en-US Thu, 10 Apr 2025 18:26:03 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 58065033 390 Bonnie Garmus David 0 currently-reading 4.23 2022
author: Bonnie Garmus
name: David
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2022
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]]> 1196125 176 Michael Eliot Howard 0192853627 David 0 3.84 2002
author: Michael Eliot Howard
name: David
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2002
rating: 0
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]]> 49818329
Emotional intelligence affects every aspect of the way we live, from romantic to professional relationships, from our inner resilience to our social success. It is arguably the single most important skill for surviving the twenty-first century. But what does it really mean? One decade ago, Alain de Botton founded The School of Life, an institute dedicated to understanding and improving our emotional intelligence. Now he presents the gathered wisdom of those ten years in a wide-ranging and innovative compendium of emotional intelligence which forms an introduction to The School of Life. Using his trademark mixture of analysis and anecdote, philosophical insight and practical wisdom, he considers how we interact with each and with ourselves, and how we can do so better. From the reigning master of popular philosophy, The School of Life: An Emotional Education is an essential look at the skill set that defines our modern lives.]]> 336 The School of Life 1912891166 David 0 4.21 2019
author: The School of Life
name: David
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2019
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]]> 214269329 In his first major work since The Universal Christ, one of our most prominent spiritual voices offers a wholehearted and hope-filled model for living today, grounded in the timeless words of the Hebrew prophets.

How do we live compassionately in a time of violence and despair? What can we do with our private disappointments and the anger we feel over an unjust world? In his most personal book yet, Richard Rohr turns to the writings of the Jewish prophets, showing how some of the lesser-read books of the Bible offer us a path forward today.

The prophets�� writings echo the spectrum of human development. Beneath their initial fervor and their forceful words, there lies a profound lamentation about our shared human condition and the pain of the world. Yet, in their astute critiques of culture and institutions, and their movement from anger and lament to wholeness and hope, the prophets embody what Rohr calls holy disorder��a distinct approach to confronting malevolence and recognizing the wholeness of every living being.

Drawing on a century of Biblical scholarship and written in the warm, pastoral voice that has endeared millions to Rohr, The Tears of Things breathes new life into ancient wisdom and paves a path of enlightenment for anyone seeking a wholehearted way of living in a hurting world.]]> 208 Richard Rohr 0593735811 David 0 4.43
author: Richard Rohr
name: David
average rating: 4.43
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]]> 19186
Born and raised in Northern Ireland, where any hint of Gaelic tradition in one's speech was considered a political act, Heaney is all too aware of the dire consequences of speaking one's mind. Indeed, during times of crisis, he has been expected to appear on television and dispense political wisdom.

Most often, however, he stays out of the fray and opts for a supreme sense of empathy to guide his words. As excavator--of earth, of his beloved Gaelic, of his own life--Heaney is unmatched. In "Bone Dreams", the archaeologist's task is synonymous with reaching for a cultural past: I push back through dictions, Elizabethan canopies, Norman devices, the erotic mayflowers of Provence and the ivied Latins of churchmen to the scop's twang, the iron flash of consonants cleaving the line.

And in early poems like "Blackberry Picking", Heaney's images--deftly, delightfully--carry us back to childhood fields: At first, just one, a glossy purple clot Among others, red, green, hard as a knot. You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam pots Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots. Round hayfields, cornfields and potato drills We trekked and picked until the cans were full... Opened Ground is a pleasure and a triumph. These three decades of work confirm Heaney as one of the most important poets of his time. --Martha Silano]]> 464 Seamus Heaney 0374526788 David 0 to-read 4.26 1996
author: Seamus Heaney
name: David
average rating: 4.26
book published: 1996
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date added: 2025/03/17
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]]> 24751581 174 Malcolm Guite 1848256795 David 0 currently-reading 4.59 2014
author: Malcolm Guite
name: David
average rating: 4.59
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at: 2023/01/01
date added: 2025/03/16
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]]> 4406
Adam Trask came to California from the East to farm and raise his family on the new rich land. But the birth of his twins, Cal and Aaron, brings his wife to the brink of madness, and Adam is left alone to raise his boys to manhood. One boy thrives nurtured by the love of all those around him; the other grows up in loneliness enveloped by a mysterious darkness.

First published in 1952, East of Eden is the work in which Steinbeck created his most mesmerizing characters and explored his most enduring themes: the mystery of identity, the inexplicability of love, and the murderous consequences of love's absence. A masterpiece of Steinbeck's later years, East of Eden is a powerful and vastly ambitious novel that is at once a family saga and a modern retelling of the Book of Genesis.]]> 601 John Steinbeck 0142000655 David 0 4.41 1952
author: John Steinbeck
name: David
average rating: 4.41
book published: 1952
rating: 0
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]]> 97059 - Parker J. Palmer [from the Introduction] Teachers choose their vocation for reasons of the heart, because they care deeply about their students and about their subject. But the demands of teaching cause too many educators to lose heart. Is it possible to take heart in teaching once more so that we can continue to do what good teachers always do -- give heart to our students? In The Courage to Teach , Parker Palmer takes teachers on an inner journey toward reconnecting with their vocation and their students -- and recovering their passion for one of the most difficult and important of human endeavors.]]> 224 Parker J. Palmer 0787910589 David 0 3.95 1997
author: Parker J. Palmer
name: David
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1997
rating: 0
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]]> 41057294
A year later, they’re both studying at Trinity College in Dublin. Marianne has found her feet in a new social world while Connell hangs at the sidelines, shy and uncertain. Throughout their years in college, Marianne and Connell circle one another, straying toward other people and possibilities but always magnetically, irresistibly drawn back together. Then, as she veers into self-destruction and he begins to search for meaning elsewhere, each must confront how far they are willing to go to save the other.

Sally Rooney brings her brilliant psychological acuity and perfectly spare prose to a story that explores the subtleties of class, the electricity of first love, and the complex entanglements of family and friendship.]]> 273 Sally Rooney 1984822179 David 0 3.81 2018
author: Sally Rooney
name: David
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/27
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]]> 53731495 A novel of family, Midwestern values, hard work, fate and the secrets of making a world-class beer, from the bestselling author of Kitchens of the Great Midwest

Two sisters, one farm. A family is split when their father leaves their shared inheritance entirely to Helen, his younger daughter. Despite baking award-winning pies at the local nursing home, her older sister, Edith, struggles to make what most people would call a living. So she can't help wondering what her life would have been like with even a portion of the farm money her sister kept for herself.

With the proceeds from the farm, Helen builds one of the most successful light breweries in the country, and makes their company motto ubiquitous: "Drink lots. It's Blotz." Where Edith has a heart as big as Minnesota, Helen's is as rigid as a steel keg. Yet one day, Helen will find she needs some help herself, and she could find a potential savior close to home. . . if it's not too late.

Meanwhile, Edith's granddaughter, Diana, grows up knowing that the real world requires a tougher constitution than her grandmother possesses. She earns a shot at learning the IPA business from the ground up--will that change their fortunes forever, and perhaps reunite her splintered family?

Here we meet a cast of lovable, funny, quintessentially American characters eager to make their mark in a world that's often stacked against them. In this deeply affecting family saga, resolution can take generations, but when it finally comes, we're surprised, moved, and delighted.]]> 400 J. Ryan Stradal 0399563067 David 0 4.00 2019
author: J. Ryan Stradal
name: David
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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]]> 53500314 223 Richard Rohr 1632533472 David 0 4.43
author: Richard Rohr
name: David
average rating: 4.43
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]]> 44002898 208 Thomas Keating 1472972090 David 0 4.47 1994
author: Thomas Keating
name: David
average rating: 4.47
book published: 1994
rating: 0
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]]> 51134978 160 Edward Carey 1913547035 David 0 3.51 2020
author: Edward Carey
name: David
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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]]> 139400713 Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others—in which a newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a search that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum.

Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of Tehran in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the Angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.

Electrifying, funny, wholly original, and profound, Martyr! heralds the arrival of a blazing and essential new voice in contemporary fiction.]]> 331 Kaveh Akbar 0593537610 David 0 4.22 2024
author: Kaveh Akbar
name: David
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2024
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]]> 200283776
One of the greatest challenges of our time is the overwhelmingly divisive socio-political climate. Not only in America but also internationally, it seems that almost every issue raises incredibly vocal oppositional views. Not least of all, the persistence of former President Trump and his supporters to disseminate falsehoods through vast networks of disinformation are testaments to these deepening rifts. With so much hostility, antagonism, cynicism, and discord, how can we mend the ruptures in our society?
Acclaimed philosopher Ken Wilber examines these events through the lens of Integral Theory to show what led to these fractures, both in America and around the world—as well as what is needed for humanity to move forward. In his provocative analysis, he explains that the election of Donald Trump was an evolutionary self-correction that had been decades in the making. And he explores how the arising of support for an antagonistic authoritarian represents a backlash against the failure of those at the leading edge of consciousness (postmodernism and pluralism) to acknowledge the challenges that persist amidst our imagined to date, society has been not proven to be equal, and liberty and justice have not been consistent for all. But a new Integral force is emerging that can move beyond the narcissism, nihilism, and cynicism to offer genuine leadership and move us all toward greater wholeness.]]> 184 Ken Wilber 1645473554 David 0 3.71
author: Ken Wilber
name: David
average rating: 3.71
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]]> 173754979 A brilliant reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—both harrowing and satirical—told from the enslaved Jim's point of view

When Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he runs away until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck has faked his own death to escape his violent father. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.

Brimming with nuanced humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a literary icon, this brilliant and tender novel radically illuminates Jim's agency, intelligence, and compassion as never before. James is destined to be a major publishing event and a cornerstone of twenty-first-century American literature.

