Tag Archives: Memoir

In My Hands Today…

Posted on by
Reply

Any Ordinary Day – Leigh Sales

The day that turns a life upside down usually starts like any other, but what happens the day after? Dual Walkley Award-winner Leigh Sales investigates how ordinary people endure the unthinkable.

As a journalist, Leigh Sales often encounters people experiencing the worst moments of their lives in the full glare of the media. But one particular string of bad news stories – and a terrifying brush with her own mortality – sent her looking for answers about how vulnerable each of us is to a life-changing event.

What are our chances of actually experiencing one? What do we fear most and why? And when the worst does happen, what comes next?

In this wise and layered book, Leigh talks intimately with people who’ve faced the unimaginable. From terrorism to natural disaster to simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Expecting broken lives, she instead finds strength, hope, even humour. Leigh brilliantly condenses the cutting-edge research on the way the human brain processes fear and grief, and poses the questions we too often ignore out of awkwardness. Along the way, she offers an unguarded account of her own challenges and what she’s learned about coping with life’s unexpected blows.

In My Hands Today…

Posted on by
Reply

The Girl Who Fell From the Sky – Emma Carey

From a terrible accident that left her paraplegic, Emma Carey has become an inspiration for hundreds of thousands online to live life to the fullest and remind us that if we can, we must.

There on that helicopter, somewhere over Switzerland on a Sunday in June, came the first tiny whisper. A voice that that would carry me for years to come. ‘I’m going to be okay. There’s still joy here.’

When Emma Carey was twenty, she fell from 14,000 feet and survived. In The Girl Who Fell From the Sky, Emma tells us the inspirational story of how, through what could be considered one of her greatest tragedies, she found her truest self.

From waking in hospital to the news that she was a paraplegic to learning how to use her legs again, through the six-year long court case and now being finally free to make the most of her life, Emma teaches us the importance of courage and resilience and how to appreciate the extraordinary beauty found even in the most ordinary moments of our lives.

This heartfelt book is more than a memoir, it’s a call to action that reminds us not to take our lives and abilities for granted but to live every day like it could be our last.

In My Hands Today…

Posted on by
Reply

Invention: A Life – James Dyson

Famously, over a four-year period, James Dyson made 5,127 prototypes of the cyclonic vacuum cleaner that would transform the way houses are cleaned around the world. In devoting all his resources to iteratively setbacks came hard-fought success. His products—including vacuum cleaners, hair dryer and hair stylers, and fans and purifiers—are not only revolutionary technologies, but design classics. This was a legacy of his time studying at the Royal College of Art in the 1960s, when he was inspired by some of the most famous artists, designers, and inventors of the era, as well as his engineering heroes such as Frank Whittle and Alex Issigonis.

In A Life, Dyson reveals how he came to set up his own company and led it to become one of the most inventive technology companies in the world. It is a compelling and dramatic tale, with many obstacles overcome. Dyson has always looked to the future, even setting up his own university to help provide the next generation of engineers and designers. For, as he says, “everything changes all the time, so experience is of little use.”

In My Hands Today…

Posted on by
Reply

The Pathless Path: Imagining a New Story For Work and Life – Paul Millerd

Paul thought he was on his way. From a small-town Connecticut kid to the most prestigious consulting firm in the world, he had everything he thought he wanted. Yet he decided to walk away and embark on the “real work” of his life – finding the things that matter and daring to create a life to make them happen.

This Pathless Path is about finding yourself in the wrong life, and the real work of figuring out how to live. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries and the goodwill of people from around the world, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to the good life and all of the existential crises in between.

The Pathless Path is not a how-to book filled with “hacks”; instead, it is a vulnerable account of Paul’s journey from leaving a path centered around getting ahead and towards another, one focused on doing work that matters. This book is an ideal companion for people considering leaving their jobs, embarking on a new path, dealing with the uncertainty of an unconventional path, or searching for better models for thinking about work in a fast-changing world.

In My Hands Today…

Posted on by
Reply

Finding Chika: A Little Girl, an Earthquake, and the Making of a Family – Mitch Albom

Chika Jeune was born three days before the devastating earthquake that decimated Haiti in 2010. She spent her infancy in a landscape of extreme poverty, and when her mother died giving birth to a baby brother, Chika was brought to The Have Faith Haiti Orphanage that Albom operates in Port Au Prince.

With no children of their own, the forty-plus children who live, play, and go to school at the orphanage have become family to Mitch and his wife, Janine. Chika’s arrival makes a quick impression. Brave and self-assured, even as a three-year-old, she delights the other kids and teachers. But at age five, Chika is suddenly diagnosed with something a doctor there says, “No one in Haiti can help you with.”

Mitch and Janine bring Chika to Detroit, hopeful that American medical care can soon return her to her homeland. Instead, Chika becomes a permanent part of their household, and their lives, as they embark on a two-year, around-the-world journey to find a cure.

As Chika’s boundless optimism and humor teach Mitch the joys of caring for a child, he learns that a relationship built on love, no matter what blows it takes, can never be lost. Told in hindsight, and through illuminating conversations with Chika herself, this is Albom at his most poignant and vulnerable. Finding Chika is a celebration of a girl, her adoptive guardians, and the incredible bond they formed—a devastatingly beautiful portrait of what it means to be a family, regardless of how it is made.