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Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic
Quinones, Sam
(Paperback)
List Price: $18.00 Sale: $7.38
Over the past fifteen years, enterprising sugar cane farmers in the small county of Xalisco on the west coast of Mexico have created a unique distribution system that has brought black tar heroin--the cheapest, most addictive form of the opiate, two to three times purer than its white powder cousin--to the veins of people across the United States. Communities where heroin had never been seen before have become overrun with it. Local police and residents are stunned: How could heroin, long considered a drug found only in the dense, urban environments along the East Coast, and trafficked into the United States by enormous Colombian drug cartels, be so incredibly ubiquitous in the American heartland? Who was bringing it here and why were so many townspeople suddenly eager for the comparatively cheap high it offered? Acclaimed journalist Sam Quinones weaves together two classic tales of American capitalism in Doped Up: Young men in Mexico, independent of the drug cartels, in search of their own American Dream via the fast and enormous profits of trafficking cheap black tar heroin to America's rural and suburban addicts; and Purdue Pharma, determined to corner the market on pain with its new and expensive miracle drug, Oxycontin, extremely addictive in its own right. Quinones illuminates just how these two stories fit together as cause and effect. Doped Up is a dramatic and revelatory account of addiction spreading to every part of the American landscape.
You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters
Murphy, Kate
(Hardcover)
List Price: $26.00 Sale: $10.10
At work, we’re taught to lead the conversation.On social media, we shape our personal narratives.At parties, we talk over one another. So do our politicians.We’re not listening.And no one is listening to us.Despite living in a world where technology allows constant digital communication and opportunities to connect, it seems no one is really listening or even knows how. And it’s making us lonelier, more isolated, and less tolerant than ever before. A listener by trade, New York Times contributor Kate Murphy wanted to know how we got here.In this always illuminating and often humorous deep dive, Murphy explains why we’re not listening, what it’s doing to us, and how we can reverse the trend. She makes accessible the psychology, neuroscience, and sociology of listening while also introducing us to some of the best listeners out there (including a CIA agent, focus group moderator, bartender, radio producer, and top furniture salesman). Equal parts cultural observation, scientific exploration, and rousing call to action that's full of practical advice, You're Not Listening is to listening what Susan Cain's Quiet was to introversion. It’s time to stop talking and start listening.
Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America
Macy, Beth
(Paperback)
List Price: $17.99 Sale: $5.09
In this masterful work, Beth Macy takes us into the epicenter of America's twenty-plus year struggle with opioid addiction. From distressed small communities in Central Appalachia to wealthy suburbs; from disparate cities to once-idyllic farm towns; it's a heartbreaking trajectory that illustrates how this national crisis has persisted for so long and become so firmly entrenched.Beginning with a single dealer who lands in a small Virginia town and sets about turning high school football stars into heroin overdose statistics, Macy endeavors to answer a grieving mother's question - why her only son died - and comes away with a harrowing story of greed and need. From the introduction of OxyContin in 1996, Macy parses how America embraced a medical culture where overtreatment with painkillers became the norm. In some of the same distressed communities featured in her bestselling book Factory Man, the unemployed use painkillers both to numb the pain of joblessness and pay their bills, while privileged teens trade pills in cul-de-sacs, and even high school standouts fall prey to prostitution, jail, and death.Through unsparing, yet deeply human portraits of the families and first responders struggling to ameliorate this epidemic, each facet of the crisis comes into focus. In these politically fragmented times, Beth Macy shows, astonishingly, that the only thing that unites Americans across geographic and class lines is opioid drug abuse. But in a country unable to provide basic healthcare for all, Macy still finds reason to hope - and signs of the spirit and tenacity necessary in those facing addiction to build a better future for themselves and their families.
Them
Sasse, Ben
(Paperback)
List Price: $17.99 Sale: $6.45
Something is wrong. We all know it.American life expectancy is declining for a third straight year. Birth rates are dropping. Nearly half of us think the other political party isn’t just wrong; they’re evil. We’re the richest country in history, but we’ve never been more pessimistic.What’s causing the despair?In Them, bestselling author and U.S. senator Ben Sasse argues that, contrary to conventional wisdom, our crisis isn’t really about politics. It’s that we’re so lonely we can’t see straight - and it bubbles out as anger.Local communities are collapsing. Across the nation, little leagues are disappearing, Rotary clubs are dwindling, and in all likelihood, we don’t know the neighbor two doors down. Work isn’t what we’d hoped: less certainty, few lifelong coworkers, shallow purpose. Stable families and enduring friendships - life’s fundamental pillars - are in statistical freefall.As traditional tribes of place evaporate, we rally against common enemies so we can feel part of a team. No institutions command widespread public trust, enabling foreign intelligence agencies to use technology to pick the scabs on our toxic divisions. We’re in danger of half of us believing different facts than the other half, and the digital revolution throws gas on the fire.There’s a path forward - but reversing our decline requires something radical: a rediscovery of real places and human-to-human relationships. Even as technology nudges us to become rootless, Sasse shows how only a recovery of rootedness can heal our lonely souls.America wants you to be happy, but more urgently, America needs you to love your neighbor and connect with your community. Fixing what's wrong with the country depends on it.
Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth
Smarsh, Sarah
(Paperback)
List Price: $17.00 Sale: $6.02
During Sarah Smarsh's turbulent childhood in Kansas in the 1980s and 1990s, the country's wealth gap widened - with Smarsh's family of laborers on the losing end. Through this intergenerational story, Smarsh challenges us to examine the class divide in our country and the myths about people thought to be less because they earn less. Combining memoir with powerful analysis and cultural commentary, Heartland is an uncompromising look at class, identity, and the particular perils of economic hardship in a country known for its excess.
Savage Inequalities
Kozol, Jonathan
(Paperback)
List Price: $15.00 Sale: $5.09
For two years, beginning in 1988, Jonathan Kozol visited schools in neighborhoods across the country, from Illinois to Washington D.C., and from New York to San Antonio. He spoke with teachers, principals, superintendents, and, most important, children. What he found was devastating. Not only were schools for rich and poor blatantly unequal, the gulf between the two extremes was widening--and it has widened since. The urban schools he visited were overcrowded and understaffed, and lacked the basic elements of learning--including books and, all too often, classrooms for the students. In Savage Inequalities, Kozol delivers a searing examination of the extremes of wealth and poverty and calls into question the reality of equal opportunity in our nation's schools.
A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster
Solnit, Rebecca
(Paperback)
List Price: $18.00 Sale: $6.45
The most startling thing about disasters, according to award-winning author Rebecca Solnit, is not merely that so many people rise to the occasion, but that they do so with joy. That joy reveals an ordinarily unmet yearning for community, purposefulness, and meaningful work that disaster often provides. A Paradise Built in Hell is an investigation of the moments of altruism, resourcefulness, and generosity that arise amid disaster's grief and disruption and considers their implications for everyday life. It points to a new vision of what society could become - one that is less authoritarian and fearful, more collaborative and local.
Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship
Boyle, Gregory
(Paperback)
List Price: $16.00 Sale: $6.45
In a nation deeply divided and plagued by poverty and violence, Barking to the Choir offers a snapshot into the challenges and joys of life on the margins. Sergio, arrested at age nine, in a gang by age twelve, and serving time shortly thereafter, now works with the substance-abuse team at Homeboy to help others find sobriety. Jamal, abandoned by his family when he tried to attend school at age seven, gradually finds forgiveness for his schizophrenic mother. New father Cuco, who never knew his own dad, thinks of a daily adventure on which to take his four-year-old son. These former gang members uplift the soul and reveal how bright life can be when filled with unconditional love and kindness.This book is guaranteed to shake up our ideas about God and about people with a glimpse at a world defined by more compassion and fewer barriers. Gently and humorously, Barking to the Choir invites us to find kinship with one another and re-convinces us all of our own goodness.
Season of the Witch
Talbot, David
(Paperback)
List Price: $17.00 Sale: $7.13
In a kaleidoscopic narrative, New York Times bestselling author David Talbot tells the gripping story of San Francisco in the turbulent years between 1967 and 1982 - and of the extraordinary men and women who led to the city's ultimate rebirth and triumph. Season of the Witch is the first book to fully capture the dark magic of San Francisco in this breathtaking period, when the city radically changed itself - and then revolutionized the world.
No Visible Bruises: What We Don't Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us
Snyder, Rachel Louise
(Paperback)
List Price: $17.00 Sale: $6.87
The book that changed the conversation about domestic violence - an award-winning journalist’s intimate investigation of the abuse that happens behind closed doors, now with a new afterword by the author.We call it domestic violence. We call it private violence. Sometimes we call it intimate terrorism. But whatever we call it, we generally do not believe it has anything at all to do with us, despite the World Health Organization deeming it a “global epidemic.” In America, domestic violence accounts for 15 percent of all violent crime, and yet it remains locked in silence, even as its tendrils reach unseen into so many of our most pressing national issues, from our economy to our education system, from mass shootings to mass incarceration to #MeToo. We still have not taken the true measure of this problem.In No Visible Bruises, journalist Rachel Louise Snyder gives context for what we don’t know we’re seeing. She frames this urgent and immersive account of the scale of domestic violence in our country around key stories that explode the common myths - that if things were bad enough, victims would just leave; that a violent person cannot become nonviolent; that shelter is an adequate response; and most insidiously that violence inside the home is a private matter, sealed from the public sphere and disconnected from other forms of violence. Through the stories of victims, perpetrators, law enforcement, and reform movements from across the country, Snyder explores the real roots of private violence, its far-reaching consequences for society, and what it will take to truly address it.
One Summer: America, 1927
Bryson, Bill
(Paperback)
List Price: $16.95 Sale: $5.51
The summer of 1927 began with Charles Lindbergh crossing the Atlantic. Meanwhile, Babe Ruth was closing in on the home run record. In Newark, New Jersey, Alvin "Shipwreck" Kelly sat atop a flagpole for twelve days, and in Chicago, the gangster Al Capone was tightening his grip on bootlegging. The first true "talking picture," Al Jolson's The Jazz Singer, was filmed, forever changing the motion picture industry. All this and much, much more transpired in the year Americans attempted and accomplished outsized thing - and when the twentieth century truly became the American century. One Summer transforms it all into narrative nonfiction of the highest order.
The Like Switch
Schafer, Jack
(Paperback)
List Price: $19.99 Sale: $5.77
From a former FBI Special Agent specializing in behavior analysis and recruiting spies comes a handbook filled with his proven strategies on how to instantly read people and influence how they perceive you, so you can easily turn on the like switch. The Like Switch is packed with all the tools you need for turning strangers into friends, whether you are on a sales call, a first date, or a job interview. As a Special Agent for the FBI's National Security Division's Behavioral Analysis Program, Dr. Jack Schafer developed dynamic and breakthrough strategies for profiling terrorists and detecting deception. Now, Dr. Schafer has evolved his proven-on-the-battlefield tactics for the day-to-day, but no less critical battle of getting people to like you. In The Like Switch, he presents these techniques for how you can influence, attract, and win people over. Learn how to think and react like your favorite TV investigators from Criminal Minds or CSI as Dr. Schafer shows you how to improve your LQ (Likeability Quotient), "spot the lie" both in person and online, master nonverbal cues that influence how people perceive you, and turn up or turn down the intensity of a relationship. Dr. Schafer cracks the code on making great first impressions, building lasting relationships, and understanding others' behavior to learn what they really think about you. With tips and techniques that hold the key to taking control of your communications, interactions, and relationships, The Like Switch shows you how to read others and get people to like you for a moment or a lifetime.
