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Showing 161 - 180 of 3562 items
By Elin Kelsey. 2020
How do we say goodbye to a loved one after they die? This book broaches a difficult topic in a…
heartfelt way by exploring the beauty in how animals mourn. From elephants to whales, parrots to bonobos, and lemurs to humans, we all have rituals to commemorate our loved ones and to lift each other up in difficult times. New from the award-winning team behind You Are Stardust, Wild Ideas, and You Are Never Alone, this book gently recognizes death as a natural part of life for humans and all animals. Written in spare, poetic language and illustrated with stunning dioramas, it draws out our similarities with other animals as it honors the universal experience of mourning. The touching and uplifting book ends on a hopeful note, showing how we live on both in memories and on the planet, our bodies nourishing new life in the Earth and the oceans.By Howard Bronson. 2021
I am your parent, child, spouse, sibling, or friend . . . gone forever gone. I am not coming back.…
I will always know that you loved me. You will always know that I loved you. Just one small excerpt of this very powerful bereavement book. Based on the accidental death of the author's father due to a surgical mistake, Early Winter will help you to reconnect with your own feelings of loss and eventual acceptance. This book will make you laugh at times and cry at others as it takes you through the process of challenging loss and delivers you to a better placeBy Danielle Claro, Adrienne L. Simone, Jaqueline Worth. 2020
Finally, a calming pregnancy book that cuts through the noise to tell expectant mothers exactly what they need to know-and…
what they can stop obsessing about and over-researching. In The New Rules of Pregnancy, two leading OB-GYNs guide you, the modern pregnant woman, through all aspects of pregnant life in an easy-to-digest, compassionate, and motivating way. Instead of a detailed week-by-week look at your baby's development, it's all about you and how to help your pregnancy go as smoothly as possible. It assumes an intelligent, busy listener (who, somewhere inside, is shouting, "Just tell me what to do!"). Every aspect of pregnant life is covered-from the practical details (how to fly pregnant) to the complex issues ("What makes it postpartum depression?"). The book also covers that critical "fourth trimester"-"Nursing" and "How to Feel Like Yourself Again"-because once the baby is born, self-care typically goes out the window, and you really need someone to have your back. Its strong point of view and expertise come from gynecologist Adrienne Simone and obstetrician Jaqueline Worth-two renowned New York doctors dedicated to bringing patients the safest, calmest, least invasive pregnancies possible. The book's voice-motivating, supportive, real-comes from Danielle Claro, coauthor of The New Health RulesBy Ann Gordon. 2020
From moral panics about immigration and gun control to anxiety about terrorism and natural disasters, Americans live in a culture…
of fear. While fear is typically discussed in emotional or poetic terms-as the opposite of courage or an obstacle to be overcome-it nevertheless has very real consequences in everyday life. Persistent fear negatively affects individuals' decision-making abilities and causes anxiety, depression, and poor physical health. Furthermore, fear harms communities and society by corroding social trust and civic engagement. Yet politicians often effectively leverage fears to garner votes, and companies routinely market unnecessary products that promise protection from imagined or exaggerated harms. Drawing on five years of data from the Chapman Survey of American Fears-which canvasses a random national sample of adults about a broad range of fears-Fear Itself offers new insights into what people are afraid of and how fear affects their lives. The authors also draw on participant observation with Doomsday preppers and conspiracy theorists to provide fascinating narratives about subcultures of fear. Fear Itself is a novel, wide-ranging study of the social consequences of fear, ultimately suggesting that there is good reason to be afraid of fear itselfBy Heather Christle. 2020
Heather Christle has just lost a dear friend to suicide and now must reckon with her own depression and the…
birth of her first child. As she faces her grief and impending parenthood, she decides to research the act of crying: what it is and why people do it, even if they rarely talk about it. Along the way, she discovers an artist who designed a frozen-tear-shooting gun and a moth that feeds on the tears of other animals. She researches tear-collecting devices (lachrymatories) and explores the role white women's tears play in racist violence. Honest, intelligent, rapturous, and surprising, Christle's investigations look through a mosaic of science, history, and her own lived experience to find new ways of understanding life, loss, and mental illnessBy Céline Huyghebaert. 2019
" Quand mon père est mort, je n'ai pas hérité de boîtes pleines de documents et de lettres. Ses cendres…
