Pink, #1 New York Times bestselling author of When

An essential guide for how to snap out of autopilot and become your own best advocate, with candid anecdotes and easy-to-adopt steps, from veteran HR specialist and popular podcast host Laurie Ruettimann

Chances are you've spent the past few months cooped up inside, buried under a relentless news cycle and work that never seems to switch off. Millions of us worldwide are overworked, exhausted, and trying our hardest—yet not getting the recognition we deserve. It’s time for a fix.

Top career coach and HR consultant Laurie Ruettimann knows firsthand that work can get a hell of a lot better. A decade ago, Ruettimann was uninspired, blaming others and herself for the unhappiness she felt. Until she had an epiphany: if she wanted a fulfilling existence, she couldn’t sit around and wait for change. She had to be her own leader. She had to truly take ahold of life—the good, the bad, and the downright ugly—in order to transform her future.

Today, as businesses prioritize their bottom line over employee satisfaction and workers become increasingly isolated, the need to safeguard your well-being is crucial. And though this sounds intimidating, it’s easier to do than you think. Through tactical advice on how to approach work in a smart and healthy manner, which includes knowing when to sign off for the day, doubling down on our capacity to learn, fixing those finances, and beating impostor syndrome once and for all, Ruettimann lays out the framework necessary to champion your interests and create a life you actually enjoy.

Packed with advice and stories of others who regained control of their lives, Betting on You is a game-changing must-read for how to radically improve your day-to-day, working more effectively and enthusiastically starting now.

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Kings of Crypto

Jeff John Roberts

"Tech writer Roberts debuts with a page-turning account of the rise of cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase from the Y Combinator startup incubator to becoming a 'pillar of the larger crypto economy.'" — Publisher's Weekly

For a moment late in 2018, one bitcoin, which physically amounts to a few electrons blipping on a tiny bit of silicon, was worth $20,000—the same as a pound of gold. Libertarian technologists who believed bitcoin would be the foundation of a new world order saw the moment as an apotheosis. Everyone else saw a bubble. Everyone else was right, and the bubble burst. But bitcoin survived, and the battle for its soul rages on.

Kings of Crypto drops us into the unfolding drama, tracing the rise, fall, and rebirth of cryptocurrency through the experiences of major players across the globe. We follow Silicon Valley entrepreneur Brian Armstrong and the turbulent rocket ride of his startup, Coinbase, as he tries to take bitcoin mainstream while fighting off hackers, thieves, and zealots. Author Jeff John Roberts keenly observes the world of virtual currencies and what happens when startups try to disrupt the world of high finance. Clear explanations of crypto technology are woven into an amazing landscape full of meme-fueled startup hijinks, hacking (so much hacking!), shady investors, government investigations, billionaire bros and their Lambos, and closed-door meetings with Jamie Dimon.

This is the surprising story of the origins of cryptocurrency and how it is changing money forever.

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The Devil You Know

Charles M. Blow

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

A New York Times Editor's Choice

From journalist and New York Times bestselling author Charles Blow comes a powerful manifesto and call to action for Black Americans to amass political power and fight white supremacy.

Race, as we have come to understand it, is a fiction; but, racism, as we have come to live it, is a fact. The point here is not to impose a new racial hierarchy, but to remove an existing one. After centuries of waiting for white majorities to overturn white supremacy, it seems to me that it has fallen to Black people to do it themselves.

Acclaimed columnist and author Charles Blow never wanted to write a "race book." But as violence against Black people--both physical and psychological--seemed only to increase in recent years, culminating in the historic pandemic and protests of the summer of 2020, he felt compelled to write a new story for Black Americans. He envisioned a succinct, counterintuitive, and impassioned corrective to the myths that have for too long governed our thinking about race and geography in America. Drawing on both political observations and personal experience as a Black son of the South, Charles set out to offer a call to action by which Black people can finally achieve equality, on their own terms.

So what will it take to make lasting change when small steps have so frequently failed? It's going to take an unprecedented shift in power. The Devil You Know is a groundbreaking manifesto, proposing nothing short of the most audacious power play by Black people in the history of this country. This book is a grand exhortation to generations of a people, offering a road map to true and lasting freedom.

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Black Boy Out of Time

Hari Ziyad

An eloquent, restless, and enlightening memoir by one of the most thought-provoking journalists today about growing up Black and queer in America, reuniting with the past, and coming of age their own way.

One of nineteen children in a blended family, Hari Ziyad was raised by a Hindu Hare Kṛṣṇa mother and a Muslim father. Through reframing their own coming-of-age story, Ziyad takes readers on a powerful journey of growing up queer and Black in Cleveland, Ohio, and of navigating the equally complex path toward finding their true self in New York City. Exploring childhood, gender, race, and the trust that is built, broken, and repaired through generations, Ziyad investigates what it means to live beyond the limited narratives Black children are given and challenges the irreconcilable binaries that restrict them.

Heartwarming and heart-wrenching, radical and reflective, Hari Ziyad's vital memoir is for the outcast, the unheard, the unborn, and the dead. It offers us a new way to think about survival and the necessary disruption of social norms. It looks back in tenderness as well as justified rage, forces us to address where we are now, and, born out of hope, illuminates the possibilities for the future.

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