Great new book recommendations for our Self-Starter types this Winter
This winter, we have meticulously curated a collection of books that cater to the self-starter's insatiable thirst for knowledge and ambition, ensuring they have the resources to further their personal and professional growth.
March NEW RELEASES
How to Walk Into a Room: The Art of Knowing When to Stay and When to Walk Away
by Emily P Freeman
What do you do when you start to feel a shift and must decide if it's time to make a change? When it comes to navigating big decisions about when to stay and go, how can we know for sure when the time is right? Though we enter and exit many rooms over the course of our life--jobs, relationships, communities, life stages--knowing how and when it's time to leave is a decision that rarely has a clear answer.
Podcast host, spiritual director, and bestselling author of The Next Right Thing, Emily P. Freeman offers guidance to help us recognize when it's time to move on from situations that no longer fit, allowing us to find new spaces where we can flourish and grow.
The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness
by Jonathan Haidt
After more than a decade of stability or improvement, the mental health of adolescents plunged in the early 2010s. Rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide rose sharply, more than doubling on most measures. Why?
In The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt lays out the facts about the epidemic of teen mental illness that hit many countries at the same time. He then investigates the nature of childhood, including why children need play and independent exploration to mature into competent, thriving adults. Haidt shows how the "play-based childhood" began to decline in the 1980s, and how it was finally wiped out by the arrival of the "phone-based childhood" in the early 2010s. He presents more than a dozen mechanisms by which this "great rewiring of childhood" has interfered with children's social and neurological development, covering everything from sleep deprivation to attention fragmentation, addiction, loneliness, social contagion, social comparison, and perfectionism. He explains why social media damages girls more than boys and why boys have been withdrawing from the real world into the virtual world, with disastrous consequences for themselves, their families, and their societies.
Cooking in Real Life: Delicious & Doable Recipes for Every Day (a Cookbook)
by Lidey Heuck - Ina Garten
As any Ina Garten fan will attest, Lidey Heuck landed the most plum after-college job--working for Ina in her East Hampton kitchen. There, she learned how to develop recipes that work every time and how to put together dishes that are at once special and unfussy.
Cooking in Real Life represents the golden middle ground that new and experienced home cooks crave: recipes that are inventive but not overly complicated, that use familiar ingredients but encourage us to do things a little bit differently. They are designed to be low-effort, practical, and high-reward. Lidey combines straight-forward delicious cooking with innovative, vegetable-forward recipes, inspired by bold flavors from near and far.
February NEW RELEASES
Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection
by Charles Duhigg
Come inside a jury room as one juror leads a starkly divided room to consensus. Join a young CIA officer as he recruits a reluctant foreign agent. And sit with an accomplished surgeon as he tries, and fails, to convince yet another cancer patient to opt for the less risky course of treatment. In Supercommunicators, Charles Duhigg blends deep research and his trademark storytelling skills to show how we can all learn to identify and leverage the hidden layers that lurk beneath every conversation.
Communication is a superpower and the best communicators understand that whenever we speak, we're actually participating in one of three conversations: practical (What's this really about?), emotional (How do we feel?), and social (Who are we?). If you don't know what kind of conversation you're having, you're unlikely to connect.
Supercommunicators know the importance of recognizing--and then matching--each kind of conversation, and how to hear the complex emotions, subtle negotiations, and deeply held beliefs that color so much of what we say and how we listen. Our experiences, our values, our emotional lives--and how we see ourselves, and others--shape every discussion, from who will pick up the kids to how we want to be treated at work. In this book, you will learn why some people are able to make themselves heard, and to hear others, so clearly.
With his storytelling that takes us from the writers' room of The Big Bang Theory to the couches of leading marriage counselors, Duhigg shows readers how to recognize these three conversations--and teaches us the tips and skills we need to navigate them more successfully.
In the end, he delivers a simple but powerful lesson: With the right tools, we can connect with anyone.
The End of Love: Sex and Desire in the Twenty-First Century
by Tamara Tenenbaum - Carolina Parodi
Born and raised in an Orthodox Jewish community in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Tamara Tenenbaum approached the sexual and affective habits of the secular world like an anthropologist discovering the ways of life of an unknown civilization.
Drawing from philosophy and feminist militancy, from conversations with friends and colleagues, and from an attempt to turn her own body and experience into a laboratory for both individual and collective reflection, Tenenbaum explores the challenges that young people today face at the start of their adult lives.
Tenenbaum examines the multiple dimensions of affection, from the value of friendship to the culture of consent, passing through motherhood as a choice or an imperative, desired and abhorred singlehood, polyamory, open relationships, and the workings of dating apps. Timely and illuminating, The End of Love celebrates the creative destruction of romantic relationships as we know them, and advocates for the rise of a better, freer love.