ont été jetées à l'eau. Ses biens ont été donnés, détruits à la hâte. Il avait les yeux clairs et portait la barbe. Sur les photos, il avait cette allure virile et négligée caractéristique des années soixante-dix. Il ne pouvait pas se mettre à table sans son couteau de poche et du pain. Il disait il à ceux qu'il aurait dû vouvoyer, parce qu'il refusait de se soumettre à leur supériorité de classe. Il était drôle et colérique. Il était sensible. Il fumait, il buvait ; il n'a pas laissé grand-chose derrière lui. Je crois qu'il avait commencé à disparaître de son vivant déjà. Quand on a soulevé son corps, une légère empreinte avait creusé le drap, là où était posé son crâne. Puis elle s'est effacée, et le drap est redevenu lisse. C'est cette disparition qui a déclenché l'écriture de ce livre, cette absence que laissent les morts, avec laquelle ceux qui leur survivent tissent des fictions pour s'en sortir. "By Trent Preszler. 2021
"Little and Often is a beautiful memoir of grief, love, the shattered bond between a father and son, and the…
resurrection of a broken heart. Trent Preszler tells his story with the same level of art and craftsmanship that he brings to his boat making, and he reminds us of creativity's power to transform and heal our lives. This is a powerful and deeply moving book. I won't soon forget it." —Elizabeth Gilbert Trent Preszler thought he was living the life he always wanted, with a job at a winery and a seaside Long Island home, when he was called back to the life he left behind. After years of estrangement, his cancer-stricken father had invited him to South Dakota for Thanksgiving. It would be the last time he saw his father alive. Preszler's only inheritance was a beat-up wooden toolbox that had belonged to his father, who was a cattle rancher, rodeo champion, and Vietnam War Bronze Star Medal recipient. This family heirloom befuddled Preszler. He did not work with his hands—but maybe that was the point. In his grief, he wondered if there was still a way to understand his father, and with that came an epiphany: he would make something with his inheritance. Having no experience or training in woodcraft, driven only by blind will, he decided to build a wooden canoe, and he would aim to paddle it on the first anniversary of his father's death. While Preszler taught himself how to use his father's tools, he confronted unexpected revelations about his father's secret history and his own struggle for self-respect. The grueling challenges of boatbuilding tested his limits, but the canoe became his sole consolation. Gradually, Preszler learned what working with his hands offered: a different perspective on life, and the means to change it. Little and Often is an unflinching account of bereavement and a stirring reflection on the complexities of inheritance. Between his past and his present, and between America's heartland and its coasts, Preszler shows how one can achieve reconciliation through the healing power of creativityBy Lorenzo Carcaterra. 2021
&“As nourishing as a three-course Italian feast, this is a fierce, moving tribute to the ties that bind.&”— People (Book…
of the Week) The #1 New York Times bestselling author of Sleepers offers a heartfelt homage to the women who taught him courage, kindness, and the power of storytelling: his mother, his grandmother, and his late wife. At sixty-six, Lorenzo Carcaterra finds it easier to reflect on the past than ruminate on the future. &“By the time you reach my age,&” he writes, &“you have witnessed too much loss to not be aware of what lies ahead.&” This turn to the past inspired a poignant memoir about the women who made him the man he is today. His Italian grandmother, Nonna Maria, gave him his first taste of a loving home during the summers he spent with her as a teenager on Ischia, an island off the coast of Naples. With her kindness, her humor, and the same formidable strength she employed to make secret trips for food when the Nazis occupied Ischia during World War II, she instilled in him the importance of community, providing shelter for a boy whose home life was difficult. His mother, Raffaela, dealt with daily hardships: a loveless and abusive marriage, the burden of debt, and a life of dread. Though the lessons she taught were harsh, they would drive Lorenzo from the world they shared to the better one she always prayed he would find. The third woman is his wife, Susan, a gifted editor and his professional champion. Their marriage lasted three decades before her death from lung cancer in 2013. While their upbringings were wildly different, their love and friendship never wavered—and neither did her faith in Lorenzo&’s talent and potential as a writer. Standing with his children near Nonna Maria&’s grave on a recent trip to Ischia, Lorenzo realized how much of his life has been shaped by the women who taught him how to look for joy and overcome sorrow. This book is his tribute to themBy Gregory Curtis. 2021
In this moving, tender memoir of losing a beloved spouse, the longtime editor of Texas Monthly, newly widowed, returns alone…
to a city whose enchantment he's only ever shared with his wife, in search of solace, memories, and the courage to find a way forward. At the age of sixty-six, after thirty-five years of marriage, Gregory Curtis finds himself a widower. Tracy—with whom he fell in love the first time he saw her—has succumbed to a long battle with cancer. Paralyzed by grief, agonized by social interaction, Curtis turns to watching magic lessons on DVD—"a pathetic, almost comical substitute" for his evenings with Tracy. To break the spell, he returns to the place he had the "best and happiest times" of his life. As he navigates the storied city and contemplates his new future, Curtis relives his days in Paris with Tracy, piecing together the portrait of a woman, a marriage, parenthood, and his life's great love through the memories of six unforgettable trips to the City of Lights. Alone in Paris, Curtis becomes a tireless wanderer, exploring the city's grand boulevards and forgotten corners as he confronts the bewildering emotional state that ensues after losing a life partner. Paris Without Her is a work of tremendous courage and insight—an ode to the lovely woman who was his wife, to a magnificent city, and to the self we might invent, and reinvent, thereBy Michelle Zauner. 2021