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780385550369.]]> 303 Percival Everett David 0 4.47 2024
author: Percival Everett
name: David
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2024
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]]> 77265006 An incandescent novel about the inheritance of trauma, wonder, and love across three generations of women.

Nell McDaragh never knew her grandfather, the famed Irish poet Phil McDaragh. But his love poems seem to speak directly to her. Restless, full of verve and wit, twenty-two-year-old Nell leaves her mother Carmel’s home to find her voice as a writer and live a life of her choosing. Carmel, too, knows the magic of her Daddo’s poetry—and the broken promises within its verses. When Phil abandons the family, Carmel struggles to reconcile “the poet�� with the man whose desertion scars Carmel, her sister, and their cancer-ridden mother.

The Wren, the Wren brings to life three generations of women who contend with inheritances—of abandonment and of sustaining love that is “more than a strand of DNA, but a rope thrown from the past, a fat twisted rope, full of blood.�� In sharp prose studded with crystalline poetry, Anne Enright masterfully braids a family story of longing, betrayal, and hope.]]> 278 Anne Enright 1324005696 David 0 3.51 2023
author: Anne Enright
name: David
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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]]> 20170404 An audacious, darkly glittering novel set in the eerie days of civilization’s collapse—the spellbinding story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity.

Kirsten Raymonde will never forget the night Arthur Leander, the famous Hollywood actor, had a heart attack on stage during a production of King Lear. That was the night when a devastating flu pandemic arrived in the city, and within weeks, civilization as we know it came to an end.

Twenty years later, Kirsten moves between the settlements of the altered world with a small troupe of actors and musicians. They call themselves The Traveling Symphony, and they have dedicated themselves to keeping the remnants of art and humanity alive. But when they arrive in St. Deborah by the Water, they encounter a violent prophet who will threaten the tiny band’s existence. And as the story takes off, moving back and forth in time, and vividly depicting life before and after the pandemic, the strange twist of fate that connects them all will be revealed.]]> 333 Emily St. John Mandel 0385353308 David 0 4.05 2014
author: Emily St. John Mandel
name: David
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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]]> 33574273 It was a dark and stormy night.

Out of this wild night, a strange visitor comes to the Murry house and beckons Meg, her brother Charles Wallace, and their friend Calvin O'Keefe on a most dangerous and extraordinary adventure—one that will threaten their lives and our universe.

Winner of the 1963 Newbery Medal, A Wrinkle in Time is the first book in Madeleine L'Engle's classic Time Quintet.]]> 218 Madeleine L'Engle 1250153271 David 0 3.91 1962
author: Madeleine L'Engle
name: David
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1962
rating: 0
read at: 2025/01/29
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]]> 9963483 199 Richard Rohr 0470907754 David 5 4.21 2004
author: Richard Rohr
name: David
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2004
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/28
date added: 2025/01/28
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]]> 199798198
The Grand Canyon is an American treasure, visited by more than 6 million people a year, many of whom are rendered speechless by its vast beauty, mystery, and complexity. Now, in A Walk in the Park , author Kevin Fedarko chronicles his year-long effort to find a 750-mile path along the length of the Grand Canyon, through a vertical wilderness suspended between the caprock along the rims of the abyss and the Colorado River, which flows along its bottom.

Consisting of countless cliffs and steep drops, plus immense stretches with almost no access to water, and the fact that not a single trail links its eastern doorway to its western terminus, this jewel of national parks is so challenging that when Fedarko departed fewer people had completed the journey in one single hike than had walked on the moon. The intensity of the effort required him to break his trip into several legs, each of which held staggering dangers and unexpected discoveries.

Accompanying Fedarko through this sublime yet perilous terrain is the award-winning photographer Peter McBride, who captures the stunning landscape in breathtaking photos. Together, they encounter long-lost Native American ruins, the remains of Old West prospectors�� camps, present day tribal activists, and signs that commercial tourism is impinging on the park’s remote wildness.

An epic adventure, action-packed survival tale, and a deep spiritual journey, A Walk in the Park gives us an unprecedented glimpse of the crown jewel of America’s National an iconic landscape framed by ancient rock whose contours are recognized by all, but whose secrets and treasures are known to almost no one, and whose topography encompasses some of the harshest, least explored, most awe-inspiring terrain in the world.]]> 512 Kevin Fedarko 1501183052 David 0 4.22 2024
author: Kevin Fedarko
name: David
average rating: 4.22
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]]> 162743008 0 Richard Rohr David 0 4.27
author: Richard Rohr
name: David
average rating: 4.27
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]]> 23168277
The Sympathizer is the story of this captain: a man brought up by an absent French father and a poor Vietnamese mother, a man who went to university in America, but returned to Vietnam to fight for the Communist cause. A gripping spy novel, an astute exploration of extreme politics, and a moving love story, The Sympathizer explores a life between two worlds and examines the legacy of the Vietnam War in literature, film, and the wars we fight today.]]> 371 Viet Thanh Nguyen 0802123457 David 0 4.00 2015
author: Viet Thanh Nguyen
name: David
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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]]> 75404 The Amateurs, David Halberstam once again displays the unique brand of reportage, both penetrating and supple, that distinguished his bestselling The Best and the Brightest and October 1964. This time he has taken for his subject the dramatic and special world of amateur rowing. While other athletes are earning fortunes in salaries and-or endorsements, the oarsmen gain fame only with each other and strive without any hope of financial reward.

What drives these men to endure a physical pain known to no other sport? Who are they? Where do they come from? How do they regard themselves and their competitors? What have they sacrificed, and what inner demons have they appeased?

In answering these questions, David Halberstam takes as his focus the 1984 single sculls trials in Princeton. The man who wins will gain the right to represent the United States in the 84 Olympiad; the losers will then have to struggle further to gain a place in the two- or four-man boats. And even if they succeed, they will have to live with the bitter knowledge that they were not the best, only close to it.

Informative and compelling, The Amateurs combines the vividness of superb sportswriting with the narrative skills of a Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent.]]> 221 David Halberstam 0449910032 David 0 3.99 1985
author: David Halberstam
name: David
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1985
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]]> 98250 248 John L. Parker Jr. 0915297019 David 0 4.10 1978
author: John L. Parker Jr.
name: David
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1978
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/11
date added: 2024/12/11
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]]> 96887229 1 Alex Pattakos David 0 3.46
author: Alex Pattakos
name: David
average rating: 3.46
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]]> 4069 Man's Search for Meaning has become one of the most influential books in America; it continues to inspire us all to find significance in the very act of living.]]> 165 Viktor E. Frankl 080701429X David 0 4.39 1946
author: Viktor E. Frankl
name: David
average rating: 4.39
book published: 1946
rating: 0
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]]> 35631386
Forty years ago, Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky wrote a series of breathtakingly original papers that invented the field of behavioral economics. One of the greatest partnerships in the history of science, Kahneman and Tversky’s extraordinary friendship incited a revolution in Big Data studies, advanced evidence-based medicine, led to a new approach to government regulation, and made much of Michael Lewis’s own work possible. In The Undoing Project, Lewis shows how their Nobel Prize–winning theory of the mind altered our perception of reality.]]> 368 Michael Lewis 0393354776 David 0 3.95 2016
author: Michael Lewis
name: David
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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]]> 34746464 “Bursting with energy and surprising locutions. . . . Even the most familiar poets seem somehow new within the context of��Joy.”—David Skeel, Wall Street Journal �� “Wiman takes readers through the ostensible ordinariness of life and reveals the extraordinary.”—Adrianna Smith, The Atlantic
�� Christian Wiman, a poet known for his meditations on mortality, has long been fascinated by joy and by its relative absence in modern literature. Why is joy so resistant to language? How has it become so suspect in our times? Manipulated by advertisers, religious leaders, and politicians, joy can seem disquieting, even offensive. How does one speak of joy amid such ubiquitous injustice and suffering in the world?

In this revelatory anthology, Wiman takes readers on a profound and surprising journey through some of the most underexplored terrain in contemporary life. Rather than define joy for readers, he wants them to experience it. Ranging from Emily Dickinson to Mahmoud Darwish and from Sylvia Plath to Wendell Berry, he brings together diverse and provocative works as a kind of counter to the old, modernist maxim “light writes white”�� no agony, no art . His rich selections awaken us to the essential role joy plays in human life.]]> 173 Christian Wiman 030022608X David 0 4.34
author: Christian Wiman
name: David
average rating: 4.34
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]]> 40648344 A beloved nun and social activist offers a soul-stirring guide for all who feel disillusioned and dissatisfied with the power-hungry institutions and systems of this world��“A cri de coeur against the status quo and for a bold spirituality to fight injustice.”—The New York Times��In��The Time Is Now,��Sister Joan Chittister—a rabble-rousing force of nature for social justice and fervent proponent of personal faith and spiritual fulfillment—draws on the wisdom of prophets, both ancient and modern, to help us confront the societal forces that oppress and silence the sacred voices among us.����Pairing scriptural insights with narratives of the truth-tellers that came before us, Sister Joan offers a compelling vision for readers to combat complacency and to propel ourselves toward creating a world of justice, freedom, peace, and empowerment.��For the weary, the cranky, and the fearful, this energizing message invites us to participate in a vision for a world greater than the one we find ourselves in today. This is spirituality in action; this is practical and powerful activism for our times.Praise for The Time Is Now“For decades Chittister has been a prolific author and advocate for women and social justice inside and outside the realm of the Catholic Church. Here she shares her perspective on the current state of equity, social justice, and the environment and calls on all Christians to explore the traits of prophets, many of which they can find within themselves . . . offering motivation as well as ways to accomplish change.�Ũ�ĔB�Ǵǰ����������“A series of short essays to encourage and refresh the spirit of activists . . . applicable to both progressive and conservative Christians. Will appeal to spiritual readers seeking an encouraging book for social justice advocacy.”—Library Journal (starred review)]]> 136 Joan D. Chittister 1984823426 David 0 4.13
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name: David
average rating: 4.13
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]]> 75665850 AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Few things will change your trajectory in life or business as much as learning to think clearly. Yet few of us recognize opportunities to think in the first place.