Come Together: The Science (and Art!) of Creating Lasting Sexual Connections
by Emily Nagoski
In Come as You Are, Emily Nagoski, PhD, revolutionized the way we think about women's sexuality. Now, in Come Together, Nagoski takes on a fundamentally misunderstood subject: sex in long-term relationships.
Most of us struggle at some point to maintain a sexual connection with our partner/s or spouse. And many of us are given not-very-good advice on what to do about it. In this book, Nagoski dispels the myths we've been taught about sex--for instance, the belief that sexual satisfaction and desire are highest at the beginning of a relationship and that they inevitably decline the longer that relationship lasts. Nagoski assures us that's not true.
So, what is true? Come Together isn't about how much we want sex, or how often we're having it; it's about whether we like the sex we're having. Nagoski breaks down the obstacles that impede us from enjoying sex--from stress and body image to relationship difficulties and gendered beliefs about how sex "should" be--and presents the best ways to overcome them. You'll learn:
- that "spontaneous desire" is not the kind of desire to strive for if you want to have great sex for decades
- vocabulary for talking with partners about ways to get in "the mood" and how to not take it personally when "the mood" is nowhere to be found
- how to understand your own and your partner's "emotional floorplan," so that you have a blueprint for how to get to a sexy state of mind
Written with scientific rigor, humor, and compassion, Nagoski shows us what great sex can look like, how to create it in our own lives, and what to do when struggles arise.
Look Again: The Power of Noticing What Was Always There
by Tali Sharot - Cass R Sunstein
Have you ever noticed that what is thrilling on Monday tends to become boring on Friday? Even exciting relationships, stimulating jobs, and breathtaking works of art lose their sparkle after a while. People stop noticing what is most wonderful in their own lives. They also stop noticing what is terrible. They get used to dirty air. They stay in abusive relationships. People grow to accept authoritarianism and take foolish risks. They become unconcerned by their own misconduct, blind to inequality, and are more liable to believe misinformation than ever before.
But what if we could find a way to see everything anew? What if you could regain sensitivity, not only to the great things in your life, but also to the terrible things you stopped noticing and so don't try to change?
Now, neuroscience professor Tali Sharot and Harvard law professor (and presidential advisor) Cass R. Sunstein investigate why we stop noticing both the great and not-so-great things around us and how to "dishabituate" at the office, in the bedroom, at the store, on social media, and in the voting booth. This groundbreaking work, based on decades of research in the psychological and biological sciences, illuminates how we can reignite the sparks of joy, innovate, and recognize where improvements urgently need to be made. The key to this disruption--to seeing, feeling, and noticing again--is change. By temporarily changing your environment, changing the rules, changing the people you interact with--or even just stepping back and imagining change--you regain sensitivity, allowing you to more clearly identify the bad and more deeply appreciate the good.
January NEW RELEASES
Adventure Revolution: The Life-Changing Power of Choosing Challenge
by Belinda Kirk
For the past twenty-five years, Belinda Kirk's professional life has revolved around adventure. She's seen it change people first hand: turning the timid into the confident, the addicted into the recovering, and the lost into the intentionally wandering. As a force for change, adventure can be powerful like few others.
This book is about this transformational power, and the first to explore why adventure is essential to our wellbeing. From managing anxiety and overcoming fear, to finding self-worth and building interpersonal connections, to being happier, healthier, and more playful, ADVENTURE REVOLUTION draws lessons from more than two decades of experience leading groups into the wilderness around the globe. Illuminated with Belinda's personal narrative, her own research with modern hunter-gatherers, and the latest findings in neuroscience and behaviour, ADVENTURE REVOLUTION presents a compelling case for ditching the living room in favour of a longer, happier, and more adventurous life.
Making It in America: The Almost Impossible Quest to Manufacture in the U.S.A. (and How It Got That Way)
by Rachel Slade
Meet Ben and Whitney Waxman, two tireless idealists attempting to do the impossible: produce an American-made, union-made, all American-sourced sweatshirt--an American hoodie.
Ben spent a decade organizing workers in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Wisconsin, fighting for Americans at a time when national support for unions had sunk to an all-time low. Struggling with depression and a drug dependency, Ben lands back in his hometown of Portland, Maine, desperate to prove that ethical manufacturing is possible. There, he meets Whitney, a bartender wrestling with her own complicated past. In each other they see a better future, a version of the American dream they can build together.
Making It in America is a deeply personal account of one couple's quest to change the world. As they navigate private struggles, international trade wars, and a global pandemic, their story carries us across the nation and across time, from the cotton fields of Mississippi to New York City's hollowed-out garment district to a family-owned zipper company in Los Angeles to the enormous knit-and-dye factories in North Carolina. Throughout, we grapple with what "Made in the USA" really means to Americans in the twenty-first century.