Modern Romance
Ansari, Aziz
(Paperback)
List Price: $17.00 Sale: $5.77
A hilarious, thoughtful, and in-depth exploration of the pleasures and perils of modern romance from one of this generation’s sharpest comedic voices.
Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are
Stephens-Davidowitz, Seth
(Paperback)
List Price: $16.99 Sale: $5.09
Blending the informed analysis of The Signal and the Noise with the instructive iconoclasm of Think Like a Freak, a fascinating, illuminating, and witty look at what the vast amounts of information now instantly available to us reveals about ourselves and our world - provided we ask the right questions.By the end of an average day in the early twenty-first century, human beings searching the internet will amass eight trillion gigabytes of data. This staggering amount of information - unprecedented in history - can tell us a great deal about who we are - the fears, desires, and behaviors that drive us, and the conscious and unconscious decisions we make. From the profound to the mundane, we can gain astonishing knowledge about the human psyche that less than twenty years ago, seemed unfathomable.Everybody Lies offers fascinating, surprising, and sometimes laugh-out-loud insights into everything from economics to ethics to sports to race to sex, gender and more, all drawn from the world of big data. What percentage of white voters didn’t vote for Barack Obama because he’s black? Does where you go to school effect how successful you are in life? Do parents secretly favor boy children over girls? Do violent films affect the crime rate? Can you beat the stock market? How regularly do we lie about our sex lives and who’s more self-conscious about sex, men or women?Investigating these questions and a host of others, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz offers revelations that can help us understand ourselves and our lives better. Drawing on studies and experiments on how we really live and think, he demonstrates in fascinating and often funny ways the extent to which all the world is indeed a lab. With conclusions ranging from strange-but-true to thought-provoking to disturbing, he explores the power of this digital truth serum and its deeper potential - revealing biases deeply embedded within us, information we can use to change our culture, and the questions we’re afraid to ask that might be essential to our health - both emotional and physical. All of us are touched by big data everyday, and its influence is multiplying. Everybody Lies challenges us to think differently about how we see it and the world.
Them: Why We Hate Each Other - and How to Heal
Sasse, Ben
(Hardcover)
List Price: $28.99 Sale: $4.15
Something is wrong. We all know it.American life expectancy is declining for a third straight year. Birth rates are dropping. Nearly half of us think the other political party isn’t just wrong; they’re evil. We’re the richest country in history, but we’ve never been more pessimistic.What’s causing the despair?In Them, bestselling author and U.S. senator Ben Sasse argues that, contrary to conventional wisdom, our crisis isn’t really about politics. It’s that we’re so lonely we can’t see straight - and it bubbles out as anger.Local communities are collapsing. Across the nation, little leagues are disappearing, Rotary clubs are dwindling, and in all likelihood, we don’t know the neighbor two doors down. Work isn’t what we’d hoped: less certainty, few lifelong coworkers, shallow purpose. Stable families and enduring friendships - life’s fundamental pillars - are in statistical freefall.As traditional tribes of place evaporate, we rally against common enemies so we can feel part of a team. No institutions command widespread public trust, enabling foreign intelligence agencies to use technology to pick the scabs on our toxic divisions. We’re in danger of half of us believing different facts than the other half, and the digital revolution throws gas on the fire.There’s a path forward - but reversing our decline requires something radical: a rediscovery of real places and human-to-human relationships. Even as technology nudges us to become rootless, Sasse shows how only a recovery of rootedness can heal our lonely souls.America wants you to be happy, but more urgently, America needs you to love your neighbor and connect with your community. Fixing what's wrong with the country depends on it.
The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements
Hoffer, Eric
(Paperback)
List Price: $10.99 Sale: $4.66
Newly urgent, The True Believer is Eric Hoffer's classic examination of nationalist movements, fanatical causes, and the psychology of authoritarian leaders and their followers. "It's theme is political fanaticism, with which it deals severely and brilliantly," hails The New Yorker.
How to Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy, and the Racial Divide
Fleming, Crystal Marie
(Paperback)
List Price: $14.95 Sale: $5.51
A unique and irreverent take on everything that's wrong with our “national conversation about race”—and what to do about itHow to Be Less Stupid About Race is your essential guide to breaking through the half-truths and ridiculous misconceptions that have thoroughly corrupted the way race is represented in the classroom, pop culture, media, and politics. Centuries after our nation was founded on genocide, settler colonialism, and slavery, many Americans are kinda-sorta-maybe waking up to the reality that our racial politics are (still) garbage. But in the midst of this reckoning, widespread denial and misunderstandings about race persist, even as white supremacy and racial injustice are more visible than ever before.Combining no-holds-barred social critique, humorous personal anecdotes, and analysis of the latest interdisciplinary scholarship on systemic racism, sociologist Crystal M. Fleming provides a fresh, accessible, and irreverent take on everything that’s wrong with our “national conversation about race.” Drawing upon critical race theory, as well as her own experiences as a queer black millennial college professor and researcher, Fleming unveils how systemic racism exposes us all to racial ignorance—and provides a road map for transforming our knowledge into concrete social change.Searing, sobering, and urgently needed, How to Be Less Stupid About Race is a truth bomb for your racist relative, friend, or boss, and a call to action for everyone who wants to challenge white supremacy and intersectional oppression. If you like Issa Rae, Justin Simien, Angela Davis, and Morgan Jerkins, then this deeply relevant, bold, and incisive book is for you.
Civilization: The West and the Rest
Ferguson, Niall
(Paperback)
List Price: $19.00 Sale: $7.38
Western civilization's rise to global dominance is the single most important historical phenomenon of the past five centuries How did the West overtake its Eastern rivals? And has the zenith of Western power now passed? Acclaimed historian Niall Ferguson argues that beginning in the fifteenth century, the West developed six powerful new concepts, or "killer applications"--competition, science, the rule of law, modern medicine, consumerism, and the work ethic--that the Rest lacked, allowing it to surge past all other competitors. Yet now, Ferguson shows how the Rest have downloaded the killer apps the West once monopolized, while the West has literally lost faith in itself. Chronicling the rise and fall of empires alongside clashes (and fusions) of civilizations, Civilization: The West and the Rest recasts world history with force and wit. Boldly argued and teeming with memorable characters, this is Ferguson at his very best.
Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living
Tippett, Krista
(Paperback)
List Price: $17.00 Sale: $7.13
In Becoming Wise, Krista Tippett has created a master class in living for a fractured world. Fracture, she says, is not the whole story of our time The enduring question of what it means to be human has become inextricable from the challenge of who we are to one another. She insists on the possibility of personal depth and common life for this century, nurtured by science and "spiritual technologies," with civility and love as muscular public practice. And, accompanied by a cross-disciplinary dream team of a teaching faculty, she shows us how.
Amazing Grace
Kozol, Jonathan
(Paperback)
List Price: $15.00 Sale: $5.09
Amazing Grace is Jonathan Kozol's classic book on life and death in the South Bronx--the poorest urban neighborhood of the United States. He brings us into overcrowded schools, dysfunctional hospitals, and rat-infested homes where families have been ravaged by depression and anxiety, drug-related violence, and the spread of AIDS. But he also introduces us to devoted and unselfish teachers, dedicated ministers, and--at the heart and center of the book--courageous and delightful children. The children we come to meet through the friendships they have formed with Jonathan defy the stereotypes of urban youth too frequently presented by the media. Tender, generous, and often religiously devout, they speak with eloquence and honesty about the poverty and racial isolation that have wounded but not hardened them. Amidst all of the despair, it is the very young whose luminous capacity for love and transcendent sense of faith in human decency give reason for hope.
The Moral Animal
Wright, Robert
(Paperback)
List Price: $18.00 Sale: $6.75
Are men literally born to cheat? Does monogamy actually serve women's interests? These are among the questions that have made The Moral Animal one of the most provocative science books in recent years. Wright unveils the genetic strategies behind everything from our sexual preferences to our office politics - as well as their implications for our moral codes and public policies.
The Working Poor: Invisible in America
Shipler, David K.
(Paperback)
List Price: $14.00 Sale: $5.51
As David K. Shipler makes clear in this study, the invisible poor are engaged in the activity most respected in American ideology - hard, honest work. But their version of the American Dream is a nightmare: low paying, dead-end jobs; the profound failure of government to improve upon decaying housing, health care, and education; the failure of families to break the patterns of child abuse and substance abuse. Shipler exposes the interlocking, problems by taking us into the sorrowful, infuriating, courageous lives of the poor - white and black, Asian and Latino, citizens and immigrants. We encounter them every day, for they do jobs essential to the American economy. We meet drifting farm workers in North Carolina, exploited garment workers in New Hampshire, illegal immigrants trapped in the steaming kitchens of Los Angeles restaurants, addicts who struggle into productive work from the cruel streets of the nation's capital - each life another aspect of a confounding, far-reaching urgent national crises. And unlike most works on poverty, this one delves into the calculations of some employers as well - their razor-thin profits, their anxieties about competition from abroad, their frustrations in finding qualified workers.
Black Diamonds: The Downfall of an Aristocratic Dynasty and the Fifty Years That Changed England
Bailey, Catherine
(Paperback)
List Price: $17.00 Sale: $6.24
When the sixth Earl Fitzwilliam died in 1902, he left behind the second largest estate in twentieth-century England, valued at more than £3 billion of today’s money - a lifeline to the tens of thousands of people who worked either in the family’s coal mines or on their expansive estate. The earl also left behind four sons, and the family line seemed assured. But was it? As Bailey retraces the Fitzwilliam family history, she uncovers a legacy riddled with bitter feuds, scandals (including Peter Fitzwilliam’s ill-fated affair with American heiress Kick Kennedy), and civil unrest as the conflict between the coal industry and its miners came to a head. Once again, Bailey has written an irresistible and brilliant narrative history.
Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier
Glaeser, Edward
(Paperback)
List Price: $16.00 Sale: $6.75
A pioneering urban economist presents a compelling affirmation of the city as humanity's greatest invention and our best hope for the future.