From the indie rockstar of Japanese Breakfast fame, and author of the viral 2018 New Yorker essay that shares the…
title of this book, an unflinching, powerful memoir about growing up Korean American, losing her mother, and forging her own identity. In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up one of the few Asian American kids at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother's particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother's tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food. As she grew up, moving to the East Coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, and performing gigs with her fledgling band—and meeting the man who would become her husband—her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live. It was her mother's diagnosis of terminal cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her. Vivacious and plainspoken, lyrical and honest, Zauner's voice is as radiantly alive on the page as it is onstage. Rich with intimate anecdotes that will resonate widely, Crying in H Mart is a book to cherish, share, and rereadBy David Macfarlane. 2021
When the worst that can happen, happens, the only useful lesson is the knowledge that it can. That's the take-away:…
a world can actually end, time can actually run out, sadness can prevail. But I didn't know that then . . . From one of Canada's most celebrated writers and the author of the classic memoir The Danger Tree comes an occasionally hilarious, sometimes heart-breaking meditation on love, memory, and the fathomless depths of grief. Likeness is a multi-generational story told through the vehicle of a painting, a portrait of Macfarlane by the well-known Canadian artist, John Hartman. The painting has ended up unexpectedly, temporarily, and enormously in Macfarlane's living room. He looks at it—a lot. It's hard to avoid. To Macfarlane's surprise, the painting becomes a portal—not only into his own past, but into his father's, too. Through these two histories is woven the present—one dominated by illness. Macfarlane's son undergoes treatment for leukemia during the time the painting hangs in the family living room. Blake is a young man rich in creative possibility. There is music to be composed. There are films to be made. But Blake's future is as circumscribed by fate as his father's was wide open. A tragic difference, eloquently noted. Likeness can be very funny. But it is also inescapably, achingly sad. A book of transcendent beauty, Likeness demonstrates the power of memory to transform the tragic into the precious and profoundBy Barbara Becker. 2021
"We can do extraordinary things when we lead with love," Barbara Becker reminds us in her debut memoir Heartwood .…
When her earliest childhood friend is diagnosed with a terminal illness, Becker sets off on a quest to immerse herself in what it means to be mortal. Can we live our lives more fully knowing some day we will die? With a keen eye towards that which makes life worth living, interfaith minister, mom and perpetual seeker Barbara Becker recounts stories where life and death intersect in unexpected ways. She volunteers on a hospice floor, becomes an eager student of the many ways people find meaning at the end of life, and accompanies her parents in their final days. Becker inspires listeners to live with the end in mind and proves that turning toward loss rather than away from it is the only true way to live life to its fullest. Just as with the heartwood of a tree—the central core that is no longer alive yet supports the newer growth rings—the dead become an enduring source of strength to the living. With life-affirming prose, Becker helps us see that that grief is not a problem to be solved, but rather a sacred invitation—an opportunity to let go into something even greater...a love that will inform all the days of our lives. A Macmillan Audio production from Flatiron Books "Becker's eloquence is a salve for confronting a difficult topic...This will be a comfort for anyone contemplating their own mortality, or those in search of advice for others. " — Publishers Weekly, starred reviewBy Dan Robson. 2021
"Dan Robson’s book is a heart-wrenching portrait of grief. Anyone who has lost a parent will recognize it, know it…
intimately as you roll through the stages and finally come to the realization that a parent’s ultimate gift to a child is showing them how to live."—Tanya Talaga, bestselling author of Seven Fallen Feathers A tender memoir of fathers and sons, love and loss, and learning to fill boots a size too big. Dan Robson’s father is a builder, a fixer. A man whose high-school education is enough not only to provide for his family, but to build a successful business. Rick Robson holds things up. When he dies, nothing in his son’s world feels steady anymore. In a very real sense, the home his father had built is suddenly fragile. Without its natural caretaker, the house will fall to pieces—and his family shows all the same signs of crumbling. Dan is hit especially hard. He knows he is not the man his father was. Dan never learned the blue-collar skills he admired, because his father wanted him to pursue his dream of becoming a writer. Now that his father is gone, the acknowledgment of his sacrifices and the sheer longing