You might believe you’re thinking clearly in the moments that matter most. But in all likelihood, when the pressure is on, you won’t be thinking at all. And your subsequent actions will inevitably move you further from the results you ultimately seek—love, belonging, success, wealth, victory. According to Farnam Street founder Shane Parrish, we must get better at recognizing these opportunities for what they are, and deploying our cognitive ability in order to achieve the life we want.

Clear Thinking gives you the tools to recognize the moments that have the potential to transform your trajectory, and reshape how you navigate the critical space between stimulus and response. As Parrish shows, we may imagine we are the protagonists in the story of our lives. But the sad truth is, most of us run on autopilot. Our behavioral defaults, groomed by biology, evolution, and culture, are primed to run the show for us if we don’t intervene. At our worst, we react to events without reasoning, not even realizing that we’ve missed an opportunity to think at all. At our best, we recognize these moments for what they are, and apply the full capacity of our reasoning and rationality to them.

Through stories, mental models, and more, Parrish offers the missing link between behavioral science and real-life outcomes. The result is a must-have manual for optimizing decision-making, gaining competitive advantage, and living a more intentional life.]]> 284 Shane Parrish 0593086112 David 0 4.16 2023
author: Shane Parrish
name: David
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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]]> 204401135 329 Jay Martin David 0 4.00
author: Jay Martin
name: David
average rating: 4.00
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]]> 63882242 192 Peter Block 139415609X David 0 4.00
author: Peter Block
name: David
average rating: 4.00
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rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/03
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]]> 59364113 A fascinating, revelatory portrait of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and its treasures by a former New Yorker staffer who spent a decade as a museum guard.

Millions of people climb the grand marble staircase to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art every year. But only a select few have unrestricted access to every nook and cranny. They’re the guards who roam unobtrusively in dark blue suits, keeping a watchful eye on the two million square foot treasure house. Caught up in his glamorous fledgling career at The New Yorker, Patrick Bringley never thought he’d be one of them. Then his older brother was diagnosed with fatal cancer and he found himself needing to escape the mundane clamor of daily life. So he quit The New Yorker and sought solace in the most beautiful place he knew.

To his surprise and the reader’s delight, this temporary refuge becomes Bringley’s home away from home for a decade. We follow him as he guards delicate treasures from Egypt to Rome, strolls the labyrinths beneath the galleries, wears out nine pairs of company shoes, and marvels at the beautiful works in his care. Bringley enters the museum as a ghost, silent and almost invisible, but soon finds his voice and his tribe: the artworks and their creators and the lively subculture of museum guards—a gorgeous mosaic of artists, musicians, blue-collar stalwarts, immigrants, cutups, and dreamers. As his bonds with his colleagues and the art grow, he comes to understand how fortunate he is to be walled off in this little world, and how much it resembles the best aspects of the larger world to which he gradually, gratefully returns.

In the tradition of classic workplace memoirs like Lab Girl and Working Stiff, All The Beauty in the World is a surprising, inspiring portrait of a great museum, its hidden treasures, and the people who make it tick, by one of its most intimate observers.]]> 240 Patrick Bringley 1982163321 David 0 4.00 2023
author: Patrick Bringley
name: David
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2023
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]]> 17601
In The Will to Change, bell hooks gets to the heart of the matter and shows men how to express the emotions that are a fundamental part of who they are—whatever their age, marital status, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. But toxic masculinity punishes those fundamental emotions, and it’s so deeply ingrained in our society that it’s hard for men to not comply—but hooks wants to help change that.

With trademark candor and fierce intelligence, hooks addresses the most common concerns of men, such as fear of intimacy and loss of their patriarchal place in society, in new and challenging ways. She believes men can find the way to spiritual unity by getting back in touch with the emotionally open part of themselves—and lay claim to the rich and rewarding inner lives that have historically been the exclusive province of women. A brave and astonishing work, The Will to Change is designed to help men reclaim the best part of themselves.]]> 208 bell hooks 0743456084 David 0 4.38 2003
author: bell hooks
name: David
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2003
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/21
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]]> 13650 The Wave in the Mind includes some literary criticism, rare autobiographical writings, performance art pieces, and, most centrally, her reflections on the arts of writing and reading.]]> 314 Ursula K. Le Guin 1590300068 David 0 4.30 2004
author: Ursula K. Le Guin
name: David
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2004
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/21
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]]> 201608882
That's the invitation award-winning author Lore Ferguson Wilbert extends to readers in The Understory.

On this journey, Wilbert shares her story of alienation and disorientation after years of religious and political unrest in the evangelical church. In doing so, she looks to an unlikely place--the forest--to learn how to live and even thrive when everything seems to be falling apart. What can we learn from eroding soil, the decomposition process, the time it takes to grow lichen, the beauty of fiddlehead ferns, the regeneration of self-sowing seeds, and walking through the mud? Here, among the understory of the forest, Wilbert discovers rich metaphors for living a rooted and flourishing life within the complex ecosystems of our world. Her tenderness and honesty will help readers grieve, remember, hope, and press on with resilience.]]> 240 Lore Ferguson Wilbert 1587435705 David 0 4.29 2024
author: Lore Ferguson Wilbert
name: David
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/08/25
date added: 2024/08/25
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]]> 16798
As Boston’s Red Line shuttles Bill Chalmers to work one summer morning, something extraordinary happens. Suddenly, he can't remember which stop is his, where he works, or even who he is. The only thing he can remember is his corporate motto: the maximum information in the minimum time.

Bill’s memory returns, but a strange numbness afflicts him. As he attempts to find a diagnosis for his deteriorating illness, he descends into a nightmarish tangle of inconclusive results, his company’s manic frenzy, and his family’s disbelief. Ultimately, Bill discovers that he is fighting not just for his body but also for his soul.]]> 369 Alan Lightman 0375725504 David 2 2.84 2000
author: Alan Lightman
name: David
average rating: 2.84
book published: 2000
rating: 2
read at: 2024/01/01
date added: 2024/08/17
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I gave him the benefit of the doubt all the way to the end. So, that's on me.
]]> 80571
J. Robert Oppenheimer is one of the iconic figures of the twentieth century, a brilliant physicist who led the effort to build the atomic bomb for his country in a time of war and who later found himself confronting the moral consequences of scientific progress.

When he proposed international controls over atomic materials, opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb, and criticized plans for a nuclear war, his ideas were anathema to powerful advocates of a massive nuclear buildup during the anti-Communist hysteria of the early 1950s. They declared that Oppenheimer could not be trusted with America’s nuclear secrets.

In this magisterial biography twenty-five years in the making, which won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for biography, the authors capture Oppenheimer’s life and times, from his early career to his central role in the Cold War.]]> 721 Kai Bird David 0 4.27 2005
author: Kai Bird
name: David
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at: 2024/08/14
date added: 2024/08/14
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]]> 7753701 ---John Barr, President, Poetry Foundation "At last there is a book that explores the deep but unexpected connections between business and poetry. Clare Morgan and her colleagues demonstrate how the creative energy, emotional power, and communicative complexity of poetry relate directly to the practical needs for innovation and problem solving that face business managers. There has never been a book on developing managerial potential quite like this one."
---Dana Gioia, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts and a former corporate executive at General Foods
What does poetry bring to business? According to Clare Morgan and her coauthors, it brings complexity and flexibility of thinking, along with the ability to empathize with and better understand the thoughts and feelings of others. Through her own experiences and many examples, Morgan demonstrates that the skills necessary to talk and think about poetry can be of significant benefit to leaders and strategists, to executives who are facing infinite complexity and who are armed with finite resources in a changing world. What Poetry Brings to Business presents ways in which reading and thinking about poetry offer businesspeople new strategies for reflection on their companies, their daily tasks, and their work environments. The goal is both to increase and broaden readers' understanding of poems and how they convey meaning, and also to help readers develop analytical and cognitive skills that will be beneficial in a business context. The unique combinations and connections made in this book will open new avenues of thinking about poetry and business alike. Clare Morgan is Director of the graduate creative writing programme at the University of Oxford. She has run workshops and given presentations on this topic in the United States, the United Kingdom, continental Europe, and Japan. Dr. Morgan is a fiction writer and critic, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Kirsten Lange and Ted Buswick are employed by The Boston Consulting Group, an international management consulting firm, she as Managing Director of the Munich office, he as head of Oral History and Archiving.]]> 280 Clare Morgan 0472050869 David 0 3.29 2010
author: Clare Morgan
name: David
average rating: 3.29
book published: 2010
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/22
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]]> 122879512 Ken Wilber David 0 5.00
author: Ken Wilber
name: David
average rating: 5.00
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rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/19
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]]> 34089867 87 Ken Wilber David 0 3.99 2017
author: Ken Wilber
name: David
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at: 2024/07/15
date added: 2024/07/15
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]]> 177152 ��
Ken Wilber has long been hailed as one of the most important thinkers of our time, but his work has seemed inaccessible to readers who lack a background in consciousness studies or evolutionary theory—until now. In�� A Theory of Everything , Wilber uses clear, non-technical language to present complex, cutting-edge theories that integrate the realms of body, mind, soul, and spirit. He then demonstrates how these theories and models can be applied to real world problems and incorporated into readers�� everyday lives.
��
Wilber begins his study by presenting models like “spiral dynamics”—a leading model of human evolution—and his groundbreaking “all-level, all-quadrant�� model for integrating science and religion, showing how they are being applied to politics, medicine, business, education, and the environment. He also covers broader models, explaining how they can integrate the various worldviews that have been developed around the world throughout the ages. Finally, Wilber proposes that readers take up an "integral transformative practice"—such as meditation—to help them apply and develop this integral vision in their personal, daily lives. A fascinating and easy-to-follow exploration of the “M Theory,�� this book is another tour-de-force from one of America’s most inventive minds.]]> 189 Ken Wilber 1570628556 David 0 3.93 1996
author: Ken Wilber
name: David
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1996
rating: 0
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]]> 348850 192 Richard Rohr 0824519957 David 0 4.24 2003
author: Richard Rohr
name: David
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2003
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/09
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]]> 61218415 Wendell Berry has never been afraid to speak up for the dispossessed. The Need to Be Whole continues the work he began in The Hidden Wound (1970) and The Unsettling of America (1977), demanding a careful exploration of this hard, shared truth: The wealth of the mighty few governing this nation has been built on the unpaid labor of others.