The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great
Shapiro, Ben
(Paperback)
List Price: $17.99 Sale: $6.02
In 2016, Ben Shapiro spoke at UC Berkeley. Hundreds of police officers were required from 10 UC campuses across the state to protect his speech, which was - ironically - about the necessity for free speech and rational debate. He came to argue that Western civilization is in the midst of a crisis of purpose and ideas. Our freedoms are built upon the twin notions that every human being is made in God's image and that human beings were created with reason capable of exploring God's world. We can thank these values for the birth of science, the dream of progress, human rights, prosperity, peace, and artistic beauty. Jerusalem and Athens built America, ended slavery, defeated the Nazis and the Communists, lifted billions from poverty, and gave billions spiritual purpose. Jerusalem and Athens were the foundations of the Magna Carta and the Treaty of Westphalia; they were the foundations of the Declaration of Independence, Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Letter from Birmingham Jail. Civilizations that rejected Jerusalem and Athens have collapsed into dust. The USSR rejected Judeo-Christian values and Greek natural law, substituting a new utopian vision of "social justice" - and they starved and slaughtered tens of millions of human beings. The Nazis rejected Judeo-Christian values and Greek natural law, and they shoved children into gas chambers. Venezuela rejects Judeo-Christian values and Greek natural law, and citizens of their oil-rich nation have been reduced to eating dogs.We are in the process of abandoning Judeo-Christian values and Greek natural law, favoring instead moral subjectivism and the rule of passion. And we are watching our civilization collapse into age-old tribalism, individualistic hedonism, and moral subjectivism. We believe we can reject Judeo-Christian values and Greek natural law and satisfy ourselves with intersectionality, or scientific materialism, or progressive politics, or authoritarian governance, or nationalistic solidarity. We can't.The West is special, and in The Right Side of History, Ben Shapiro bravely explains that it's because too many of us have lost sight of the moral purpose that drives us each to be better, or the sacred duty to work together for the greater good, or both. A stark warning, and a call to spiritual arms, this book may be the first step in getting our civilization back on track.
Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television
Mander, Jerry
(Softcover)
List Price: $13.95 Sale: $5.51
A total departure from previous writing about television, this book is the first ever to advocate that the medium is not reformable. Its problems are inherent in the technology itself and are so dangerous - to personal health and sanity, to the environment, and to democratic processes - that TV ought to be eliminated forever. Weaving personal experiences through meticulous research, the author ranges widely over aspects of television that have rarely been examined and never before joined together, allowing an entirely new, frightening image to emerge. The idea that all technologies are "neutral," benign instruments that can be used well or badly, is thrown open to profound doubt. Speaking of TV reform is, in the words of the author, "as absurd as speaking of the reform of a technology such as guns."
How to Work a Room
Roane, Susan
(Paperback)
List Price: $15.99 Sale: $6.75
The classic bestseller on socializing - now fully updated for social interactions in a digital age How to Work a Room® is the classic bestselling book on improving communication and socializing skills, and using them to create and leverage connections. This Silver Anniversary Edition is fully revised and updated to include the role of technology and social media in networking, as well as Susan RoAne's proven tips for using digital strategies to your advantage - plus practical hints for starting conversations and strengthening rapport with strangers. How to Work a Room®: The 25th Anniversary Edition is a vital tool for business professionals, job seekers and career changers of all ages.
Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief
Wright, Lawrence
(Paperback)
List Price: $15.95 Sale: $6.45
Scientology presents itself as a scientific approach to spiritual enlightenment, but its practices have long been shrouded in mystery. Now Lawrence Wright—armed with his investigative talents, years of archival research, and more than two hundred personal interviews with current and former Scientologists—uncovers the inner workings of the church. We meet founder L. Ron Hubbard, the highly imaginative but mentally troubled science-fiction writer, and his tough, driven successor, David Miscavige. We go inside their specialized cosmology and language. We learn about the church’s legal attacks on the IRS, its vindictive treatment of critics, and its phenomenal wealth. We see the church court celebrities such as Tom Cruise while consigning its clergy to hard labor under billion-year contracts. Through it all, Wright asks what fundamentally comprises a religion, and if Scientology in fact merits this Constitutionally-protected label. Brilliantly researched, compellingly written, Going Clear pulls back the curtain on one of the most secretive organizations at work today.
After the Affair
Spring, Janis Abrahms
(Softcover)
List Price: $14.99 Sale: $6.24
After the Affair teaches partners how to heal themselves and grow from the shattering crisis of an infidelity. Drawing on thirty-five years as a clinical psychologist, Dr. Spring offers a series of original and proven strategies that address such questions as: Why did it happen? Once love and trust are gone, can we ever get them back? Can I - should I - recommit when I feel so ambivalent? How do we become sexually intimate again? Is forgiveness possible? What constitutes an affair in cyberspace?
The Armchair Economist
Landsburg, Steven E.
(Paperback)
List Price: $16.00 Sale: $6.24
In this revised and updated edition of Steven Landsburg’s hugely popular book, he applies economic theory to today’s most pressing concerns, answering a diverse range of daring questions, such as: Why are seat belts deadly? Why do celebrity endorsements sell products? Why are failed executives paid so much? Who should bear the cost of oil spills? Do government deficits matter? How is workplace safety bad for workers? What’s wrong with the local foods movement? Which rich people can’t be taxed? Why is rising unemployment sometimes good? Why do women pay more at the dry cleaner? Why is life full of disappointments? Whether these are nagging questions you’ve always had, or ones you never even thought to ask, this new edition of The Armchair Economist turns the eternal ideas of economic theory into concrete answers that you can use to navigate the challenges of contemporary life.
Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America
Griswold, Eliza
(Paperback)
List Price: $18.00 Sale: $5.09
Stacey Haney is a local nurse working hard to raise two kids and keep up her small farm when the fracking boom comes to her hometown of Amity, Pennsylvania. Intrigued by reports of lucrative natural gas leases in her neighbors’ mailboxes, she strikes a deal with a Texas-based energy company. Soon trucks begin rumbling past her small farm, a fenced-off drill site rises on an adjacent hilltop, and domestic animals and pets start to die. When mysterious sicknesses begin to afflict her children, she appeals to the company for help. Its representatives insist that nothing is wrong.Alarmed by her children’s illnesses, Haney joins with neighbors and a committed husband-and-wife legal team to investigate what’s really in the water and air. Against local opposition, Haney and her allies doggedly pursue their case in court and begin to expose the damage that’s being done to the land her family has lived on for centuries. Soon a community that has long been suspicious of outsiders faces wrenching new questions about who is responsible for their fate, and for redressing it: The faceless corporations that are poisoning the land? The environmentalists who fail to see their economic distress? A federal government that is mandated to protect but fails on the job? Drawing on seven years of immersive reporting, Griswold reveals what happens when an imperiled town faces a crisis of values, and a family wagers everything on an improbable quest for justice.
The Works
Ascher, Kate
(Softcover)
List Price: $25.00 Sale: $7.72
A fascinating guided tour of the ways things work in a modern city. Have you ever wondered how the water in your faucet gets there? Where your garbage goes? What the pipes under city streets do? How bananas from Ecuador get to your local market? Why radiators in apartment buildings clang? Using New York City as its point of reference, The Works takes readers down manholes and behind the scenes to explain exactly how an urban infrastructure operates. Deftly weaving text and graphics, author Kate Ascher explores the systems that manage water, traffic, sewage and garbage, subways, electricity, mail, and much more. Full of fascinating facts and anecdotes, The Works gives readers a unique glimpse at what lies behind and beneath urban life in the twenty-first century.
Stoned: Jewelry, Obsession, and How Desire Shapes the World
Raden, Aja
(Paperback)
List Price: $15.99 Sale: $5.77
As entertaining as it is incisive, Stoned is a raucous journey through the history of human desire for what is rare, and therefore precious.What makes a stone a jewel? What makes a jewel priceless? And why do we covet beautiful things? In this brilliant account of how eight jewels shaped the course of history, jeweler and scientist Aja Raden tells an original and often startling story about our unshakeable addiction to beauty and the darker side of human desire.What moves the world is what moves each of us: desire. Jewelry - which has long served as a stand-in for wealth and power, glamor and success - has birthed cultural movements, launched political dynasties, and started wars. Masterfully weaving together pop science and history, Stoned breaks history into three categories - Want, Take, and Have - and explains what the diamond on your finger has to do with the GI Bill, why green-tinted jewelry has been exalted by so many cultures, why the glass beads that bought Manhattan for the Dutch were initially considered a fair trade, and how the French Revolution started over a coveted necklace.Studded with lively personalities and fascinating details, Stoned tells the remarkable story of our abiding desire for the rare and extraordinary.
Why Religion? A Personal Story
Pagels, Elaine
(Paperback)
List Price: $17.99 Sale: $5.51
Why is religion still around in the twenty-first century? Why do so many still believe? And how do various traditions still shape the way people experience everything from sexuality to politics, whether they are religious or not? In Why Religion? Elaine Pagels looks to her own life to help address these questions.These questions took on a new urgency for Pagels when dealing with unimaginable loss—the death of her young son, followed a year later by the shocking loss of her husband. Here she interweaves a personal story with the work that she loves, illuminating how, for better and worse, religious traditions have shaped how we understand ourselves; how we relate to one another; and, most importantly, how to get through the most difficult challenges we face.Drawing upon the perspectives of neurologists, anthropologists, and historians, as well as her own research, Pagels opens unexpected ways of understanding persistent religious aspects of our culture.A provocative and deeply moving account from one of the most compelling religious thinkers at work today, Why Religion? explores the spiritual dimension of human experience.
Good Chemistry: The Science of Connection, from Soul to Psychedelics
Holland, Julie
(Hardcover)
List Price: $27.99 Sale: $9.17
A psychiatrist and psychedelic researcher explores the science of connection—why we need it, how we’ve lost it, and how we might find it again.We are suffering from an epidemic of disconnection that antidepressants and social media can’t fix. This state of isolation puts us in “fight or flight mode,” deranging sleep, metabolism and libido. What’s worse, we’re paranoid of others. This kill-or-be-killed framework is not a way to live. But, when we feel safe and loved, we can rest, digest, and repair. We can heal. And it is only in this state of belonging that we can open up to connection with others.In this powerful book, Holland helps us to understand the science of connection as revealed in human experiences from the spiritual to the psychedelic. The key is oxytocin—a neurotransmitter and hormone produced in our bodies that allows us to trust and bond. It fosters attachment between mothers and infants, romantic partners, friends, and even with our pets. There are many ways to reach this state of mental and physical wellbeing that modern medicine has overlooked. The implications for our happiness and health are profound. We can find oneness in meditation, in community, or in awe at the beauty around us. Another option: psychedelic medicines that can catalyze a connection with the self, with nature, or the cosmos. Good Chemistry points us on the right path to forging true and deeper attachments with our own souls, to one another, and even to our planet, helping us heal ourselves and our world.
Final Journeys
Callanan, Maggie
(Paperback)
List Price: $17.00 Sale: $5.51
For more than two decades, hospice nurse Maggie Callanan has tended to the terminally ill and been a cornerstone of support for their loved ones. Now the coauthor of the classic bestseller Final Gifts passes along the lessons she has learned from the experts - her patients. Here is the guide we all need to understanding the special needs of the dying and those who care for them. From supporting a husband or wife faced with the loss of a spouse to helping a dying mother prepare her children to carry on without her, Callanan's poignant stories illustrate new ways to meet the physical, emotional, and spiritual challenges of this difficult and precious time. She brings welcome clarity to medical and ethical concerns, explaining what to expect at every stage. Designed to be your companion, resource, and advocate from diagnosis through the final hours, Final Journeys will help you keep the lines of communication open, get the help you need, and create the peaceful end we all hope for.