Making It in America also offers a unique look at global politics, economics, and labor through the story of textile manufacturing. It was the demand for cheap cloth that sparked the industrial revolution. It was the brutality of the textile industry that first drove workers to organize.
Making It in America reveals how profoundly manufacturing shapes all of us. Each twist and turn of the Waxmans' quest tells us how we got here, where we are now, and where we're headed--through the people that produce the fabric of our lives.
One Day I'll Work for Myself: The Dream and Delusion That Conquered America
by Benjamin C Waterhouse
"One day I'll work for myself." Perhaps you've heard some version of that phrase from friends, colleagues, family members--perhaps you've said it yourself. If so, you're not alone. The spirit of entrepreneurship runs deep in American culture and history, in the films we watch and the books we read, in our political rhetoric, and in the music piping through our speakers.
What makes the dream of self-employment so alluring, so pervasive in today's world? Benjamin C. Waterhouse offers a provocative argument: the modern cult of the hustle is a direct consequence of economic failures--bad jobs, stagnant wages, and inequality--since the 1970s. With original research, Waterhouse traces a new narrative history of business in America, populated with vivid characters--from the activists, academics, and work-from-home gurus who hailed business ownership as our economic salvation to the upstarts who took the plunge. We meet, among others, a consultant who quits his job and launches a wildly popular beer company, a department store saleswoman who founds a plus-size bra business on the Internet, and an Indian immigrant in Texas who flees the corporate world to open a motel. Some flourish; some squeak by. Some fail.
As Waterhouse shows, the go-it-alone movement that began in the 1970s laid the political and cultural groundwork for today's gig economy and its ethos: everyone should be their own boss. While some people find success in that world, countless others are left bouncing from gig to gig--exploited, underpaid, or conned by get-rich-quick scams. And our politics doesn't know how to respond.
Accessible, fast-paced, and eye-opening, One Day I'll Work for Myself offers a fresh, insightful cultural history of the U.S. economy from the perspective of the people within it, asking urgent questions about why we're clinging to old strategies for progress--and at what cost.
Optimal: How to Sustain Personal and Organizational Excellence Every Day
by Daniel Goleman - Cary Cherniss
There are moments when we achieve peak performance: An athlete plays a perfect game; a business has a quarter with once-in-a-lifetime profits. But these moments are often elusive, and for every amazing day, we may have a hundred ordinary and even unsatisfying days. Fulfillment doesn't come from isolated peak experiences, but rather from many consistent good days. So how do we sustain performance, while avoiding burnout and maintaining balance?
In Optimal, Daniel Goleman and Cary Cherniss reveal how emotional intelligence can help us have a great day, any day. They explain how to set a realistic, attainable goal of feeling satisfied that you've had a productive day -- to consistently work at your 'optimal' level. Based on research of how hundreds of people build the inner architecture of having a good day, they sketch what an optimal state feels like, and show how emotional intelligence holds the key to our best performance.
Optimal is the culmination of decades of scientific discoveries bearing on emotional intelligence. Enhanced emotional intelligence pays off in improved engagement, productivity, and more satisfying days. In this book, you'll find the keys to competence in emotional intelligence, and practical methods for applying this skill set more readily. It will equip you to become a highly effective leader and enable you to build an organizational culture that empowers workers to sustain high performance.
Rental Person Who Does Nothing: A Memoir (Original)
by Shoji Morimoto
Shoji Morimoto was constantly being told by his boss, "It makes no difference whether you're here or not," and that his presence contributed nothing to the company. Morimoto began to wonder whether a person who "does nothing" could still have actual value and a place in the world. Perhaps he could turn "doing nothing" into a service? With one tweet, Rental Person was born.
The Six Disciplines of Strategic Thinking: Leading Your Organization Into the Future
by Michael D Watkins
Pattern recognition. Systems perspective. Mental agility. Structured problem-solving. Visioning. Political savvy. For every good leader who has mastered of one of these disciplines is a great leader who knows and has mastered all of them.
Michael D. Watkins, an expert on leadership transitions and organizational success, returns to the page with a new how-to guide for the modern leader. Here, he presents the six disciplines that separate the great from the good. Developed over the course of his storied career, Watkins' approach to strategic thinking--"a set of mental disciplines leaders use to recognize potential threats and opportunities, establish priorities, and mobilize themselves and their organizations to envision and enact promising paths forward"--is the model followed by some of today's most successful first-time CEOs and new business leaders.
The Six Disciplines of Strategic Thinking is a comprehensive and practical guide to strategic thinking, offering a wealth of insights and tools for leaders at all levels.