Without historical understanding of this practice of dispossession—the displacement of Native peoples, the destruction of both the land and land-based communities, ongoing racial division—we are doomed to continue industrialism’s assault on both the natural world and every sacred American ideal. Berry writes, “To deal with so great a problem, the best idea may not be to go ahead in our present state of unhealth to more disease and more product development. It may be that our proper first resort should be to history: to see if the truth we need to pursue might be behind us where we have ceased to look.�� If there is hope for us, this is it: that we honestly face our past and move into a future guided by the natural laws of affection. This book furthers Mr. Berry’s part in what is surely our country’s most vital conversation.]]> 513 Wendell Berry David 0 3.98
author: Wendell Berry
name: David
average rating: 3.98
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]]> 39096 368 Sean B. Carroll 0393327795 David 0 to-read 4.07 2005
author: Sean B. Carroll
name: David
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2005
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/09
shelves: to-read
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]]> 52611 244 John W. Gardner 0787966789 David 0 4.23 2003
author: John W. Gardner
name: David
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2003
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/09
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]]> 59801798
The "rich and gripping" true story of the first time machines came for human jobs—and how the Luddite uprising explains the power, threat, and toll of big tech and AI today��(Naomi Klein) The most urgent story in modern tech begins not in Silicon Valley but two hundred years ago in rural England, when workers known as the Luddites rose up rather than starve at the hands of factory owners who were using automated machines to erase their livelihoods.

The Luddites organized guerrilla raids to smash those machines—on punishment of death—and won the support of Lord Byron, enraged the Prince Regent, and inspired the birth of science fiction. This all-but-forgotten class struggle brought nineteenth-century England to its knees.

Today, technology imperils millions of jobs, robots are crowding factory floors, and artificial intelligence will soon pervade every aspect of our economy. How will this change the way we live? And what can we do about it?

The answers lie in Blood in the Machine . Brian Merchant intertwines a lucid examination of our current age with the story of the Luddites, showing how automation changed our world—and is shaping our future.]]> 416 Brian Merchant 0316487740 David 0 4.17 2023
author: Brian Merchant
name: David
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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]]> 58536094
Sir Ken Robinson changed the lives of millions of people. The embodiment of the prestigious TED conference, his TED Talks are watched an average of 17,000 times a day--a figure that Chris Anderson, Head of TED, says is the equivalent of selling out the Millennium Dome every night for fifteen consecutive years. A New York Times bestselling author, Sir Ken’s books have been translated into twenty four languages.

In his final years, Sir Ken was working on a book that would serve as his manifesto. This book was being written for both new and dedicated audiences alike as a coherent overview of the arguments that he dedicated his life to, and as a pivotal piece of literature for the education revolution he began. When Sir Ken received his cancer prognosis in August 2020 he asked his daughter and collaborator, Kate Robinson, to finish writing this manifesto and continue his work.

At its core, Sir Ken’s work is a love letter to human potential--a celebration of what we as a species are capable of doing, and of being, if we create the right conditions. It is a rallying cry to revolutionize our systems of education, and the ways in which we run our businesses and structure our social systems, so that they bring out the best in each and every person. Sir Ken often observed that what separates us from the rest of life on Earth is our power of the ability to bring to mind things that are not present to our senses. It is imagination that allows us to create the world in which we live, rather than just exist in it. It also gives us the power to recreate it.]]> 144 Ken Robinson 0143134167 David 0 4.12
author: Ken Robinson
name: David
average rating: 4.12
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]]> 158875813
On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her step. Two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police are here to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist.

Ireland is falling apart. The country is in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny and Eilish can only watch helplessly as the world she knew disappears. When first her husband and then her eldest son vanish, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a collapsing society.

How far will she go to save her family? And what �� or who �� is she willing to leave behind?

Exhilarating, terrifying and propulsive, Prophet Song is a work of breathtaking originality, offering a devastating vision of a country at war and a deeply human portrait of a mother’s fight to hold her family together.]]> 259 Paul Lynch David 0 4.03 2023
author: Paul Lynch
name: David
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/01/29
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]]> 63428313 From a National Book Award finalist and a powerful literary mind, an incisive new work examining capitalism's toxic creep into the land, our bodies, and our thinking.

For Jenn Shapland, the barrier between herself and the world is porous; she was even diagnosed with extreme dermatologic sensitivity--thin skin. Recognizing how deeply vulnerable we all are to our surroundings, she becomes aware of the impacts our tiniest choices have on people, places, and species far away. She can't stop seeing the ways we are enmeshed and entangled with everyone else on the planet. Despite our attempts to cordon ourselves off from risk, our boundaries are permeable.
Weaving together historical research, interviews, and her everyday life in New Mexico, Shapland probes the lines between self and work, human and animal, need and desire. She traces the legacies of nuclear weapons development on Native land, unable to let go of her search for contamination until it bleeds out into her own family's medical history. She questions the toxic myth of white womanhood and the fear of traveling alone that she's been made to feel since girlhood. And she explores her desire to build a creative life as a queer woman, asking whether such a thing as a meaningful life is possible under capitalism.
Ceaselessly curious, uncompromisingly intelligent, and urgently seeking, with Thin Skin Shapland builds thrillingly on her genre-defying debut ("Gorgeous, symphonic, tender, and brilliant" Carmen Machado), firmly establishing herself as one of the sharpest essayists of her generation.]]> 289 Jenn Shapland 0593317459 David 0 3.99 2023
author: Jenn Shapland
name: David
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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]]> 112974860 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER �� A practical, heartfelt guide to the art of truly knowing another person in order to foster deeper connections at home, at work, and throughout our lives—from the author of The Road to Character and The Second Mountain

As David Brooks observes, “There is one skill that lies at the heart of any healthy person, family, school, community organization, or society: the ability to see someone else deeply and make them feel seen—to accurately know another person, to let them feel valued, heard, and understood.��

And yet we humans don’t do this well. All around us are people who feel invisible, unseen, misunderstood. In How to Know a Person, Brooks sets out to help us do better, posing questions that are essential for all of us: If you want to know a person, what kind of attention should you cast on them? What kind of conversations should you have? What parts of a person’s story should you pay attention to?

Driven by his trademark sense of curiosity and his determination to grow as a person, Brooks draws from the fields of psychology and neuroscience and from the worlds of theater, philosophy, history, and education to present a welcoming, hopeful, integrated approach to human connection. How to Know a Person helps readers become more understanding and considerate toward others, and to find the joy that comes from being seen. Along the way it offers a possible remedy for a society that is riven by fragmentation, hostility, and misperception.

The act of seeing another person, Brooks argues, is profoundly creative: How can we look somebody in the eye and see something large in them, and in turn, see something larger in ourselves? How to Know a Person is for anyone searching for connection, and yearning to be understood.]]> 304 David Brooks 059323006X David 0 4.09 2023
author: David Brooks
name: David
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/11/01
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]]> 16176440
Meet the Cooke family: Mother and Dad, Lowell, Rosemary and her unusual sister Fern. Rosemary begins her story in the middle. She has her reasons. “Until Fern’s expulsion...,�� Rosemary says, “she was my twin, my funhouse mirror, my whirlwind other half and I loved her.�� As a child, Rosemary never stopped talking. Then, something happened, and Rosemary wrapped herself in silence.

In We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, Karen Joy Fowler weaves her most accomplished work to date—a tale of loving but fallible people whose well-intentioned actions lead to heartbreaking consequences.]]> 310 Karen Joy Fowler 0399162097 David 0 3.70 2013
author: Karen Joy Fowler
name: David
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at: 2023/10/13
date added: 2023/10/28
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]]> 140225
The Dawn Treader is the first ship Narnia has seen in centuries. King Caspian has built it for his voyage to find the seven lords, good men whom his evil uncle Miraz banished when he usurped the throne. The journey takes Edmund, Lucy, and their cousin Eustace to the Eastern Islands, beyond the Silver Sea, toward Aslan's country at the End of the World.]]> 248 C.S. Lewis 006112527X David 0 4.10 1952
author: C.S. Lewis
name: David
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1952
rating: 0
read at: 2023/08/07
date added: 2023/08/07
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]]> 59571658 An astonishing collection about interconnectedness—between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves—from National Book Critics Circle Award winner and National Book Award finalist Ada Limón.

“I have always been too sensitive, a weeper / from a long line of weepers,�� writes Limón. “I am the hurting kind.�� What does it mean to be the hurting kind? To be sensitive not only to the world’s pain and joys, but to the meanings that bend in the scrim between the natural world and the human world? To divine the relationships between us all? To perceive ourselves in other beings—and to know that those beings are resolutely their own, that they “do not / care to be seen as symbols��?

With Limón’s remarkable ability to trace thought, The Hurting Kind explores those questions—incorporating others�� stories and ways of knowing, making surprising turns, and always reaching a place of startling insight. These poems slip through the seasons, teeming with horses and kingfishers and the gleaming eyes of fish. And they honor parents, stepparents, and grandparents: the sacrifices made, the separate lives lived, the tendernesses extended to a hurting child; the abundance, in retrospect, of having two families.

