Category Archives: Books

Books

In My Hands Today…

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Culinary Reactions: The Everyday Chemistry of Cooking – Simon Quellen Field

When you’re cooking, you’re a chemist! Every time you follow or modify a recipe, you are experimenting with acids and bases, emulsions and suspensions, gels and foams. In your kitchen you denature proteins, crystallize compounds, react enzymes with substrates, and nurture desired microbial life while suppressing harmful bacteria and fungi. And unlike in a laboratory, you can eat your experiments to verify your hypotheses.

In Culinary Reactions, author Simon Quellen Field turns measuring cups, stovetop burners, and mixing bowls into graduated cylinders, Bunsen burners, and beakers. How does altering the ratio of flour, sugar, yeast, salt, butter, and water affect how high bread rises? Why is whipped cream made with nitrous oxide rather than the more common carbon dioxide? And why does Hollandaise sauce call for “clarified” butter? This easy-to-follow primer even includes recipes to demonstrate the concepts being discussed, Whipped Creamsicle Topping—a foam; Cherry Dream Cheese—a protein gle; Lemonade with Chameleon Eggs—an acid indicator; and more!

In My Hands Today,,,

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The Cure for Burnout: How to Find Balance and Reclaim Your Life – Emily Ballesteros

Is dread the first thing you feel when you wake up in the morning? Are you working in the evenings and on weekends to catch up? Have you already beat burnout once, only to find it creeping back? If you answered yes to any of these, you’re in need of a cure for burnout.

In The Cure for Burnout , burnout management coach and TikTok influencer Emily Ballesteros combines scientific and cultural research, her expertise in organizational psychology, and the tried-and-true strategies she’s successfully implemented with clients around the globe to demystify burnout for our post-pandemic world – and set you on a path toward a life of personal and professional balance. Ballesteros outlines five areas in which you can build healthy habits to combat burnout — mindset, personal care, time management, boundaries , and stress management .

She offers clear, easy-to-implement tools to help you find greater balance, energy, and fulfillment, showing you how to break burnout habits that keep you in a pattern of chronic overwhelm, create sustainable work/life balance through predictable personal care, get more done in less time while creating forward momentum toward a meaningful life, identify and set your personal and professional limits , guilt-free, and master your stress and detach from your stressors

The Cure for Burnout provides a holistic method for burnout management to address the epidemic of our always-on, chronically overextended culture, empowering us to reclaim control of our own lives once and for all.

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Never Not Working: Why the Always-On Culture Is Bad for Business–and How to Fix It – Malissa Clark

The always-on hustle culture creates an unhealthy, counterproductive relationship with work.

Many workers believe that to compete with other top talent they must embrace a culture that rewards long hours and constant connection to work. Businesses and society have encouraged this by endorsing busyness, overwork, and extreme commitment as the most valued traits in workers.

Sometimes that endorsement is explicit, as when Elon Musk told Twitter employees to work “long hours at high intensity” or get fired. But more often it’s an implicit contract, a buildup of organizational and cultural norms and the adoption of new technologies that increasingly make it easy to tether people to work. Either way, this workaholic behavior is unhealthy and counterproductive for workers and for organizations. It’s time to fight back.

Malissa Clark—the preeminent researcher on workaholic culture—shows you how in Never Not Working . Finally, a book that looks at overwork and burnout not just from the individual’s perspective but from an organizational perspective, too. Clark delivers a comprehensive, nuanced definition of workaholism, busting myths along the way—such as the idea that the number of hours worked is the strongest predictor of workaholic tendencies. (It’s not.) She also helps you see if you’re creating workaholics in your organization or if you’re falling prey to the phenomenon yourself. Clark shows you how to escape the trap of putting work at the center of everything and thus losing your well-being—or your company’s performance—in the process. Deeply researched and written for everyone, from leaders to individual contributors, Never Not Working is the essential guide to identifying workaholism in yourself and others and starting on the road to recovery.

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Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory’s Power to Hold on to What Matters – Charan Ranganath

Memory is far more than a record of the past. In this groundbreaking tour of the mind and brain, one of the world’s top memory researchers reveals the powerful role memory plays in nearly every aspect of our lives, from recalling faces and names, to learning, decision-making, trauma and healing.

A new understanding of memory is emerging from the latest scientific research. In Why We Remember , pioneering neuroscientist and psychologist Charan Ranganath radically reframes the way we think about the everyday act of remembering. Combining accessible language with cutting-edge research, he reveals the surprising ways our brains record the past and how we use that information to understand who we are in the present, and to imagine and plan for the future.

Memory, Dr. Ranganath shows, is a highly transformative force that shapes how we experience the world in often invisible and sometimes destructive ways. Knowing this can help us with daily remembering tasks, like finding our keys, and with the challenge of memory loss as we age. What’s more, when we work with the brain’s ability to learn and reinterpret past events, we can heal trauma, shed our biases, learn faster, and grow in self-awareness.

Including fascinating studies and examples from pop culture, and drawing on Ranganath’s life as a scientist, father, and child of immigrants, Why We Remember is a captivating read that unveils the hidden role memory plays throughout our lives. When we understand its power– and its quirks–we can cut through the clutter and remember the things we want to remember. We can make freer choices and plan a happier future.

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Housewife: Why Women Still Do It All and What to Do Instead – Lisa Selin Davis

The notion of “housewife” evokes strong reactions. For some, it’s nostalgia for a bygone era, simpler and better times when men were breadwinners and women remained home with the kids. For others, it’s a sexist, oppressive stereotype of women’s work. Either way, housewife is a long outdated concept—or is it?

Lisa Selin Davis, known for her smart, viral, feminist, cultural takes, argues that the “breadwinner vs. homemaker” divide is a myth. She charts examples from prehistoric female hunters to working class housewives in the 1930s, from First Ladies to 21st century stay-at-home moms, on a search for answers to the problems of what is referred to as women’s work and motherhood. Davis discovers that women have been sold a lie about what families should be. Housewife unveils a interdependence, rather than independence, is the American way.

The book is a clarion call for all women—married or single, mothers or childless—and for men, too, to push for liberation. In Housewife , Davis builds a case for systemic, cultural, and personal change, to encourage women to have the power to choose the best path for themselves.