The Corner
Simon, David
(Paperback)
List Price: $15.95 Sale: $5.09
The Corner tells the true story of a year in the life of a West Baltimore street corner, the center of a neighborhood that revolves entirely around the drug trade. The book's focus is a smart, sympathetic fifteen-year-old named Deandre; both his parents are addicts, and the book's dramatic tension is provided by a simple, heart-breaking question: will he or won't he get sucked irretrievably into the corner life?
The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation
Moore, Natalie Y.
(Paperback)
List Price: $17.00 Sale: $5.09
Mayors Richard M. Daley and Rahm Emanuel have touted and promoted Chicago as a "world class city." The skyscrapers kissing the clouds, the billion-dollar Millennium Park, Michelin-rated restaurants, pristine lake views, fabulous shopping, vibrant theater scene, downtown flower beds and stellar architecture tell one story. Yet, swept under the rug is the stench of segregation that compromises Chicago. The Manhattan Institute dubs Chicago as one of the most segregated big cities in the country. Though other cities - including Cleveland, Los Angeles, and Baltimore - can fight over that mantle, it's clear that segregation defines Chicago. And unlike many other major U.S. cities, no one race dominates. Chicago is divided equally into black, white, and Latino, each group clustered in their various turfs. In this intelligent and highly important narrative, Chicago-native Natalie Moore shines a light on contemporary segregation on the South Side of Chicago through reported essays, showing the life of these communities through the stories of people who live in them. The South Side shows the important impact of Chicago's historic segregation - and the ongoing policies that keep it that way.
Fair Play: A Game-Changing Solution for When You Have Too Much to Do (and More Life to Live)
Rodsky, Eve
(Hardcover)
List Price: $26.00 Sale: $8.03
A REESE WITHERSPOON x HELLO SUNSHINE BOOK CLUB PICK"A hands-on, real talk guide for navigating the hot-button issues that so many families struggle with."--Reese Witherspoon Tired, stressed, and in need of more help from your partner? Imagine running your household (and life!) in a new way...It started with the Sh*t I Do List. Tired of being the "shefault" parent responsible for all aspects of her busy household, Eve Rodsky counted up all the unpaid, invisible work she was doing for her family -- and then sent that list to her husband, asking for things to change. His response was... underwhelming. Rodsky realized that simply identifying the issue of unequal labor on the home front wasn't enough: She needed a solution to this universal problem. Her sanity, identity, career, and marriage depended on it. The result is Fair Play: a time- and anxiety-saving system that offers couples a completely new way to divvy up chores and responsibilities. Rodsky interviewed more than five hundred men and women from all walks of life to figure out what the invisible work in a family actually entails and how to get it all done efficiently. With four easy-to-follow rules, 100 household tasks, and a figurative card game you play with your partner, Fair Play helps you prioritize what's important to your family and who should take the lead on every chore from laundry to homework to dinner. "Winning" this game means rebalancing your home life, reigniting your relationship with your significant other, and reclaiming your Unicorn Space -- as in, the time to develop the skills and passions that keep you interested and interesting. Stop drowning in to-dos and lose some of that invisible workload that's pulling you down. Are you ready to try Fair Play? Let's deal you in.
Little Heathens: Hard Tikmes and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression
Kalish, Mildred Armstrong
(Paperback)
List Price: $16.00 Sale: $5.51
I tell of a time, a place, and a way of life long gone. For many years I have had the urge to describe that treasure trove, lest it vanish forever. So, partly in response to the basic human instinct to share feelings and experiences, and partly for the sheer joy and excitement of it all, I report on my early life. It was quite a romp.So begins Mildred Kalish’s story of growing up on her grandparents’ Iowa farm during the depths of the Great Depression. With her father banished from the household for mysterious transgressions, five-year-old Mildred and her family could easily have been overwhelmed by the challenge of simply trying to survive. This, however, is not a tale of suffering.Kalish counts herself among the lucky of that era. She had caring grandparents who possessed - and valiantly tried to impose - all the pioneer virtues of their forebears, teachers who inspired and befriended her, and a barnyard full of animals ready to be tamed and loved. She and her siblings and their cousins from the farm across the way played as hard as they worked, running barefoot through the fields, as free and wild as they dared.Filled with recipes and how-tos for everything from catching and skinning a rabbit to preparing homemade skin and hair beautifiers, apple cream pie, and the world’s best head cheese (start by scrubbing the head of the pig until it is pink and clean), Little Heathens portrays a world of hardship and hard work tempered by simple rewards. There was the unsurpassed flavor of tender new dandelion greens harvested as soon as the snow melted; the taste of crystal clear marble-sized balls of honey robbed from a bumblebee nest; the sweet smell from the body of a lamb sleeping on sun-warmed grass; and the magical quality of oat shocking under the light of a full harvest moon.
The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America
Packer, George
(Hardcover)
List Price: $27.00 Sale: $3.30
A riveting examination of a nation in crisis, from one of the finest political journalists of our generation. American democracy is beset by a sense of crisis. Seismic shifts during a single generation have created a country of winners and losers, allowing unprecedented freedom while rending the social contract, driving the political system to the verge of breakdown, and setting citizens adrift to find new paths forward. In "The Unwinding," George Packer, author of "The Assassins Gate: America in Iraq," tells the story of the United States over the past three decades in an utterly original way, with his characteristically sharp eye for detail and gift for weaving together complex narratives. "The Unwinding" journeys through the lives of several Americans, including Dean Price, the son of tobacco farmers, who becomes an evangelist for a new economy in the rural South; Tammy Thomas, a factory worker in the Rust Belt trying to survive the collapse of her city; Jeff Connaughton, a Washington insider oscillating between political idealism and the lure of organized money; and Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley billionaire who questions the Internet's significance and arrives at a radical vision of the future. Packer interweaves these intimate stories with biographical sketches of the era's leading public figures, from Newt Gingrich to Jay-Z, and collages made from newspaper headlines, advertising slogans, and song lyrics that capture the flow of events and their undercurrents. "The Unwinding " portrays a superpower in danger of coming apart at the seams, its elites no longer elite, its institutions no longer working, its ordinary people left to improvise their own schemes for success and salvation. Packer's novelistic and kaleidoscopic history of the new America is his most ambitious work to date.
When Work Disappears
Wilson, William Julius
(Paperback)
List Price: $14.00 Sale: $5.51
In his long-awaited new book, our foremost authority on race and poverty challenges decades of liberal and conservative pieties to look squarely at the devastating effects that joblessness has had on our urban ghettos. Marshaling a vast array of data and the personal stories of hundreds of men and women, William Julius Wilson persuasively argues that the problems endemic to America's inner cities - from fatherless households to drugs and violent crime - stem directly from the disappearance of blue-collar jobs in the wake of a globalized economy. Wilson's achievement is to portray this crisis as one that affects all Americans, and to propose solutions whose benefits would be felt across our society. At a time when welfare is ending and our country's racial dialectic is more strained than ever before, When Work Disappears is a sane, courageous, and desperately important work.
Our America
Jones, LeAlan
(Paperback)
List Price: $14.95 Sale: $3.73
Through two award-winning National Public Radio documentaries, and now this powerful book, LeAlan Jones and Lloyd Newman have made it their mission to be loud voices from one of this country's darkest places, Chicago's Ida B. Wells housing project. Set against the stunning photographs of a talented young photographer from the projects, "Our America" evokes the unforgiving world of these two amazing young men, and their struggle to survive unrelenting tragedy. With a gift for clear-eyed journalism, they tell their own stories and others, including that of the death of Eric Morse, a five-year-old who was dropped to his death from the fourteenth floor of an Ida B. Wells apartment building by two other little boys. Sometimes funny, often painful, but always charged with their dream of "Our America", LeAlan Jones and Lloyd Newman reach out to grab your attention and break your heart.
The Geoghraphy of Nowhere
Kunstler, James Howard
(Paperback)
List Price: $15.00 Sale: $6.24
The Geography of Nowhere traces America's evolution from a nation of Main Streets and coherent communities to a land where every place is like no place in particular, where the cities are dead zones and the countryside is a wasteland of cartoon architecture and parking lots. In elegant and often hilarious prose, Kunstler depicts our nation's evolution from the Pilgrim settlements to the modern auto suburb in all its ghastliness. The Geography of Nowhere tallies up the huge economic, social, and spiritual costs that America is paying for its car-crazed lifestyle. It is also a wake-up call for citizens to reinvent the places where we live and work, to build communities that are once again worthy of our affection. Kunstler proposes that by reviving civic art and civic life, we will rediscover public virtue and a new vision of the common good. "The future will require us to build better places," Kunstler says, "or the future will belong to other people in other societies."
The Death of Woman Wang
Spencer, Jonathan D.
(Paperback)
List Price: $15.00 Sale: $4.66
Award-winning author Jonathan D. Spence paints a vivid picture of an obscure place and time: provincial China in the seventeenth century. Life in the northeastern county of T'an-ch'eng emerges here as an endless cycle of floods, plagues, crop failures, banditry, and heavy taxation. Against this turbulent background a tenacious tax collector, an irascible farmer, and an unhappy wife act out a poignant drama at whose climax the wife, having run away from her husband, returns to him, only to die at his hands. Magnificently evoking the China of long ago, The Death of Woman Wang also deepens our understanding of the China we know today.
Invitation to Sociology
Berger, Peter L.
(Paperback)
List Price: $11.95 Sale: $4.88
This classic work views sociology in the humanist tradition. The author points out its affinity to history and philosophy as well as its need for scientific procedures. He discusses human consciousness and the relationships between man and his institutions.
Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun
Larson, Erik
(Paperback)
List Price: $12.00 Sale: $5.09
Overview not currently available
The Italians
Hooper, John
(Paperback)
List Price: $17.00 Sale: $6.24
John Hooper’s entertaining and perceptive new book is the ideal companion for anyone seeking to understand contemporary Italy and the unique character of the Italians. Fifteen years as a foreign correspondent based in Rome have sharpened Hooper’s observations, and he looks at the facts that lie behind the stereotypes, shedding new light on everything from the Italians’ bewildering politics to their love of life and beauty. Hooper persuasively demonstrates the impact of geography, history, and tradition on many aspects of Italian life, including football and Freemasonry, sex, food, and opera. Brimming with the kind of fascinating - and often hilarious - insights unavailable in guidebooks, The Italians will surprise even the most die-hard Italophile.
Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families
Lukas, J. Anthony
(Paperback)
List Price: $18.00 Sale: $6.75
Overview not currently available
The Narcissism Epidemic
Twenge, Jean M.