Along the way, we glimpse loss. There are flashes of the pandemic, ghosts whose presence manifests in unexpected memories and the mysterious behavior of pets left behind. But The Hurting Kind is filled, above all, with connection and the delight of being in the world. “Slippery and waddle thieving my tomatoes still / green in the morning’s shade,�� writes Limón of a groundhog in her garden, “she is doing what she can to survive.”]]> 100 Ada Limon 1639550496 David 0 4.34 2022
author: Ada Limon
name: David
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/07/25
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]]> 410538 384 Peter Koestenbaum 0787959561 David 5 4.00 1991
author: Peter Koestenbaum
name: David
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1991
rating: 5
read at: 2023/07/20
date added: 2023/07/20
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This book feels as relevant, if not more so, in our post-pandemic, politically fragmented world as it must have after 9/11. It is as powerful and practical a call to leadership greatness as I have read.
]]> 542953
Building to a climax that is as stunning as it is inevitable, 'A GATHERING OF OLD MEN' powerfully describes the racial tensions in 1970s Louisiana. Narrators Peter Francis James, Michelle-Denise Woods, Sally Darling, Graham Brown, Murphy Guyer, Tom Stechschulte, and Mark Hammer bring Gaines' masterful prose to vivid life.



Running Time => 7hrs. and 37mins.

©1992 Ernest J. Gaines (P)1996 Recorded Books]]> 214 Ernest J. Gaines 0679738908 David 0 4.07 1983
author: Ernest J. Gaines
name: David
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1983
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/07/07
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]]> 28748 From the bestselling author of Tenth of December comes a splendid new edition of his acclaimed collaboration with the illustrator behind The Stinky Cheese Man and James and the Giant Peach! Featuring fifty-two haunting and hilarious images, The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip is a modern fable for people of all ages that touches on the power of kindness, generosity, compassion, and community.

In the seaside village of Frip live three families: the Romos, the Ronsens, and a little girl named Capable and her father. The economy of Frip is based solely on goat’s milk, and this is a problem because the village is plagued by gappers: bright orange, many-eyed creatures the size of softballs that love to attach themselves to goats. When a gapper gets near a goat, it lets out a high-pitched shriek of joy that puts the goats off giving milk, which means that every few hours the children of Frip have to go outside, brush the gappers off their goats, and toss them into the sea. The gappers have always been everyone’s problem, until one day they get a little smarter, and instead of spreading out, they gang up: on Capable’s goats. Free at last of the tyranny of the gappers, will her neighbors rally to help her? Or will they turn their backs, forcing Capable to bear the misfortune alone?

Featuring fifty-two haunting and hilarious illustrations by Lane Smith and a brilliant story by George Saunders that explores universal themes of community and kindness, The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip is a rich and resonant story for those that have all and those that have not.]]> 84 George Saunders 1932416374 David 0 4.13 2000
author: George Saunders
name: David
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2000
rating: 0
read at: 2023/07/05
date added: 2023/07/05
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]]> 17620753 A darkly comic short story, a fable about the all too real impact that we humans have on the environment

Fox 8 has always been known as the daydreamer in his pack, the one his fellow foxes regarded with a knowing snort and a roll of the eyes. That is, until Fox 8 develops a unique skill: He teaches himself to speak "Yuman" by hiding in the bushes outside a house and listening to children's bedtime stories. The power of language fuels his abundant curiosity about people—even after "danjer" arrives in the form of a new shopping mall that cuts off his food supply, sending Fox 8 on a harrowing quest to help save his pack.]]> 21 George Saunders 0812995325 David 0 4.14 2013
author: George Saunders
name: David
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/07/05
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]]> 53487237 A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, he shares a version of that class with us, offering some of what he and his students have discovered together over the years. Paired with iconic short stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, the seven essays in this book are intended for anyone interested in how fiction works and why it’s more relevant than ever in these turbulent times.

In his introduction, Saunders writes, “We’re going to enter seven fastidiously constructed scale models of the world, made for a specific purpose that our time maybe doesn’t fully endorse but that these writers accepted implicitly as the aim of art—namely, to ask the big questions, questions like, How are we supposed to be living down here? What were we put here to accomplish? What should we value? What is truth, anyway, and how might we recognize it?�� He approaches the stories technically yet accessibly, and through them explains how narrative functions; why we stay immersed in a story and why we resist it; and the bedrock virtues a writer must foster. The process of writing, Saunders reminds us, is a technical craft, but also a way of training oneself to see the world with new openness and curiosity.

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is a deep exploration not just of how great writing works but of how the mind itself works while reading, and of how the reading and writing of stories make genuine connection possible.]]> 403 George Saunders 1984856049 David 5 4.55 2021
author: George Saunders
name: David
average rating: 4.55
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2023/07/04
date added: 2023/07/04
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How in the heck is a book about reading and writing, grounded in the examination of 125 year old short stories by Russian authors a page turner?? Because it's written by George Saunders who is masterful at writing with simplicity, humility and insights so useful to the troubled state of being human that I was compelled to just keep going. If you love reading, writing, learning, questioning and becoming more fully, if faultily formed as a human being, you will benefit from this incredible work.
]]> 5197 256 Ernest J. Gaines 0375702709 David 5 3.98 1993
author: Ernest J. Gaines
name: David
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1993
rating: 5
read at: 2023/06/30
date added: 2023/06/30
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This is a beautiful, painful and extraordinary book. I cannot recommend it strongly enough.
]]> 68795866
Bestselling author Margaret Wheatley has summoned us to be courageous leaders who strengthen community and rely on fully engaged people since her 1992 classic book, Leadership and the New Science , and eight subsequent books. In response to how quickly society is changing and the exponential increase in leadership challenges, this second edition of her latest bestseller is 80% new material.

How do we see clearly so that we can act wisely? Wheatley brings present reality into clear and troubling focus using multiple lenses of Western and Indigenous sciences, and the historic patterns of collapse in complex civilizations. With gentle but insistent guidance to face reality, she offers us the path and practices to be sane leaders who know how to evoke people’s inherent generosity, creativity, and kindness.

Skillfully weaving science, history, exemplars, poetry, and quotes with stories and practices, Wheatley asks us to be Warriors for the Human Spirit, leaders and citizens who stay engaged, choose service over self, stand steadfast in the midst of crises, and offer our reliable presence of compassion and insight no matter what.]]> 336 Margaret J. Wheatley 1523004738 David 5 4.88
author: Margaret J. Wheatley
name: David
average rating: 4.88
book published:
rating: 5
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date added: 2023/06/24
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I read the original and was both moved and inspired so the revised edition was a welcome chance to revisit the difficult and necessary themes Wheatley explores. The essence is this: there is no going back, no undoing what's been done, so each of us has a choice to either retreat into avoidance or make a contribution with what we have right where we are. Wheatley is a truth teller and in this updated and expanded edition she manages to incorporate a warm embrace while simultaneously giving a good, swift kick in the butt.
]]> 432853 308 Janine M. Benyus 0060533226 David 4 3.99 1997
author: Janine M. Benyus
name: David
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1997
rating: 4
read at: 2023/06/15
date added: 2023/06/15
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]]> 33165123 166 Molly Davis 1942545746 David 5 4.43
author: Molly Davis
name: David
average rating: 4.43
book published:
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2023/06/02
shelves:
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There is no greater act of love than being reconciled to the truth and possibility of who we are, of why we are. ‘BLUSH�� is an invitation to that reckoning as only a dearest friend can provide it: one part warm embrace, one part kick in the ass. I am reminded in reading this generous book of my own forms of avoidance, my own hiding places. And I am resolved to step out from those familiar shadows with arms and hands open wide to receive myself just as I am. Warmly recommended.
]]> 18814253 No other English translation of this greatest of the Chinese classics can match Ursula Le Guin's striking new version. Le Guin, best known for thought-provoking science fiction novels that have helped to transform the genre, has studied the Tao Te Ching for more than forty years. She has consulted the literal translations and worked with Chinese scholars to develop a version that lets the ancient text speak in a fresh way to modern people, while remaining faithful to the poetic beauty of the work. Avoiding scholarly interpretations and esoteric Taoist insights, she has revealed the Tao Te Ching's immediate relevance and power, its depth and refreshing humor, in a way that shows better than ever before why it has been so much loved for more than 2,500 years. Included are Le Guin's own personal commentary and notes on the text. This new version is sure to be welcomed by the many readers of the Tao Te Ching as well as those coming to the text for the first time.

]]> 162 Lao Tzu David 0 4.37 -350
author: Lao Tzu
name: David
average rating: 4.37
book published: -350
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/06/02
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]]> 36443331 The Washington Post

"Nothing escapes him; everything is illuminated." --Library Journal

"Will one day rank alongside of Edgar Lee Masters, Robert Frost, and William Carlos Williams." --Minneapolis Tribune

"Kooser's ability to discover the smallest detail and render it remarkable is a rare gift." --The Bloomsbury Review

Four decades of poetry--and a generous selection of new work--make up this extraordinary collection by Pulitzer Prize winner Ted Kooser. Firmly rooted in the landscapes of the Midwest, Kooser's poetry succeeds in finding the emotional resonances within the ordinary. Kooser's language of quiet intensity trains itself on the intricacies of human relationships, as well as the animals and objects that make up our days. As Poetry magazine said of his work, "Kooser documents the dignities, habits, and small griefs of daily life, our hunger for connection, our struggle to find balance."

From "March 2"

Patchy clouds and windy.
All morning
our house has been flashing in and out of shade
like a signal, and far across the waves of grass
a neighbor's house has answered,
offering help.

