In My Hands Today…

Dashavatar : Stories of Lord Vishnu – Piyusha Vir

Did you know that each avatar of Vishnu arrived with a specific purpose?

Time and again, Vishnu has manifested in different forms to fulfil his role as a ‘protector’ of the world. Among the long list of 24 avatars, 10 have captured our imagination for centuries together—Matsya, Kurma, Varaha, Narasimha, Vamana, Parshuram, Rama, Krishna, Buddha, and Kalki.

But how exactly did these avatars impact society? And how do they link to the Charles Darwin theory of evolution?

While each avatar has its own set of legends that extoll their characteristics and deeds, the stories behind them are just as interesting and informative.

Presented from a contemporary and unbiased perspective, these stories of the 10 avatars of Vishnu are an attempt to make mythology more believable and relevant to the world that we live in today.

In My Hands Today…

Rough Sleepers – Tracy Kidder

When Jim O’Connell graduated from Harvard Medical School and was nearing the end of his residency at Massachusetts General Hospital, the chief of medicine made a proposal: Would he defer a prestigious fellowship and spend a year helping to create an organization to bring health care to homeless citizens?

Jim took the job because he felt he couldn’t refuse. But that year turned into his life’s calling. Tracy Kidder spent five years following Dr. O’Connell and his colleagues as they served their thousands of homeless patients.

In this book, we travel with O’Connell as he navigates the city, offering medical care, socks, soup, empathy, humor, and friendship to some of the city’s most vulnerable citizens. He emphasizes a style of medicine in which patients come first, joined with their providers in what he calls “a system of friends.”

In My Hands Today…

Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to Be – Becky Kennedy

Dr. Becky Kennedy, wildly popular parenting expert and creator of @drbeckyatgoodinside, shares her groundbreaking approach to raising kids and offers practical strategies for parenting in a way that feels good.

Over the past several years, Dr. Becky Kennedy–known to her followers as “Dr. Becky”–has been sparking a parenting revolution. Millions of parents, tired of following advice that either doesn’t work or simply doesn’t feel good, have embraced Dr. Becky’s empowering and effective approach, a model that prioritizes connecting with our kids over correcting them.

Parents have long been sold a model of childrearing that simply doesn’t work. From reward charts to time outs, many popular parenting approaches are based on shaping behavior, not raising humans. These techniques don’t build the skills kids need for life, or account for their complex emotional needs. Add to that parents’ complicated relationships with their own upbringings, and it’s easy to see why so many caretakers feel lost, burned out, and worried they’re failing their kids. In Good Inside, Dr. Becky shares her parenting philosophy, complete with actionable strategies, that will help parents move from uncertainty and self-blame to confidence and sturdy leadership.

Offering perspective-shifting parenting principles and troubleshooting for specific scenarios–including sibling rivalry, separation anxiety, tantrums, and more–Good Inside is a comprehensive resource for a generation of parents looking for a new way to raise their kids while still setting them up for a lifetime of self-regulation, confidence, and resilience.

In My Hands Today…

Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things – Adam M. Grant

We live in a world that’s obsessed with talent. We celebrate gifted students in school, natural athletes in sports, and child prodigies in music. But admiring people who start out with innate advantages leads us to overlook the distance we ourselves can travel. We underestimate the range of skills that we can learn and how good we can become. We can all improve at improving. And when opportunity doesn’t knock, there are ways to build a door.

Hidden Potential offers a new framework for raising aspirations and exceeding expectations. Adam Grant weaves together groundbreaking evidence, surprising insights, and vivid storytelling that takes us from the classroom to the boardroom, the playground to the Olympics, and underground to outer space. He shows that progress depends less on how hard you work than how well you learn. Growth is not about the genius you possess—it’s about the character you develop. Grant explores how to build the character skills and motivational structures to realize our own potential, and how to design systems that create opportunities for those who have been underrated and overlooked.

Many writers have chronicled the habits of superstars who accomplish great things. This book reveals how anyone can rise to achieve greater things. The true measure of your potential is not the height of the peak you’ve reached, but how far you’ve climbed to get there.
Genres
Nonfiction
Self Help
Psychology
Business
Audiobook
Personal Development
Leadership

In My Hands Today…

Unreliable Narrator: Me, Myself, and Impostor Syndrome – Aparna Nancherla

Aparna Nancherla is a superstar comedian on the rise—a darling of Netflix and Comedy Central’s comedy special lineups, a headliner at comedy shows and music festivals, a frequenter of late-night television and the subject of numerous profiles. She’s also a successful actor who has written a barrage of thoughtful essays published by the likes of the New York Times. If you ask her, though, she’s a total fraud. She’d hate to admit it, but no one does impostor syndrome quite like Aparna Nancherla.

Unreliable Narrator is a collection of essays that uses Aparna’s signature humor to illuminate an interior life—one constantly bossed around by her depression (whom she calls Brenda), laced with anxiety like a horror movie full of jump scares, and plagued by an unrepenting love-hate relationship with her career as a painfully shy standup comedian. But luckily, crippling self-doubt comes with the gift of keen self-examination. These essays deliver hilarious and incredibly insightful meditations on body image, productivity culture, the ultra-meme-ability of mental health language, and who, exactly, gets to make art “about nothing.” Despite her own arguments to the contrary, Unreliable Narrator is undeniable proof that Aparna is a force—as a comedian and author alike—to be reckoned with.