(Paperback)
List Price: $17.00 Sale: $6.24
Narcissism - an inflated view of the self - is everywhere. Public figures say it's what makes them stray from their wives. Parents teach it by dressing children in T-shirts that say "Princess." Teenagers and young adults hone it on Facebook, and celebrity newsmakers have elevated it to an art form. And it's what's making people depressed, lonely, and buried under piles of debt. Jean Twenge's influential first book, Generation Me, spurred a national debate with its depiction of the challenges twenty- and thirty-somethings face in today's world - and the fallout these issues create for educators and employers. Now, Dr. Twenge turns her focus to the pernicious spread of narcissism in today's culture, which has repercussions for every age group and class. Dr. Twenge joins forces with W. Keith Campbell, Ph.D., a nationally recognized expert on narcissism, to explore this new plague in The Narcissism Epidemic, their eye-opening exposition of the alarming rise of narcissism and its catastrophic effects at every level of society. Even the world economy has been damaged by risky, unrealistic overconfidence. Drawing on their own extensive research as well as decades of other experts' studies, Drs. Twenge and Campbell show us how to identify narcissism, minimize the forces that sustain and transmit it, and treat it or manage it where we find it. Filled with arresting, alarming, and even amusing stories of vanity gone off the tracks (would you like to hire your own personal paparazzi?), The Narcissism Epidemic is at once a riveting window into the consequences of narcissism, a prescription to combat the widespread problems it causes, and a probing analysis of the culture at large.
The Vanishing American Adult: Our Coming-of-Age Crisis - and How to Rebuild a Culture of Self-Reliance
Sasse, Ben
(Paperback)
List Price: $17.99 Sale: $4.15
In an era of safe spaces, trigger warnings, and an unprecedented election, the country's youth are in crisis. Senator Ben Sasse warns the nation about the existential threat to America's future.Raised by well-meaning but overprotective parents and coddled by well-meaning but misbegotten government programs, America's youth are ill-equipped to survive in our highly-competitive global economy.Many of the coming-of-age rituals that have defined the American experience since the Founding: learning the value of working with your hands, leaving home to start a family, becoming economically self-reliant - are being delayed or skipped altogether. The statistics are daunting: 30% of college students drop out after the first year, and only 4 in 10 graduate. One in three 18-to-34 year-olds live with their parents.From these disparate phenomena: Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse who as president of a Midwestern college observed the trials of this generation up close, sees an existential threat to the American way of life.In The Vanishing American Adult, Sasse diagnoses the causes of a generation that can't grow up and offers a path for raising children to become active and engaged citizens. He identifies core formative experiences that all young people should pursue: hard work to appreciate the benefits of labor, travel to understand deprivation and want, the power of reading, the importance of nurturing your body - and explains how parents can encourage them.Our democracy depends on responsible, contributing adults to function properly - without them America falls prey to populist demagogues. A call to arms, The Vanishing American Adult will ignite a much-needed debate about the link between the way we're raising our children and the future of our country.
Unfinished Business
Slaughter, Anne-Marie
(Paperback)
List Price: $18.00 Sale: $5.51
When Anne-Marie Slaughter accepted her dream job as the first female director of policy planning at the U.S. State Department in 2009, she was confident she could juggle the demands of her position in Washington, D.C., with the responsibilities of her family life in suburban New Jersey. Her husband and two young sons encouraged her to pursue the job; she had a tremendously supportive boss, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; and she had been moving up on a high-profile career track since law school. But then life intervened. Parenting needs caused her to make a decision to leave the State Department and return to an academic career that gave her more time for her family. The reactions to her choice to leave Washington because of her kids led her to question the feminist narrative she grew up with. Her subsequent article for The Atlantic, "Why Women Still Can't Have It All," created a firestorm, sparked intense national debate, and became one of the most-read pieces in the magazine's history. Since that time, Anne-Marie Slaughter has pushed forward, breaking free of her long-standing assumptions about work, life, and family. Though many solutions have been proposed for how women can continue to break the glass ceiling or rise above the "motherhood penalty," women at the top and the bottom of the income scale are further and further apart. Now, in her refreshing and forthright voice, Anne-Marie Slaughter returns with her vision for what true equality between men and women really means, and how we can get there. She uncovers the missing piece of the puzzle, presenting a new focus that can reunite the women's movement and provide a common banner under which both men and women can advance and thrive. With moving personal stories, individual action plans, and a broad outline for change, Anne-Marie Slaughter reveals a future in which all of us can finally finish the business of equality for women and men, work and family.
Empire of Sin: A Story of Sex, Jazz, Murder, and the Battle for Modern New Orleans
Krist, Gary
(Paperback)
List Price: $16.00 Sale: $5.51
From bestselling author Gary Krist, a vibrant and immersive account of New Orleans’ other civil war, at a time when commercialized vice, jazz culture, and endemic crime defined the battlegrounds of the Crescent City.Empire of Sin re-creates the remarkable story of New Orleans' thirty-years war against itself, pitting the city’s elite "better half" against its powerful and long-entrenched underworld of vice, perversity, and crime. This early-20th-century battle centers on one man: Tom Anderson, the undisputed czar of the city's Storyville vice district, who fights desperately to keep his empire intact as it faces onslaughts from all sides. Surrounding him are the stories of flamboyant prostitutes, crusading moral reformers, dissolute jazzmen, ruthless Mafiosi, venal politicians, and one extremely violent serial killer, all battling for primacy in a wild and wicked city unlike any other in the world.
Deeper Dating
Page, Ken
(Paperback)
List Price: $14.95 Sale: $5.51
Act confident. Play hard to get. This approach to dating doesn’t lead to love, it leads to insecurity and loneliness. In Deeper Dating, psychotherapist Ken Page offers a new path to finding meaningful and lasting relationships.
Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea
Duneier, Mitchell
(Paperback)
List Price: $16.00 Sale: $5.77
In this sweeping and original account, Mitchell Duneier traces the idea of the ghetto from its beginnings in the sixteenth century and its revival by the Nazis to the present. As Duneier shows, we cannot comprehend the entanglements of race, poverty, and place in America today without recalling the ghettos of Europe, as well as earlier efforts to understand the problems of the American city. Ghetto is the story of the scholars and activists who tried to achieve that understanding. Using new and forgotten sources, Duneier introduces us to the pioneering sociologists Horace Cayton, St. Clair Drake, and William Julius Wilson; the psychologist Kenneth Clark; Daniel Patrick Moynihan and his controversial report on the black family; and the education reformer Geoffrey Canada. Duneier offers a clear-eyed assessment of these and other thinkers and doers who have shaped American ideas about the ghetto. The result is a valuable new estimation of an age-old concept.
The Lives of a Cell
Thomas, Lewis
(Paperback)
List Price: $15.00 Sale: $6.02
Elegant, suggestive, and clarifying, Lewis Thomas's profoundly humane vision explores the world around us and examines the complex interdependence of all things. Extending beyond the usual limitations of biological science and into a vast and wondrous world of hidden relationships, this provocative book explores in personal, poetic essays topics such as computers, germs, language, music, death, insects, and medicine.
Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America
Macy, Beth
(Hardcover)
List Price: $28.00 Sale: $8.74
In this masterful work, Beth Macy takes us into the epicenter of America's twenty-plus year struggle with opioid addiction. From distressed small communities in Central Appalachia to wealthy suburbs; from disparate cities to once-idyllic farm towns; it's a heartbreaking trajectory that illustrates how this national crisis has persisted for so long and become so firmly entrenched.Beginning with a single dealer who lands in a small Virginia town and sets about turning high school football stars into heroin overdose statistics, Macy endeavors to answer a grieving mother's question - why her only son died - and comes away with a harrowing story of greed and need. From the introduction of OxyContin in 1996, Macy parses how America embraced a medical culture where overtreatment with painkillers became the norm. In some of the same distressed communities featured in her bestselling book Factory Man, the unemployed use painkillers both to numb the pain of joblessness and pay their bills, while privileged teens trade pills in cul-de-sacs, and even high school standouts fall prey to prostitution, jail, and death.Through unsparing, yet deeply human portraits of the families and first responders struggling to ameliorate this epidemic, each facet of the crisis comes into focus. In these politically fragmented times, Beth Macy shows, astonishingly, that the only thing that unites Americans across geographic and class lines is opioid drug abuse. But in a country unable to provide basic healthcare for all, Macy still finds reason to hope - and signs of the spirit and tenacity necessary in those facing addiction to build a better future for themselves and their families.
The Mirage Factory: Illusion, Imagination, and the Invention of Los Angeles
Krist, Gary
(Paperback)
List Price: $17.00 Sale: $6.02
From bestselling author Gary Krist, the story of the metropolis that never should have been and the visionaries who dreamed it into realityLittle more than a century ago, the southern coast of California—bone-dry, harbor-less, isolated by deserts and mountain ranges—seemed destined to remain scrappy farmland. Then, as if overnight, one of the world’s iconic cities emerged. At the heart of Los Angeles’ meteoric rise were three flawed visionaries: William Mulholland, an immigrant ditch-digger turned self-taught engineer, designed the massive aqueduct that would make urban life here possible. D.W. Griffith, who transformed the motion picture from a vaudeville-house novelty into a cornerstone of American culture, gave L.A. its signature industry. And Aimee Semple McPherson, a charismatic evangelist who founded a religion, cemented the city’s identity as a center for spiritual exploration.All were masters of their craft, but also illusionists, of a kind. The images they conjured up—of a blossoming city in the desert, of a factory of celluloid dreamworks, of a community of seekers finding personal salvation under the California sun—were like mirages liable to evaporate on closer inspection. All three would pay a steep price to realize these dreams, in a crescendo of hubris, scandal, and catastrophic failure of design that threatened to topple each of their personal empires. Yet when the dust settled, the mirage that was LA remained.Spanning the years from 1900 to 1930, The Mirage Factory is the enthralling tale of an improbable city and the people who willed it into existence by pushing the limits of human engineering and imagination.
Little Princes
Grennan, Conor
(Paperback)
List Price: $14.99 Sale: $4.66
In search of adventure, twenty-nine-year-old Conor Grennan traded his day job for a year-long trip around the globe, a journey that began with a three-month stint volunteering at the Little Princes Children's Home, an orphanage in war-torn Nepal. Conor was initially reluctant to volunteer, unsure whether he had the proper skill, or enough passion, to get involved in a developing country in the middle of a civil war. But he was soon overcome by the herd of rambunctious, resilient children who would challenge and reward him in a way that he had never imagined. When Conor learned the unthinkable truth about their situation, he was stunned: The children were not orphans at all. Child traffickers were promising families in remote villages to protect their children from the civil war - for a huge fee - by taking them to safety. They would then abandon the children far from home, in the chaos of Nepal's capital, Kathmandu. For Conor, what began as a footloose adventure becomes a commitment to reunite the children he had grown to love with their families, but this would be no small task. He would risk his life on a journey through the legendary mountains of Nepal, facing the dangers of a bloody civil war and a debilitating injury. Waiting for Conor back in Kathmandu, and hopeful he would make it out before being trapped in by snow, was the woman who would eventually become his wife and share his life's work. Little Princes is a true story of families and children, and what one person is capable of when faced with seemingly insurmountable odds. At turns tragic, joyful, and hilarious, Little Princes is a testament to the power of faith and the ability of love to carry us beyond our wildest expectations.