Ted Kooser is the author of eleven collections of poetry, including Delights & Shadows, which won the Pulitzer Prize. He served as the Poet Laureate of the United States, and is a visiting professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.]]> 256 Ted Kooser 1556595336 David 5 4.50 2018
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]]> 52357 259 Unknown 0393320979 David 5 3.46 1000
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]]> 243389 268 William Stafford 1555972845 David 5 4.48 1998
author: William Stafford
name: David
average rating: 4.48
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]]> 1211497 ��
“John O’Donohue is a man of the soul.”�� Times�� (London)
��
To Bless the Space Between Us ��is a compelling blend of elegant, poetic language and spiritual insight to offer readers comfort and encouragement on their journeys through life. John O’Donohue, Irish teacher and poet, looks at life’s thresholds—getting married, having children, starting a new job—and offers invaluable guidelines for making the transition from a known, familiar world into a new, unmapped territory.
��
Most profoundly, however, O’Donohue explains “blessings�� as a way of life, a lens through which the whole world is transformed. He awakens readers to timeless truths and shows the power they have to answer contemporary dilemmas and ease us through periods of change.]]> 240 John O'Donohue 0385522274 David 0 4.40 2008
author: John O'Donohue
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]]> 19314428 We are our stories. We tell them to stay alive or keep alive those who only live now in the telling. In Faha, County Clare, everyone is a long story...

Bedbound in her attic room beneath the falling rain, in the margin between this world and the next, Plain Ruth Swain is in search of her father. To find him, enfolded in the mystery of ancestors, Ruthie must first trace the jutting jaw lines, narrow faces and gleamy skin of the Swains from the restless Reverend Swain, her great-grandfather, to grandfather Abraham, to her father, Virgil - via pole-vaulting, leaping salmon, poetry and the three thousand, nine hundred and fifty eight books piled high beneath the two skylights in her room, beneath the rain.

The stories -- of her golden twin brother Aeney, their closeness even as he slips away; of their dogged pursuit of the Swains' Impossible Standard and forever falling just short; of the wild, rain-sodden history of fourteen acres of the worst farming land in Ireland -- pour forth in Ruthie's still, small, strong, hopeful voice.]]> 358 Niall Williams 1408852020 David 5 3.96 2014
author: Niall Williams
name: David
average rating: 3.96
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rating: 5
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]]> 40642458 The Second Mountain, David Brooks explores the four commitments that define a life of meaning and purpose: to a spouse and family, to a vocation, to a philosophy or faith, and to a community. Our personal fulfillment depends on how well we choose and execute these commitments. In The Second Mountain, Brooks looks at a range of people who have lived joyous, committed lives, and who have embraced the necessity of dependence. He gathers their wisdom on how to choose a partner, how to pick a vocation, how to live out a philosophy, and how we can begin to integrate our commitments into one overriding purpose.

In short, this book is meant to help us all lead more meaningful lives. But it’s also a provocative social commentary. We live in a society, Brooks argues, that celebrates freedom, that tells us to be true to ourselves, at the expense of surrendering to a cause, rooting ourselves in a neighborhood, binding ourselves to others by social solidarity and love. We have taken individualism to the extreme—and in the process we have torn the social fabric in a thousand different ways. The path to repair is through making deeper commitments. In The Second Mountain, Brooks shows what can happen when we put commitment-making at the center of our lives.]]> 384 David Brooks 0812993268 David 5 3.73 2019
author: David Brooks
name: David
average rating: 3.73
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]]> 24108839
Beginning with ALONE and closing with WORK, each chapter is a meditation on meaning and context, an invitation to shift and broaden our perspectives on the inevitable vicissitudes of life: pain and joy, honesty and anger, confession and vulnerability, the experience of feeling besieged and the desire to run away from it all. Through this lens, procrastination may be a necessary ripening; hiding an act of freedom; and shyness the appropriate confusion and helplessness that accompanies the first stage of revelation.

CONSOLATIONS invites readers into a poetic and thoughtful consideration of words whose meaning and interpretation influence the paths we choose and the way we traverse them throughout our lives.]]> 245 David Whyte 1932887342 David 4 4.47 2014
author: David Whyte
name: David
average rating: 4.47
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rating: 4
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]]> 151717 272 David Whyte 1573229148 David 5 4.27 2001
author: David Whyte
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]]> 6052036 Drawing from his own experience and the lives of some of the world's great writers and poets, David Whyte brings compelling insights to our three most important commitments—to another, to our work, and to ourselves—to frame a complete picture of a satisfying life.

David Whyte knows there are three crucial relationships, or marriages, in our lives: the marriage or partnership with a significant other, the commitment we have to our work, and the vows, spoken or unspoken, we make to an inner, constantly developing self. In The Three Marriages, the bestselling author, poet, and speaker argues that it is not possible to sacrifice one relationship for the others without causing deep psychological damage. Too often, he says, we fracture our lives and split our energies foolishly, so that one or more of these marriages is sacrificed and may wither and die, in the process impoverishing them all. Whyte looks to a different way of seeing and connecting these relationships and prompts us to examine each marriage with a fierce but affectionate eye as he shows us the importance of cherishing all three equally.

Drawing from his own struggles to achieve this goal as well as exploring the lives of some of the world's great writers and activists—from Dante to Joan of Arc, from Austen to Dickinson—Whyte reveals that our core commitments are irrevocably connected. Only by understanding the simultaneously robust and delicate nature of the three marriages and the stages of their maturation, he maintains, can we create a real portrait of what makes us tick and a real sense of finding a place in the world.

In prose that's at once lyrical and inviting, Whyte investigates captivating ideas for bringing a deeper satisfaction to our lives, one that goes beyond our previously held ideas of balance.

]]> 352 David Whyte 1594488606 David 4 3.91 2009
author: David Whyte
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average rating: 3.91
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]]> 871728 ��
Find professional and personal fulfilment through the poetry of both classic and modern masters—now revised and updated
��
Has your work lost its meaning? Have you forgotten the goals you hoped to achieve when you began your career? Are you afraid of pursuing your dreams?
��
In�� The Heart Aroused , David Whyte brings his unique perspective as poet and consultant to the workplace, showing readers how fulfilling work can be when they face their fears and follow their dreams. Going beneath the surface concerns about products and profits, organization and order, Whyte addresses the needs of the heart and soul, and the fears and desires that many workers keep hidden.
At a time when corporations are calling on employees for more creativity, dedication, and adaptability, and workers are trying desperately to balance home and work, this revised edition of�� The Heart Aroused ��is the essential guide to reinvigorating the soul.]]> 368 David Whyte 0385484186 David 5 4.25 1994
author: David Whyte
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]]> 7965157
When you think about personal transformation, do you have a picture of who you want to become? Many of us unconsciously create an idealized image of our “awakened�� selves―and in doing so, reveals David Whyte, we undermine both the work and reward of genuine transformation.

On What to Remember When Waking , this celebrated poet and teacher offers wisdom for building the essential disciplines that will see us through the difficulties of our human journey―skills of trust, vulnerability, momentum, and courage in the face of the unknown.

Engage in the Great Conversation That Defines Your Life

Our lives are defined by what David Whyte calls the “great conversation”―a give- and-take relationship between our vision of ourselves and the unfolding mystery of reality. Yet there are many conscious and unconscious ways that we often avoid living at this ever-moving frontier. Do you diminish life by attempting to assign names to everything instead of living more robustly with the unknown? Are you turning a blind eye to the invisible help that is all around you? With penetrating insight and gentle guidance, Whyte illuminates the core competencies that you must build in order to fully engage in the richness that life offers―and to express your true work in the world.

What You Can Plan Is Too Small for You to Live

“We do not always move forward because of the plans we make or the effort we expend,�� teaches David Whyte. “The conversation itself more often does the true work of transformation.�� Make sure the conversation is alive and everything takes its place. Combining a teacher’s ability to provide practical guidance with a poet’s insight into the depths of the human soul, he presents a powerful resource for anyone seeking growth and fulfillment on life’s journey with What to Remember When Waking .



Start where you are―ways of recognizing the first necessary steps to find your path
�� The gift of vulnerability―why lowering our defenses can enhance our perception, dedication, and joyfulness
�� Disciplines for cultivating the “fierce interior focus�� that helps you maintain momentum in your life’s work
�� How embracing the feeling that you are out of place in the world can deepen your empathy and compassion for others
�� The art of knowing when to let your dreams mature in their own time
�� Beyond the "pursuit of happiness"―opening yourself to the deeper fulfillment available in the high and low points of life
�� Becoming an "apprentice to life"―how to approach new challenges with a sense of humility and wonder
�� Learning to delight in the unknown instead of trying to control it through labels and beliefs
�� Building a mature and welcoming relationship with death by embracing the richness that fragility brings to life
�� Over 5 1/2 hours of David Whyte's insights, poetry, and essential lessons for fully expressing your gifts in the world]]> 1 David Whyte 1591797721 David 5 4.58 2010
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]]> 584093 376 David Whyte 1932887172 David 5 4.64 2007
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]]> 428 Play It as It Lays captures the mood of an entire generation, the ennui of contemporary society reflected in spare prose that blisters and haunts the reader. Set in a place beyond good and evil - literally in Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the barren wastes of the Mojave Desert, but figuratively in the landscape of an arid soul - it remains more than three decades after its original publication a profoundly disturbing novel, riveting in its exploration of a woman and a society in crisis and stunning in the still-startling intensity of its prose.
]]> 231 Joan Didion 0374529949 David 0 3.94 1970
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]]> 53308149
Here are six pieces written in 1968 from the "Points West" Saturday Evening Post column Joan Didion shared from 1964 to 1969 with her husband, John Gregory Dunne about: American newspapers; a session with Gamblers Anonymous; a visit to San Simeon; being rejected by Stanford; dropping in on Nancy Reagan, wife of the then-governor of California, while a TV crew filmed her at home; and an evening at the annual reunion of WWII veterans from the 101st Airborne Association at the Stardust Hotel in Las Vegas. Here too is a 1976 piece from the New York Times magazine on "Why I Write"; a piece about short stories from New West in 1978; and from The New Yorker, a piece on Hemingway from 1998, and on Martha Stewart from 2000. Each one is classic Didion: incisive, bemused, and stunningly prescient.]]> 149 Joan Didion 059331848X David 0 3.85 2021
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]]> 424 The first nonfiction work by one of the most distinctive prose stylists of our era, Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem remains, decades after its first publication, the essential portrait of America—particularly California—in the sixties.

