Tag Archives: Books

In My Hands Today…

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The Art of Power: My Story as America’s First Woman Speaker of the House – Nancy Pelosi

When, at age forty-six, Nancy Pelosi, mother of five, asked her youngest daughter if she should run for Congress, Alexandra Pelosi answered: “Mother, get a life!” And so Nancy did, and what a life it has been.

In The Art of Power, Pelosi describes for the first time what it takes to make history—not only as the first woman to ascend to the most powerful legislative role in our nation, but to pass laws that would save lives and livelihoods, from the emergency rescue of the economy in 2008 to transforming health care. She describes the perseverance, persuasion, and respect for her members that it took to succeed, but also the joy of seeing America change for the better. Among the best-prepared and hardest working Speakers in history, Pelosi worked to find common ground, or stand her ground, with presidents from Bush to Biden. She also shares moving moments with soldiers sent to the front lines, women who inspired her, and human rights activists who fought by her side.

Pelosi took positions that established her as a prophetic voice on the major moral issues of the day, warning early about the dangers of the Iraq War and of the Chinese government’s long record of misbehavior. This moral courage prepared her for the arrival of Trump, with whom she famously tangled, becoming a red-coated symbol of resistance to his destructive presidency. Here, she reveals how she went toe-to-toe with Trump, leading up to January 6, 2021, when he unleashed his post-election fury on the Congress. Pelosi gives us her personal account of that day: the assault not only on the symbol of our democracy but on the men and women who had come to serve the nation, never expecting to hide under desks or flee for their lives—and her determined efforts to get the National Guard to the Capitol. Nearly two years later, violence and fury would erupt inside Pelosi’s own home when an intruder, demanding to see the Speaker, viciously attacked her beloved husband, Paul. Here, Pelosi shares that horrifying day and the traumatic aftermath for her and her family.

The woman who has been lauded by her opposition as “the most powerful Speaker” ever shows us why she is not afraid of a good fight. The Art of Power is about the fighting spirit that has always animated her, and the historic legacy that spirit has produced.

In My Hands Today…

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Anatomy of a Breakthrough: How to Get Unstuck When It Matters Most – Adam Alter

Almost everyone feels stuck in some way. Whether you’re muddling through a midlife crisis, wrestling writer’s block, trapped in a thankless job, or trying to remedy a fraying friendship, the resulting emotion is usually a mix of anxiety, uncertainty, fear, anger, and numbness. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Anatomy of a Breakthrough is the roadmap we all need to escape our inertia and flourish in the face of friction.

Adam Alter has spent the past two decades studying how people become stuck and how they free themselves to thrive. Here he reveals the formula he and other researchers have uncovered. The solution rests on a process that he calls a friction audit—a systematic procedure that uncovers why a person or organization is stuck, and then suggests a path to progress. The friction audit states that people and organizations get unstuck when they overcome three sources of HEART (unhelpful emotions); HEAD (unhelpful patterns of thought); and HABIT (unhelpful behaviors).

Despite the ubiquity of friction, there are many great “unstickers” hidden in plain sight among us and Alter shines a light on some exceptional stories to share their valuable lessons with us. He tells us about the sub-elite swimmer who unstuck himself twice to win two Olympic gold medals, the actor who faced countless rejections before gaining worldwide fame, the renowned painter who became paralyzed and had to relearn to paint with a brush strapped to his wrist, and Alter’s own story of getting unstuck from a college degree that made him deeply unhappy.

Artfully weaving together scientific studies, anecdotes, and interviews, Alter teaches us that getting stuck is a feature rather than a glitch on the road to thriving, but with the right tweaks and corrections we can reach even our loftiest targets.

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Pixel Flesh: How Toxic Beauty Culture Harms Women – Ellen Atlanta

We live in a new age of beauty. With advancements in cosmetic surgery, walk-in treatments, augmented-reality face filters, photo-editing apps, and exposure to more images than ever, we have the ability to craft the image we want everyone to see. We pinch, pull, squeeze, tweeze, smooth, and slice ourselves beyond recognition. But is modern beauty culture truly empowering? Are we really in control?

In Pixel Flesh, Ellen Atlanta holds a mirror up to our modern beauty ideal and the pressure to present a perfect image, to live in an age of constant comparison and curated feeds. She weaves in her personal story with others’ to reconfigure our obsession with the cult of beauty and to explore the reality of living in a world of paradoxes: We know our standards are unhealthy, but following them helps us succeed. We resent social media but continue to scroll. We know digital beauty is artificial, yet we strive for it.

From Love Island to lip filler, “blackfishing” to the “beauty tax,” Pixel Flesh exposes what young women face under a dominant industry. Nuanced, unflinching, and razor sharp, it unmasks the absurdities of the standards we suddenly find ourselves upholding and acts as a rallying cry and a refusal to suffer in silence.

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I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine – Daniel J. Levitin

Music is one of humanity’s oldest medicines. From the Far East to the Ottoman Empire, Europe to Africa and the pre-colonial Americas, many cultures have developed their own rich traditions for using sound and rhythm to ease suffering, promote healing, and calm the mind.

In his latest work, neuroscientist and New York Times best-selling author Daniel J. Levitin (This Is Your Brain on Music) explores the curative powers of music, showing us how and why it is one of the most potent therapies today. He brings together, for the first time, the results of numerous studies on music and the brain, demonstrating how music can contribute to the treatment of a host of ailments, from neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, to cognitive injury, depression, and pain.

Levitin is not your typical scientist—he is also an award-winning musician and composer, and through lively interviews with some of today’s most celebrated musicians, from Sting to Kent Nagano and Mari Kodama, he shares their observations as to why music might be an effective therapy, in addition to plumbing scientific case studies, music theory, and music history. The result is a work of dazzling ideas, cutting-edge research, and jubilant celebration. I Heard There Was a Secret Chord highlights the critical role music has played in human biology, illuminating the neuroscience of music and its profound benefits for those both young and old.

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The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading – Dwight Garner

Reading and eating, like Krazy and Ignatz, Sturm und Drang, prosciutto and melon, Simon and Schuster, and radishes and butter, have always, for me, simply gone together. The book you’re holding is a product of these combined gluttonies.

Dwight Garner, the beloved New York Times critic and the author of Garner’s Quotations , serves up the intertwined pleasures of books and food. The product of a lifetime of obsessively reading, eating, and every combination therein, The Upstairs On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading is a charming, emotional memoir, one that only Garner could write. In it, he records the voices of great writers and the stories from his life that fill his mind as he moves through the sections of the day and of this breakfast, lunch, shopping, the occasional nap, drinking, and dinner.

Through his lifelong infatuation with these twin joys, we meet the man behind the pages and the plates, and a portrait of Garner, eager and insatiable, emerges. He writes with tenderness and humor about his mayonnaise-laden childhood in West Virginia and Naples, Florida (and about his father’s famous peanut butter and pickle sandwich), his mind-opening marriage to a chef from a foodie family (“Cree grew up taking leftover frog legs to school in her lunch box”), and the words and dishes closest to his heart. This is a book to be savored, though it may just whet your appetite for more.
Genres
Food
Memoir
Nonfiction
Books About Books
Essays
Audiobook
Biography