Bleeding Out: The Devastating Consequences of Urban Violence - and a Bold New Plan for Peace in the Streets
Abt, Thomas
(Hardcover)
List Price: $30.00 Sale: $7.72
From a Harvard scholar and former Obama official, a powerful proposal for curtailing violent crime in America Urban violence is one of the most divisive and allegedly intractable issues of our time. But as Harvard scholar Thomas Abt shows in Bleeding Out, we actually possess all the tools necessary to stem violence in our cities.Coupling the latest social science with firsthand experience as a crime-fighter, Abt proposes a relentless focus on violence itself -- not drugs, gangs, or guns. Because violence is "sticky," clustering among small groups of people and places, it can be predicted and prevented using a series of smart-on-crime strategies that do not require new laws or big budgets. Bringing these strategies together, Abt offers a concrete, cost-effective plan to reduce homicides by over 50 percent in eight years, saving more than 12,000 lives nationally. Violence acts as a linchpin for urban poverty, so curbing such crime can unlock the untapped potential of our cities' most disadvantaged communities and help us to bridge the nation's larger economic and social divides.Urgent yet hopeful, Bleeding Out offers practical solutions to the national emergency of urban violence - and challenges readers to demand action.
Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found
Mehta, Suketu
(Paperback)
List Price: $17.00 Sale: $6.62
A native of Bombay, Suketu Mehta gives us an insider’s view of this stunning metropolis. He approaches the city from unexpected angles, taking us into the criminal underworld of rival Muslim and Hindu gangs; following the life of a bar dancer raised amid poverty and abuse; opening the door into the inner sanctums of Bollywood; and delving into the stories of the countless villagers who come in search of a better life and end up living on the sidewalks.
Achtung Baby: An American Mom on the German Art of Raising Self-Reliant Children
Zaske, Sara
(Paperback)
List Price: $17.00 Sale: $3.30
When Sara Zaske moved from Oregon to Berlin with her husband and toddler, she knew the transition would be challenging, especially when she became pregnant with her second child. She was surprised to discover that German parents give their children a great deal of freedom - much more than Americans. In Berlin, kids walk to school by themselves, ride the subway alone, cut food with sharp knives, and even play with fire. German parents did not share her fears, and their children were thriving. Was she doing the opposite of what she intended, which was toraise capable children? Why was parenting culture so different in the States?Through her own family’s often funny experiences as well as interviews with other parents, teachers, and experts, Zaske shares the many unexpected parenting lessons she learned from living in Germany. Achtung Baby reveals that today's Germans know something that American parents don't (or have perhaps forgotten) about raising kids with “selbstandigkeit” (self-reliance), and provides practical examples American parents can use to give their own children the freedom they need to grow into responsible, independent adults.
Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America
Quart, Alissa
(Paperback)
List Price: $16.99 Sale: $6.02
Families today are squeezed on every side - from nearly unaffordable housing, education, and childcare costs to stagnant wages and the rise of the gig economy. For this generation, attaining the standard of living their parents managed has become nearly impossible.Powerfully argued, deeply reported, and ultimately hopeful, Squeezed casts a bright, clarifying light on families struggling to thrive. It will make readers think differently about their lives and those of their neighbors.
Every Day in Tuscany - Seasons of an Italian Life
Mayes, Frances
(Paperback)
List Price: $15.00 Sale: $6.24
In this sequel to her New York Times bestsellers Under the Tuscan Sun and Bella Tuscany, the celebrated "bard of Tuscany" (New York Times) lyrically chronicles her continuing, two decades-long love affair with Tuscany's people, art, cuisine, and lifestyle.
True Notebooks: A Writer's Year at Juvenile Hall
Salzman, Mark
(Softcover)
List Price: $15.00 Sale: $4.66
In 1997 Mark Salzman, bestselling author Iron and Silk and Lying Awake, paid a reluctant visit to a writing class at L.A.’s Central Juvenile Hall, a lockup for violent teenage offenders, many of them charged with murder. What he found so moved and astonished him that he began to teach there regularly. In voices of indelible emotional presence, the boys write about what led them to crime and about the lives that stretch ahead of them behind bars. We see them coming to terms with their crime-ridden pasts and searching for a reason to believe in their future selves. Insightful, comic, honest and tragic, True Notebooks is an object lesson in the redemptive power of writing.
The Sacred Canopy
Berger, Peter L.
(Paperback)
List Price: $12.00 Sale: $5.09
This important contribution to the sociology of religion provides an analysis which clarifies the often ironic interaction between religion and society.
Why Religion? A Personal Story
Pagels, Elaine
(Hardcover)
List Price: $27.99 Sale: $9.17
Why is religion still around in the twenty-first century? Why do so many still believe? And how do various traditions still shape the way people experience everything from sexuality to politics, whether they are religious or not? In Why Religion? Elaine Pagels looks to her own life to help address these questions.These questions took on a new urgency for Pagels when dealing with unimaginable loss - the death of her young son, followed a year later by the shocking loss of her husband. Here she interweaves a personal story with the work that she loves, illuminating how, for better and worse, religious traditions have shaped how we understand ourselves; how we relate to one another; and, most importantly, how to get through the most difficult challenges we face.Drawing upon the perspectives of neurologists, anthropologists, and historians, as well as her own research, Pagels opens unexpected ways of understanding persistent religious aspects of our culture.A provocative and deeply moving account from one of the most compelling religious thinkers at work today, Why Religion? explores the spiritual dimension of human experience.
Personal Politics
Evans, Sara
(Paperback)
List Price: $14.75 Sale: $6.24
Shows how women civil rights activists gained enough confidence to rebel against the narrowly defined roles available to them in these male-dominated movements.
Mommy Burnout: How to Reclaim Your Life and Raise Healthier Children in the Process
Ziegler, Sheryl
(Paperback)
List Price: $16.99 Sale: $5.09
Modern motherhood is something very different from what our grandmothers and mothers experienced. The pressure to pack the most healthy, balanced lunches for your children, enroll them in enriching extracurricular activities, the birthday party bonanza that must be post-worthy, and the pressure to get your kids into the right school - these are today's concerns. Add in work-life balance, disconnection from friends and families, and a healthy dose of social media-induced anxiety and you've got a recipe for disaster. Being everything to everyone is just too much pressure and the cracks are starting to show. And the fallout goes beyond moms - it is affecting our husbands, partners, colleagues, and especially our kids. So how do we stop the burnout cycle?From years of personal and professional practice, Dr. Sheryl Ziegler, a Denver-based child psychotherapist who has counseled families and children for two decades, has devised a prescriptive program for addressing this epidemic - teaching moms that they can find ways to reenergize themselves and not get mired in guilt. Filled with real stories from real moms and empowering, proven solutions, Mommy Burnout offers the hope modern moms need to save marriages, keep kids happy, and most important, heal themselves.
Drop the Ball: Achieving More by Doing Less
Dufu, Tiffany
(Paperback)
List Price: $16.99 Sale: $3.30
A bold and inspiring memoir and manifesto from a renowned voice in the women's leadership movement who shows women how to cultivate the single skill they really need in order to thrive: the ability to let go.Once the poster girl for doing it all, after she had her first child, Tiffany Dufu struggled to accomplish everything she thought she needed to in order to succeed. Like so many driven and talented women who have been brought up to believe that to have it all, they must do it all, Dufu began to feel that achieving her career and personal goals was an impossibility. Eventually, she discovered the solution: letting go. In Drop the Ball, Dufu recounts how she learned to reevaluate expectations, shrink her to-do list, and meaningfully engage the assistance of others - freeing the space she needed to flourish at work and to develop deeper, more meaningful relationships at home.Even though women are half the workforce, they still represent only eighteen per cent of the highest level leaders. The reasons are obvious: just as women reach middle management they are also starting families. Mounting responsibilities at work and home leave them with no bandwidth to do what will most lead to their success. Offering new perspective on why the women’s leadership movement has stalled, and packed with actionable advice, Tiffany Dufu’s Drop the Ball urges women to embrace imperfection, to expect less of themselves and more from others - only then can they focus on what they truly care about, devote the necessary energy to achieving their real goals, and create the type of rich, rewarding life we all desire.
This Land: America, Lost and Found
Barry, Dan
(Hardcover)
List Price: $29.99 Sale: $7.38
A landmark collection by New York Times journalist Dan Barry, selected from a decade of his distinctive "This Land" columns and presenting a powerful but rarely seen portrait of America.In the wake of Hurricane Katrina and on the eve of a national recession, New York Times writer Dan Barry launched a column about America: not the one populated only by cable-news pundits, but the America defined and redefined by those who clean the hotel rooms, tend the beet fields, endure disasters both natural and manmade. As the name of the president changed from Bush to Obama to Trump, Barry was crisscrossing the country, filing deeply moving stories from the tiniest dot on the American map to the city that calls itself the Capital of the World.Complemented by the select images of award-winning Times photographers, these narrative and visual snapshots of American life create a majestic tapestry of our shared experience, capturing how our nation is at once flawed and exceptional, paralyzed and ascendant, as cruel and violent as it can be gentle and benevolent.
How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America
Bayoumi, Moustafa
(Paperback)
List Price: $17.00 Sale: $5.77
An eye-opening look at how young Arab- and Muslim- Americans are forging lives for themselves in a country that often mistakes them for the enemy Just over a century ago , W.E.B. Du Bois posed a probing question in his classic The Souls of Black Folk: How does it feel to be a problem? Now, Moustafa Bayoumi asks the same about America's new "problem" - Arab- and Muslim-Americans. Bayoumi takes readers into the lives of seven twenty-somethings living in Brooklyn, home to the largest Arab-American population in the United States. He moves beyond stereotypes and cliches to reveal their often unseen struggles, from being subjected to government surveillance to the indignities of workplace discrimination. Through it all, these young men and women persevere through triumphs and setbacks as they help weave the tapestry of a new society that is, at its heart, purely American.
Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution
Sadik-Khan, Janette
(Paperback)
List Price: $20.00 Sale: $7.38
If you can change the street, you can change the world. As New York City's transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan reengineered one of the world's greatest, toughest cities into a dynamic space safe for pedestrians and bikers. Streetfight is how she did it.
The Immoral Majority: Why Evangelicals Chose Political Power over Christian Values
Howe, Ben
(Hardcover)
List Price: $26.99 Sale: $9.17
Evangelicals are losing the culture war. What if it’s their fault?In 2016, writer and filmmaker Ben Howe found himself disillusioned with the religious movement he’d always called home. In the pursuit of electoral victory, many American evangelicals embraced moral relativism and toxic partisanship. Whatever happened to the Moral Majority, who headed to Washington in the ’80s to plant the flag of Christian values? Where were the Christian leaders that emerged from that movement and led the charge against Bill Clinton for his deception and unfaithfulness? Was all that a sham? Or have they just lost sight of why they wanted to win in the first place? From the 1980s scandals till today, evangelicals have often been caricatured as a congregation of judgmental and prudish rubes taken in by thundering pastors consumed with greed and lust for power. Did the critics have a point?In The Immoral Majority, Howe - still a believer and still deeply conservative - analyzes and debunks the intellectual dishonesty and manipulative rhetoric which evangelical leaders use to convince Christians to toe the Republican Party line. He walks us through the history of the Christian Right, as well as the events of the last three decades which led to the current state of the conservative movement at large. As long as evangelicals prioritize power over persuasion, Howe argues, their pews will be empty and their national influence will dwindle. If evangelicals hope to avoid cultural irrelevance going forward, it will mean valuing the eternal over the ephemeral, humility over ego, and resisting the seduction of political power, no matter the cost. The Immoral Majority demonstrates how the Religious Right is choosing the profits of this world at the cost of its soul - and why it’s not too late to change course.