It focuses on such subjects as John Wayne and Howard Hughes, growing up a girl in California, ruminating on the nature of good and evil in a Death Valley motel room, and, especially, the essence of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, the heart of the counterculture.

It contains Didion's famous essay, "Goodbye to All That".]]> 238 Joan Didion David 0 4.20 1968
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]]> 7815
From one of America's iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion. Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage–and a life, in good times and bad–that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child.

Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later–the night before New Year's Eve–the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma.

This powerful book is Didion's attempt to make sense of the "weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness . . . about marriage and children and memory . . . about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself."]]> 227 Joan Didion 1400078431 David 0 3.94 2005
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]]> 52079343 What guides us when our world is changing? Discover the path to deeper meaning and purpose through depth psychology and classical thought.

How did we get to this crossroads in history? And will we make it through—individually and as a species? “We all assumed that learning, rationality, and good intentions would prove enough to bring us to the promised land,�� says James Hollis. “But they haven’t and won’t. Yet what we also do not recognize sufficiently is that this human animal is equipped for survival. In time, as we have seen of life’s other insolubles, we grow large enough to contain what threatened to destroy us.��

Dr. Hollis’s readers know him as a penetrating thinker who brings profound insight and sophistication to the inner journey. In Living Between Worlds, he broadens his lens to encompass the relationship between our inner struggles and the rapidly shifting realities of modern human existence. You will learn to invoke the tools of depth psychology, classical literature, philosophy, dream work, and myth, to gain access to the resources that supported our ancestors through their darkest hours. Through these paths of inner exploration, you will access your “locus of knowing”—an inner wellspring of deep resilience beyond the ego, always available to guide you back to the imperatives of your soul.

Though many of the challenges of our times are unique, the path through for us personally and collectively will always rely on our measureless capacity for creativity, wisdom, and connection to a reality larger than ourselves. Here you will find no easy answers or pat reassurances. Yet within the pages of Living Between Worlds, you will encounter causes for hope. “We can find what supports us when nothing supports us,�� Hollis teaches. “By bearing the unbearable, we go through the desert to arrive at a nurturing oasis we did not know was there.”]]> 184 James Hollis 1683645618 David 0 4.29 2020
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]]> 39028438 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - With a new afterword - From one of the world's most influential spiritual thinkers, a long-awaited book exploring what it means that Jesus was called "Christ," and how this forgotten truth can restore hope and meaning to our lives.

"Anyone who strives to put their faith into action will find encouragement and inspiration in the pages of this book."--Melinda Gates

In his decades as a globally recognized teacher, Richard Rohr has helped millions realize what is at stake in matters of faith and spirituality. Yet Rohr has never written on the most perennially talked about topic in Christianity: Jesus. Most know who Jesus was, but who was Christ? Is the word simply Jesus's last name? Too often, Rohr writes, our understandings have been limited by culture, religious debate, and the human tendency to put ourselves at the center.

Drawing on scripture, history, and spiritual practice, Rohr articulates a transformative view of Jesus Christ as a portrait of God's constant, unfolding work in the world. "God loves things by becoming them," he writes, and Jesus's life was meant to declare that humanity has never been separate from God--except by its own negative choice. When we recover this fundamental truth, faith becomes less about proving Jesus was God, and more about learning to recognize the Creator's presence all around us, and in everyone we meet.

Thought-provoking, practical, and full of deep hope and vision, The Universal Christ is a landmark book from one of our most beloved spiritual writers, and an invitation to contemplate how God liberates and loves all that is.]]> 260 Richard Rohr 1524762091 David 0 4.43 2019
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average rating: 4.43
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]]> 53091994 9780358380887

For fans of��Sorry to Bother You and The Wolf of Wall Street—a crackling, satirical debut novel about a young man given a shot at stardom as the lone Black salesman at a mysterious, cult-like, and wildly successful startup where nothing is as it seems.

There’s nothing like a Black salesman on a mission.

An unambitious twenty-two-year-old, Darren lives in a Bed-Stuy brownstone with his mother, who wants nothing more than to see him live up to his potential as the valedictorian of Bronx Science. But Darren is content working at Starbucks in the lobby of a Midtown office building, hanging out with his girlfriend, Soraya, and eating his mother’s home-cooked meals. All that changes when a chance encounter with Rhett Daniels, the silver-tongued CEO of Sumwun, NYC’s hottest tech startup, results in an exclusive invitation for Darren to join an elite sales team on the thirty-sixth floor.

After enduring a “hell week�� of training, Darren, the only Black person in the company, reimagines himself as “Buck,�� a ruthless salesman unrecognizable to his friends and family.��But when things turn tragic at home and Buck feels he’s hit rock bottom, he begins to hatch a plan to help young people of color infiltrate America’s sales force, setting off a chain of events that forever changes the game.

Black Buck is a hilarious, razor-sharp skewering of America’s workforce; it is a propulsive, crackling debut that explores ambition and race, and makes way for a necessary new vision of the American dream.]]> 388 Mateo Askaripour David 0 3.68 2021
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]]> 58734811 In her new masterpiece, the author of the bestselling phenomenon Quiet reveals the power of a bittersweet outlook on life, and why we’ve been so blind to its value.

With Quiet, Susan Cain urged our society to cultivate space for the undervalued, indispensable introverts among us, thereby revealing an untapped power hidden in plain sight. Now she employs the same mix of research, storytelling, and memoir to explore why we experience sorrow and longing, and the surprising lessons these states of mind teach us about creativity, compassion, leadership, spirituality, mortality, and love.

Bittersweetness is a tendency to states of longing, poignancy, and sorrow; an acute awareness of passing time; and a curiously piercing joy when beholding beauty. It recognizes that light and dark, birth and death—bitter and sweet—are forever paired. A song in a minor key, an elegiac poem, or even a touching television commercial all can bring us to this sublime, even holy, state of mind—and, ultimately, to greater kinship with our fellow humans.

But bittersweetness is not, as we tend to think, just a momentary feeling or event. It’s also a way of being, a storied heritage. Our artistic and spiritual traditions—amplified by recent scientific and management research—teach us its power.

Cain shows how a bittersweet state of mind is the quiet force that helps us transcend our personal and collective pain. If we don’t acknowledge our own sorrows and longings, she says, we can end up inflicting them on others via abuse, domination, or neglect. But if we realize that all humans know—or will know—loss and suffering, we can turn toward each other. And we can learn to transform our own pain into creativity, transcendence, and connection.

At a time of profound discord and personal anxiety, Bittersweet brings us together in deep and unexpected ways.]]> 310 Susan Cain 0451499786 David 0 3.96 2022
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]]> 12217780
The audio edition of this book can be downloaded via]]> 176 Richard Rohr 1616361573 David 0 4.44 2011
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]]> 50403499 Claudia Rankine's Citizen changed the conversation--Just Us urges all of us into it

As everyday white supremacy becomes increasingly vocalized with no clear answers at hand, how best might we approach one another? Claudia Rankine, without telling us what to do, urges us to begin the discussions that might open pathways through this divisive and stuck moment in American history.

Just Us is an invitation to discover what it takes to stay in the room together, even and especially in breaching the silence, guilt, and violence that follow direct addresses of whiteness. Rankine's questions disrupt the false comfort of our culture's liminal and private spaces--the airport, the theater, the dinner party, the voting booth--where neutrality and politeness live on the surface of differing commitments, beliefs, and prejudices as our public and private lives intersect.

This brilliant arrangement of essays, poems, and images includes the voices and rebuttals of others: white men in first class responding to, and with, their white male privilege; a friend's explanation of her infuriating behavior at a play; and women confronting the political currency of dying their hair blond, all running alongside fact-checked notes and commentary that complements Rankine's own text, complicating notions of authority and who gets the last word.

Sometimes wry, often vulnerable, and always prescient, Just Us is Rankine's most intimate work, less interested in being right than in being true, being together.]]> 352 Claudia Rankine 1644450216 David 0 4.36 2020
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]]> 20613761 Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric.

Claudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV-everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named "post-race" society.]]> 169 Claudia Rankine 1555976905 David 0 4.27 2014
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]]> 42972008
For one thing, the rain is stopping. Nobody remembers when it started; rain on the western seaboard is a condition of living. But now �� just as Father Coffey proclaims the coming of the electricity �� the rain clouds are lifting. Seventeen-year-old Noel Crowe is idling in the unexpected sunshine when Christy makes his first entrance into Faha, bringing secrets he needs to atone for. Though he can't explain it, Noel knows right then: something has changed.

As the people of Faha anticipate the endlessly procrastinated advent of the electricity, and Noel navigates his own coming-of-age and his fallings in and out of love, Christy's past gradually comes to light, casting a new glow on a small world.