Talk to Me: Like I'm Someone You Love
Dreyfus, Nancy
(Softcover)
List Price: $17.95 Sale: $7.38
We've all been there. A conversation with a loved one escalates into conflict. Voices rise to a fever pitch and angry, accusative words fly through the air. At times like these, it seems impossible to find the magic words that will lead to healing. Enter "Talk to Me Like I'm Someone You Love." A psychotherapist with decades of experience in counseling couples, Nancy Dreyfus hit upon the revolutionary practice outlined in this book during a couples-therapy session in which a wife's unrelenting criticism of her husband was causing him to become emotionally withdrawn. In the midst of this, Dreyfus found herself scribbling on a scrap of paper, "Talk to me like I'm someone you love" and gestured to the husband that he should hold it up. He did and within seconds the familiar power differential between the two shifted, and a gentler, more genuine connection emerged. Dreyfus was startled, then intrigued, and then motivated to create a tool that could help others.
The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in Americ a
Chua, Amy
(Paperback)
List Price: $17.00 Sale: $4.15
Mormons have recently risen to astonishing business success. Cubans in Miami climbed from poverty to prosperity in a generation. Nigerians earn doctorates at stunningly high rates. Indian and Chinese Americans have much higher incomes than other Americans; Jews may have the highest of all.Why do some groups rise? Drawing on groundbreaking original research and startling statistics, The Triple Package uncovers the secret to their success. A superiority complex, insecurity, impulse control - these are the elements of the Triple Package, the rare and potent cultural constellation that drives disproportionate group success. The Triple Package is open to anyone. America itself was once a Triple Package culture. It’s been losing that edge for a long time now. Even as headlines proclaim the death of upward mobility in America, the truth is that the old fashioned American Dream is very much alive - but some groups have a cultural edge, which enables them to take advantage of opportunity far more than others.
Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul
Moss, Jeremiah
(Hardcover)
List Price: $28.99 Sale: $10.10
An unflinching portrait of gentrification in the twenty-first century, and a love letter to lost New York, by the creator of the popular and incendiary blog Vanishing New York.
The All-or-Nothing Marriage: How the Best Marriages Work
Finkel, Eli J.
(Hardcover)
List Price: $28.00 Sale: $10.10
Eli J. Finkel's insightful and ground-breaking investigation of marriage clearly shows that the best marriages today are better than the best marriages of earlier eras. Indeed, they are the best marriages the world has ever known. He presents his findings here for the first time in this lucid, inspiring guide to modern marital bliss.The All-or-Nothing Marriage reverse engineers fulfilling marriages - from the "traditional" to the utterly nontraditional - and shows how any marriage can be better.The primary function of marriage from 1620 to 1850 was food, shelter, and protection from violence; from 1850 to 1965, the purpose revolved around love and companionship. But today, a new kind of marriage has emerged, one oriented toward self-discover, self-esteem, and personal growth. Finkel combines cutting-edge scientific research with practical advice; he considers paths to better communication and responsiveness; he offers guidance on when to recalibrate our expectations; and he even introduces a set of must-try "lovehacks."This is a book for the newlywed to the empty nester, for those thinking about getting married or remarried, and for anyone looking for illuminating advice that will make a real difference to getting the most out of marriage today.
Hungry for Change
Colquhoun, James
(Paperback)
List Price: $15.99 Sale: $5.09
With Hungry for Change you'll discover: Amazingly delicious, nutritious recipes What to buy and what to avoid at the supermarket The truth behind diet, sugar-free, and fat-free products How to overcome food addictions and cravings Why fad diets don't work How to read labels and what food additives to avoid The most effective detox and cleansing strategies How to eat for clear eyes, glowing skin, and healthy hair Featuring: Dr. Alejandro Junger, Dr. Christiane Northrup, Kris Carr, David Wolfe, Dr. Joseph Mercola, Mike Adams, Joe Cross, Jon Gabriel, Harvey Diamond, Daniel Vitalis, and more!
Gig: Americans Talk about Their Jobs
Bowe, John
(Paperback)
List Price: $16.00 Sale: $6.75
For three years, the editors of Word, a leading web magazine, sent interviewers all over America to question people about their work. There are the conventional jobs - lawyer, nurse, steelworker, actor, journalist; the not so conventional jobs - clutter consultant, adhesives company sales rep, heavy metal roadie, buffalo rancher, supermodel; and the just plain bizarre job - crime scene cleaner, adult web mistress, Elvis Presley interpreter, telephone psychic, Wal-Mart Greeter. And everything in between - 120 different jobs in total. Inspired by Studs Terkel's 1972 classic book, Working, these interviews have spawned a collection of fabulous monologues: people talking about what their jobs are really like and how they make them feel about themselves. Told in roughly textured first person voices, these monologues are mesmerizing and addictive, and as a whole give us an understanding of how much the workplace has changed since Studs Terkel put pen to paper - and how much it has stayed the same.
And Still I Rise: Black America Since MLK
Burke, Kevin M.
(Hardcover)
List Price: $35.00 Sale: $11.04
The companion book to Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s PBS series, And Still I Rise—a timeline and chronicle of the past fifty years of black history in the U.S. in more than 350 photos. Beginning with the assassination of Malcolm X in February 1965, And Still I Rise: From Black Power to the White House explores the last half-century of the African American experience. More than fifty years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the birth of Black Power, the United States has both a black president and black CEOs running Fortune 500 companies—and a large black underclass beset by persistent poverty, inadequate education, and an epidemic of incarceration. Harvard professor and scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. raises disturbing and vital questions about this dichotomy. How did the African American community end up encompassing such profound contradictions? And what will “the black community” mean tomorrow? Gates takes readers through the major historical events and untold stories of the sixty years that have irrevocably shaped both the African American experience and the nation as a whole, from the explosive social and political changes of the 1960s, into the 1970s and 1980s—eras characterized by both prosperity and neglect—through the turn of the century to today, taking measure of such racial flashpoints as the Tawana Brawley case, OJ Simpson’s murder trial, the murders of Amadou Diallo and Trayvon Martin, and debates around the NYPD’s “stop and frisk” policies. Even as it surveys the political and social evolution of black America, And Still I Rise is also a celebration of the accomplishments of black artists, musicians, writers, comedians, and thinkers who have helped to define American popular culture and to change our world.
Grateful: The Subversive Practice of Giving Thanks
Bass, Diana Butler
(Paperback)
List Price: $16.99 Sale: $6.87
If gratitude is good, why is it so hard to do? In Grateful, Diana Butler Bass untangles our conflicting understandings of gratitude and sets the table for a renewed practice of giving thanks.We know that gratitude is good, but many of us find it hard to sustain a meaningful life of gratefulness. Four out of five Americans report feeling gratitude on a regular basis, but those private feelings seem disconnected from larger concerns of our public lives. In Grateful, cultural observer and theologian Diana Butler Bass takes on this “gratitude gap” and offers up surprising, relevant, and powerful insights to practice gratitude.Bass, author of the award-winning Grounded and ten other books on spirituality and culture, explores the transformative, subversive power of gratitude for our personal lives and in communities. Using her trademark blend of historical research, spiritual insights, and timely cultural observation, she shows how we can overcome this gap and make change in our own lives and in the world.With honest stories and heartrending examples from history and her own life, Bass reclaims gratitude as a path to greater connection with god, with others, with the world, and even with our own souls. It’s time to embrace a more radical practice of gratitude—the virtue that heals us and helps us thrive.
The Mind at Work
Rose, Mike
(Paperback)
List Price: $17.00 Sale: $4.15
Integrating personal stories of his own working-class family with interviews, vivid snapshots of people on the job, and current research in social science and cognitive psychology, Rose draws a brilliantly original portrait of America at work.
American Dreams
Brands, H. W.
(Paperback)
List Price: $18.00 Sale: $4.15
The story of our nation from the A-bomb to the iPhone-from bestselling historian H.W. Brands With keen insight and an impeccable sense of the spirit of the times, H. W. Brands, one of today's preeminent historians, captures the American experience through the last six decades. As he chronicles politics, pop culture, and everything in between, Brands traces the changes we have gone through as a nation, recounting the great themes and events that have driven America - from the Yalta conference to the fall of the Berlin Wall, Apollo 11 to 9/11, My Lai to "shock and awe." In his adroit hands, movements and trends unfold through a character-driven narrative that shines a brilliant light on America's watershed moments and reveals a still unfolding legacy of dreams.
The Dressmaker of Khair Khana
Lemmon, Gayle Tzemach
(Paperback)
List Price: $14.99 Sale: $6.24
Kamila Sidiqi's life changed overnight when the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan. After her father and brother were forced to flee, she became the sole breadwinner for her five siblings. Banned from school, confined to her home, and armed only with determination, she picked up a needle and thread to create a thriving business that saved their lives. The Dressmaker of Khair Khana tells the incredible true story of this unlikely entrepreneur who mobilized her community under the Taliban. A story of war, it is also a story of family, faith, and resilience in the face of despair. These women are not victims - they are the glue that holds families together; they are the backbone and the heart of their nation. Kamila Sidiqi's journey will inspire you, but it will also change the way you think about one of the most important political and humanitarian issues of our time.
Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life
Aries, Philippe
(Paperback)
List Price: $19.95 Sale: $5.51
The theme of this extraordinary book is the evolution of the modern conception of family life and the modern image; of the nature of children. Aries traces the evolution of the concept of childhood from the end of the Middle Ages, when the child was regarded as a small adult, to the present child-centered society, by means of diaries, paintings, games, and school curricula.Ironically, he finds that individualism, far from triumphing in our time, has been held in check by the family, and that the increasing power of the tightly-knit family circle has flourished at the expense of the rich-textured communal society of earlier times. Translated from the French by Robert Baldick.
Hospital: Man, Woman, Birth, Death, Infinity, Plus Red Tape, Bad Behavior, Money, God, and Diversity on Steroids
Salamon, Julie
(Paperback)
List Price: $17.00 Sale: $4.15
A warts-and-all exploration of the struggles suffered and triumphs achieved by America's health-care professionals, Hospital follows a year in the life of Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, which serves a diverse multicultural demographic. Unraveling the financial, ethical, technological, sociological, and cultural challenges encountered every day, bestselling author Julie Salamon tracks the individuals who make this complex hospital run - from doctors, patients, and administrators to nurses, ambulance drivers, cooks, and cleaners. Drawing on her skills as an award-winning interviewer, observer, and social critic, Salamon reveals the dynamic universe of small and large concerns and personalities that, taken together, determine the nature of care in America.
Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear
Brooks, Kim
(Hardcover)
List Price: $26.99 Sale: $2.46
One morning, Kim Brooks made a split-second decision to leave her four-year old son in the car while she ran into a store. She was gone for only a few minutes, and when she came back he was still happily absorbed in a game. What Brooks didn't know was that a stranger had filmed her and would go on to send the video to the police.The fallout from this single moment would consume the next several years of Kim's life and spur her to investigate the broader role America’s culture of fear plays in parenthood. In Small Animals, Brooks asks, Of all the emotions inherent in parenting, is there any more universal or profound than fear? Why have our notions of what it means to be a good parent changed so radically? In what ways do these changes impact the lives of parents, children, and the structure of society at large? And what, in the end, does the rise of fearful parenting tell us about ourselves?Fueled by urgency and the emotional intensity of Brooks’s own story, Small Animals is a riveting examination of the ways our culture of competitive, anxious, and judgmental parenting has profoundly altered the experiences of parents and children. In her signature style - by turns funny, penetrating, and always illuminating - which has dazzled millions of fans and been called "striking" by New York Times Book Review and "beautiful" by the National Book Critics Circle, Brooks offers a provocative, compelling portrait of parenthood in America and calls us to examine what we most value in our relationships with our children and one another.
Broke: Hardship and Resilience in a City of Broken Promises
Kirshner, Jodie Adams
(Hardcover)
List Price: $28.99 Sale: $5.51
A Galvanizing, narrative account of a city's bankruptcy and its aftermath told through the lives of seven valiantly struggling DetroitersBankruptcy and the austerity it represents have become a common "solution" for struggling American cities. What do the spending cuts and limited resources do to the lives of city residents? In Broke, Jodie Adams Kirshner follows seven Detroiters as they navigate life during and after their city's bankruptcy. Reggie loses his savings trying to make a habitable home for his family. Cindy fights drug use, prostitution, and dumping on her block. Lola commutes two hours a day to her suburban job. For them, financial issues are mired within the larger ramifications of poor urban policies, restorative negligence on the state and federal level and - even before the decision to declare Detroit bankrupt in 2013 - the root causes of a city's fiscal demise.Like Matthew Desmond's Evicted, Broke looks at what municipal distress means, not just on paper but in practical - and personal - terms. More than 40 percent of Detroit's 700,000 residents fall below the poverty line. Post-bankruptcy, they struggle with a broken real estate market, school system, and job market - and their lives have not improved.Detroit is emblematic. Kirshner makes a powerful argument that cities - the economic engine of America - are never guite given the aid that they need by either the state or federal government for their resident's to survive, not to mention flourish. Success for all American's citizens depends on equity of opportunity.
Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey into the Heart of America
Fallows, Deborah
(Hardcover)
List Price: $28.95 Sale: $8.74
***NATIONAL BEST SELLER***A vivid, surprising portrait of the civic and economic reinvention taking place in America, town by town and generally out of view of the national media. A realistically positive and provocative view of the country between its coasts. For the last five years, James and Deborah Fallows have been traveling across America in a single-engine prop airplane. Visiting dozens of towns, they have met hundreds of civic leaders, workers, immigrants, educators, environmentalists, artists, public servants, librarians, business people, city planners, students, and entrepreneurs to take the pulse and understand the prospects of places that usually draw notice only after a disaster or during a political campaign. The America they saw is acutely conscious of its problems—from economic dislocation to the opioid scourge—but itis also crafting solutions, with a practical-minded determination at dramatic odds with the bitter paralysis of national politics. At times of dysfunction on a national level, reform possibilities have often arisen from the local level. The Fallowses describe America in the middle of one of these creative waves. Their view of the country is as complex and contradictory as America itself, but it also reflects the energy, the generosity and compassion, the dreams, and the determination of many who are in the midst of making things better. Our Towns is the story of their journey—and an account of a country busy remaking itself.
The Rocket Years
Segran, Elizabeth
(Hardcover)
List Price: $26.99 Sale: $8.32
The Defining Decade for the #Adulting generation—a book that blends storytelling and data to unpack the choices you make in your twenties, why they matter, and how to turn those critical years into a launchpad for the life you want.We tend to think of our twenties as a playground for life: A time for low-consequence experimentation and delaying big decisions. But the truth is that while you’re muddling through those years—exploring new cities, dating the wrong people, hopping between jobs—a small shift in your flight path can mean the difference between landing on Mars or Saturn.As the data shows, the choices we make (or put off) during this critical decade about our career, marriage, health, friends, even downtime have the greatest impact on how our lives play out. For example, did you know that people who marry between the ages of 28 and 32 have the lowest risk of divorce? And that the average 25 year old has 20 close friends, but this will shrink to 8 after age 40? And that most of us don’t acquire new hobbies after we hit our thirties?Rather than prescribing one correct path (who are we kidding, there’s no such thing anyway!), Elizabeth Segran invites readers to think critically and holistically about the life they want to build. With signature warmth and humor, Segran is the guide we all wish we had to show us the way. Blending insightful anecdotes with research from economics, sociology, and political science, The Rocket Years is an empowering exploration of these exciting, confusing, wonderful years.
Have Him at Hello
Greenwald, Rachel
(Softcover)
List Price: $14.99 Sale: $5.51
There's a reason the media has dubbed matchmaker Rachel Greenwald as "The Wife Maker." Yes, she's responsible for over 750 marriages, but more importantly, she has solved perhaps the biggest dating mystery of all time: when you finally meet Mr. Right (or even Mr. Potential), what "really" compels him to call back (or not) after a date? Armed with her Harvard MBA, Rachel embarked on a fascinating ten-year research project to decipher this puzzle. In "Have Him at Hello," she applies her business savvy to the dating world by conducting in-depth "exit interviews" with 1,000 single men, asking why they called back one woman, but not another. By refusing to accept the post-date brush-off like "There wasn't any chemistry..." or the excited, but equally vague evening recap, "We hit it off " Rachel extracted unabashedly honest and raw details. It turns out there are clear, tangible, consistent reasons why marriage-minded men either fall for you or disappear. The surprising "Top 5 Date Makers" and "Top 10 Date Breakers" revealed in this book can actually change your fate when Mr. Right finally comes along. Rachel's goal isn't for you to pretend to be someone you're not, but rather to keep the ball in your court. By using her innovative research and tips as a guide, more men will ask to see you again; then "you "can do the selecting, rather than wondering if they'll call. Because information is power, this book will make your first hello a lasting one.
Venice: Pure City
Ackroyd, Peter
(Paperback)
List Price: $21.00 Sale: $6.02
The Venetians’ language and way of thinking set them aside from the rest of Italy. They are an island people, linked to the sea and to the tides rather than the land. This latest work from the incomparable Peter Ackroyd, like a magic gondola, transports its readers to that sensual and surprising city. His account embraces facts and romance, conjuring up the atmosphere of the canals, bridges, and sunlit squares, the churches and the markets, the festivals and the flowers. He leads us through the history of the city, from the first refugees arriving in the mists of the lagoon in the fourth century to the rise of a great mercantile state and its trading empire, the wars against Napoleon, and the tourist invasions of today. Everything is here: the merchants on the Rialto and the Jews in the ghetto; the glassblowers of Murano; the carnival masks and the sad colonies of lepers; the artists - Bellini, Titian, Tintoretto, Tiepolo. And the ever-present undertone of Venice’s shadowy corners and dead ends, of prisons and punishment, wars and sieges, scandals and seductions.Ackroyd’s Venice: Pure City is a study of Venice much in the vein of his lauded London: The Biography. Like London, Venice is a fluid, writerly exploration organized around a number of themes. History and context are provided in each chapter, but Ackroyd’s portrait of Venice is a particularly novelistic one, both beautiful and rapturous. We could have no better guide - reading Venice: Pure City is, in itself, a glorious journey to the ultimate city.
Lust in Translation: Infidelity from Tokyo to Tennessee
Druckerman, Pamela
(Softcover)
List Price: $15.00 Sale: $5.51
Compared to the citizens of just about every other nation, Americans are the least adept at having affairs, have the most trouble enjoying them, and suffer the most in their aftermath and Pamela Druckerman has the facts to prove it. The journalist's surprising findings include: Russian spouses don't count beach resort flings as infidelity. South Africans consider drunkenness an adequate excuse for extramarital sex. Japanese businessmen believe, "If you pay, it's not cheating." Voyeuristic and packed with eyebrow-raising statistics and interviews, Lust in Translation is her funny and fact-filled world tour of infidelity that will give new meaning to the phrase "practicing monogamy."
Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World
Gelfand, Michele
(Hardcover)
List Price: $28.00 Sale: $8.32
In Rule Makers, Rule Breakers celebrated cultural psychologist Michele Gelfand takes us on an epic journey through human cultures, offering a startling new view of the world and ourselves. With a mix of brilliantly conceived studies and surprising on-the-ground discoveries, she shows that much of the diversity in the way we think and act derives from a key difference - how tightly or loosely we adhere to social norms.Why are clocks in Germany so accurate while those in Brazil are frequently wrong? Why do New Zealand’s women have the highest number of sexual partners? Why are “Red” and “Blue” States really so divided? Why was the Daimler-Chrysler merger ill-fated from the start? Why is the driver of a Jaguar more likely to run a red light than the driver of a plumber’s van? Why does one spouse prize running a “tight ship” while the other refuses to “sweat the small stuff?”In search of a common answer, Gelfand has spent two decades conducting research in more than fifty countries. Across all age groups, family variations, social classes, businesses, states and nationalities, she’s identified a primal pattern that can trigger cooperation or conflict. Her fascinating conclusion: behavior is highly influenced by the perception of threat.With an approach that is consistently riveting, Rule Makers, Rule Breakers thrusts many of the puzzling attitudes and actions we observe into sudden and surprising clarity.
We Speak for Ourselves: How Woke Culture Prohibits Progress
Watkins, D.
(Paperback)
List Price: $16.00 Sale: $5.51
From the row houses of Baltimore to the stoops of Brooklyn, the New York Times bestselling author of The Cook Up lays bare the voices of the most vulnerable and allows their stories to uncover the systematic injustice threaded within our society. Watkins introduces you to Down Bottom, the storied community of East Baltimore that holds a mirror to America’s poor black neighborhoods—“hoods” that could just as easily be in Chicago, Detroit, Oakland, or Atlanta. As Watkins sees it, the perspective of people who live in economically disadvantaged black communities is largely absent from the commentary of many top intellectuals who speak and write about race.Unapologetic and sharp-witted, D. Watkins is here to tell the truth as he has seen it. We Speak for Ourselves offers an in-depth analysis of inner-city hurdles and honors the stories therein. We sit in underfunded schools, walk the blocks burdened with police corruption, stand within an audience of Make America Great Again hats, journey from trap house to university lecture, and rally in neglected streets. And we listen.
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