Harking back to a simpler time, This Is Happiness is a tender portrait of a community �� its idiosyncrasies and traditions, its paradoxes and kindnesses, its failures and triumphs �� and a coming-of-age tale like no other. Luminous and lyrical, yet anchored by roots running deep into the earthy and everyday, it is about the power of stories: their invisible currents that run through all we do, writing and rewriting us, and the transforming light that they throw onto our world.]]> 400 Niall Williams 163557420X David 0 4.18 2019
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name: David
average rating: 4.18
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]]> 56816904
Louise Erdrich's latest novel, The Sentence, asks what we owe to the living, the dead, to the reader and to the book. A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store's most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Souls' Day, but she simply won't leave the store. Tookie, who has landed a job selling books after years of incarceration that she survived by reading with murderous attention, must solve the mystery of this haunting while at the same time trying to understand all that occurs in Minneapolis during a year of grief, astonishment, isolation, and furious reckoning.

The Sentence begins on All Souls' Day 2019 and ends on All Souls' Day 2020. Its mystery and proliferating ghost stories during this one year propel a narrative as rich, emotional, and profound as anything Louise Erdrich has written]]> 387 Louise Erdrich 006267112X David 0 3.92 2021
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]]> 56783258 When everything is lost, it’s our stories that survive.

How do we weather the end of things? Cloud Cuckoo Land brings together an unforgettable cast of dreamers and outsiders from past, present and future to offer a vision of survival against all odds.

Constantinople, 1453:
An orphaned seamstress and a cursed boy with a love for animals risk everything on opposite sides of a city wall to protect the people they love.

Idaho, 2020:
An impoverished, idealistic kid seeks revenge on a world that’s crumbling around him. Can he go through with it when a gentle old man stands between him and his plans?

Unknown, Sometime in the Future:
With her tiny community in peril, Konstance is the last hope for the human race. To find a way forward, she must look to the oldest stories of all for guidance.

Bound together by a single ancient text, these tales interweave to form a tapestry of solace and resilience and a celebration of storytelling itself. Like its predecessor All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr’s new novel is a tale of hope and of profound human connection.]]> 626 Anthony Doerr 1982168439 David 0 4.24 2021
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]]> 18143977
In a mining town in Germany, Werner Pfennig, an orphan, grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find that brings them news and stories from places they have never seen or imagined. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments and is enlisted to use his talent to track down the resistance. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, Doerr illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another.

From the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, the stunningly beautiful instant New York Times bestseller about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II.

An alternate cover for this ISBN can be found here]]> 544 Anthony Doerr 1476746583 David 0 4.31 2014
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]]> 56897487 «Un viaje al corazón del enigma, la historia del libro de piedra que nos enseñó a descifrar códigos secretos, la hebra que une el antiguo Egipto con el nacimiento de la informática, el nexo entre Champollion y Sherlock Holmes».
Irene Vallejo

Delta del Nilo, 1799. En un asfixiante día de julio es hallada entre un montón de escombros la piedra de Rosetta, uno de los objetos arqueológicos más famosos del mundo y la clave para desentrañar una lengua perdida. La losa de granito contenía el mismo texto grabado en tres idiomas distintos: en egipcio, en demótico y en griego. Hasta su descubrimiento, nadie era capaz de leer los innumerables jeroglíficos que cubrían los templos y estatuas del antiguo Egipto, un poderoso imperio que había dominado el mundo durante treinta siglos, pero sobre el que, sin embargo, se ignoraba prácticamente todo. Quien fuera capaz de descifrar la piedra de Rosetta abriría definitivamente la puerta de un misterio sellado desde hacía dos mil años.

A partir de 1802, en una época en que Inglaterra y Francia se disputaban encarnizadamente en todos los frentes la supremacía mundial, dos brillantes rivales se propusieron alcanzar ese honor: Thomas Young, un polímata británico que destacaba tanto en física como en lingüística, y Jean-François Champollion, educado en un pequeño enclave provinciano durante la Revolución francesa y con una verdadera fijación por todo lo egipcio. La escritura de los dioses narra esta trepidante carrera intelectual, en la que el ganador obtendría sin duda la gloria eterna, tanto para su nación como para sí mismo. Un fascinante retrato de imperios antiguos y modernos, una mirada sin parangón a la historia, la cultura y la humanidad.]]> 336 Edward Dolnick 1501198939 David 0 4.14 2021
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]]> 26782076 176 Malcolm Guite 1848258003 David 0 4.57 2015
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“In the pages that follow, I will attempt to describe the shape that spiritual direction might take for people of our time, aware that the subject is an elusive one. I am speaking to the beginner, those persons lay or ordained, with or without formal theological training, who find themselves drawn to this ministry. Perhaps they feel the stirring of their own unacknowledged gifts. Or perhaps they wonder about receiving direction, whether it is a ministry available to ‘ordinary people' or reserved for the especially holy. I hope some dark corners will be illuminated and some questions answered.”]]> 160 Margaret Guenther 1561010561 David 0 4.24 1992
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]]> 40180098 The Overstory is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of - and paean to - the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’s twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.

A New York Times Bestseller.]]> 502 Richard Powers 039335668X David 0 4.10 2018
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]]> 26706264 ISBN 9781503936645 has been moved to this edition.
Fourteen-year-old March Wong knows everything there is to know about trees. They are his passion and his obsession, even after his recent falls—and despite the state’s threat to take him away from his mother if she can’t keep him from getting hurt. But the young autistic boy cannot resist the captivating pull of the Pacific Northwest’s lush forests just outside his back door.

One day, March is devastated to learn that the Eagle Tree—a monolithic Ponderosa Pine near his home in Olympia—is slated to be cut down by developers. Now, he will do anything in his power to save this beloved tree, including enlisting unlikely support from relatives, classmates, and even his bitter neighbor. In taking a stand, March will come face-to-face with some frightening possibilities: Even if he manages to save the Eagle Tree, is he risking himself and his mother to do it?

Intertwining themes of humanity and ecology, The Eagle Tree eloquently explores what it means to be part of a family, a society, and the natural world that surrounds and connects us.]]> 262 Ned Hayes David 0 3.66 2016
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average rating: 3.66
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]]> 54785515 The average human lifespan is absurdly, insultingly brief. Assuming you live to be eighty, you have just over four thousand weeks.

Nobody needs to be told there isn’t enough time. We’re obsessed with our lengthening to-do lists, overfilled inboxes, work-life balance, and ceaseless battle against distraction; we’re deluged with advice on becoming more productive and efficient and life hacks to optimize our days. But such techniques often end up making things worse. The sense of anxious hurry grows more intense, and still the most meaningful parts of life seem to lie just beyond the horizon. Still, we rarely make the connection between our daily struggles with time and the ultimate time management problem: the challenge of how best to use our four thousand weeks.

Drawing on the insights of both ancient and contemporary philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual teachers, Oliver Burkeman delivers an entertaining, humorous, practical, and ultimately profound guide to time and time management. Rejecting the futile modern obsession with “getting everything done,�� Four Thousand Weeks introduces readers to tools for constructing a meaningful life by embracing finitude, showing that many of the unhelpful ways we’ve come to think about time aren’t inescapable, unchanging truths, but choices we’ve made as individuals and as a society—and that we could do things differently.]]> 271 Oliver Burkeman 0374159122 David 0 4.20 2021
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]]> 62039119
What is it that brings meaning to your life? Our culture tells us to seek wealth, power, prestige, or even enrollment in someone else’s idea of a worthy cause―yet where do we turn when these paths fail to fulfill our need for purpose? “When the old stories and beliefs that once defined us have played out and grown exhausted,�� teaches Dr. James Hollis, “our task is to access our inner compass, the promptings of the psyche that help us find our way through the complex thickets of choice.��

A Life of Meaning is Hollis’s profound exploration of the nature of meaning and how we can orient toward it or away from it with the choices we make. Hollis offers an examination of myth, literature, historical figures, and the wisdom of depth psychology that provides penetrating insight into the search for purpose. Join him to

�� How even cherished narratives splinter and lose potency over time
�� Why dreams are windows into your internalized patterns and base assumptions
�� How to excavate and understand your earliest, most foundational beliefs
�� The power of fear and how it shapes unconscious reactions
�� Recognizing and rising to the occasion of a “summons of the soul��
�� How to anchor yourself during times of uncertainty and change
�� Why it’s important to be aware of and closely examine your shadow
�� How to reckon with old feelings of shame, betrayal, resentment, and regret

We all have to discover our own sense of meaning. No one else can do it for us. In A Life of Meaning , Hollis offers no easy answers or feel-good certainties―instead, he shares his most valuable questions and reflections to help you find the courage, persistence, and inspiration to navigate your own odyssey. “It’s humbling work, this process of getting our lives back,�� he teaches. “Yet I submit to you that’s worth the price of the ticket, for in the journey our lives become ever more luminous.”]]> 184 James Hollis 1649630727 David 0 4.46 2023
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]]> 57648017
Having entertained the idea for years, and even offered a few questionable opportunities ("It's a piece of cake! Just do 4 hours of interviews, find someone else to write it, put your face on the cover, and voila!") I have decided to write these stories just as I have always done, in my own hand. The joy that I have felt from chronicling these tales is not unlike listening back to a song that I've recorded and can't wait to share with the world, or reading a primitive journal entry from a stained notebook, or even hearing my voice bounce between the Kiss posters on my wall as a child.

This certainly doesn't mean that I'm quitting my day job, but it does give me a place to shed a little light on what it's like to be a kid from Springfield, Virginia, walking through life while living out the crazy dreams I had as young musician. From hitting the road with Scream at 18 years old, to my time in Nirvana and the Foo Fighters, jamming with Iggy Pop or playing at the Academy Awards or dancing with AC/DC and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, drumming for Tom Petty or meeting Sir Paul McCartney at Royal Albert Hall, bedtime stories with Joan Jett or a chance meeting with Little Richard, to flying halfway around the world for one epic night with my daughters…the list goes on. I look forward to focusing the lens through which I see these memories a little sharper for you with much excitement.]]> 384 Dave Grohl 0063076098 David 0 4.45 2021
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average rating: 4.45
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