to be close to him again in some way draw Dan to the tools that lie unused in the garage. So begins Dan’s year of learning the skills his father’s hands had long mastered, and trying to fill the steel-toe boots left behind. Measuring Up is the story of that journey. Robson picks up where his father left off, working on the house and the truck, as much for the family as for himself. In much the same way that Michael Pollan comes to know his house inside-out in A Place of My Own, Robson learns the mysteries and proud satisfaction of plumbing, carpentry, wiring, and drywalling, and comes to understand how our homes are built. He also comes to see how his home was built by his father, uncovering more than one heartbreaking reminder of the kind of man his father was, and what he meant to his family. Tender and unflinching, Measuring Up is a story of love, mourning, and what it means to use your calloused hands to make the world around you a better place to live.By Beth Powning. 2021
NATIONAL BESTSELLER A novel of orphans and widows, terror and hope, and the relationships that hold us together when things…
fall apart.With murder dominating the news, the respected wife of a New Brunswick sea captain is drawn into the case of a British home child whose bad luck has turned worse. Mortified that she must purchase the girl in a pauper auction to save her from the lechery of wealthy townsmen, Josephine Galloway finds herself suddenly the proprietor of a boarding house kept afloat by the sweat and tears of a curious and not completely compatible collection of women, including this English teenager, Flora Salford. Flora's place in her new "family" cannot be complete until she rescues the missing person in her life, the only one who understands the trials she has come through and fresh horrors met since they were separated years before.Reconnecting with characters of Beth Powning's beloved The Sea Captain's Wife, The Sister's Tale is a story of women finding their way, together, through terrible circumstances they could neither predict nor avoid, but will stop at nothing to overcome.By Oliver Burkeman. 2021
"This is the most important book ever written about time management. Oliver Burkeman offers a searing indictment of productivity hacking…
and profound insights on how to make the best use of our scarcest, most precious resource. His writing will challenge you to rethink many of your beliefs about getting things done-and you’ll be wiser because of it." -Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Think Again and host of WorkLife Time is our biggest worry: there is too little of it. The award-winning, renowned Guardian columnist Oliver Burkeman offers a lively, entertaining philosophical guide to time and time management, setting aside superficial efficiency solutions in favour of reckoning with and finding joy in the finitude of human life.The average human lifespan is absurdly, insultingly brief. Assuming you live to be eighty, you have just over four thousand weeks.Nobody needs telling there isn't enough time. We're obsessed with our lengthening to-do lists, our overfilled inboxes, work-life balance, and the ceaseless struggle against distraction; and we're deluged with advice on becoming more productive and efficient, plus "lifehacks" to optimize our days. But such techniques often just end up making things worse. The sense of anxious hurry grows more intense, and still the most meaningful parts of life seem to lie just beyond the horizon. Still, we rarely make the connection between our daily struggles with time and the ultimate time management problem: the challenge of how best to use our four thousand weeks.Drawing on the insights of ancient and contemporary philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual teachers, Oliver Burkeman delivers an entertaining, humorous, practical, and ultimately profound guide to time and time management. Rejecting the futile modern obsession with "getting everything done," he introduces readers to tools for constructing a meaningful life, showing how many of the unhelpful ways we've come to think about time aren't inescapable, unchanging truths, but choices we've made, as individuals and as a society--and that we could do things differently.An artist explains the Swedish concept of döstädning, meaning the effort to clean and declutter your home before you die.…
The tips for sorting and categorizing possessions can be used to prepare for any big life transition. 2018By Michael Ignatieff. 2021
Timely and profound philosophical meditations on how great figures in history, literature, music, and art searched for solace while facing…
tragedies and crises, from the internationally renowned historian of ideas and Booker Prize-finalist Michael Ignatieff.When someone we love dies, when we suffer loss or defeat, when catastrophe strikes--war, famine, pandemic--we go in search of consolation. Once the province of priests and philosophers, the language of consolation has largely vanished from our modern vocabulary, and the places where it was offered, houses of religion, are often empty. Rejecting the solace of ancient religious texts, humanity since the sixteenth century has increasingly placed its faith in science, ideology, and the therapeutic.How do we console each other and ourselves in an age of unbelief? In a series of lapidary meditations on writers, artists, musicians, and their works--from the books of Job and Psalms to Albert Camus, Anna Akhmatova, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and Primo Levi--esteemed writer and historian Michael Ignatieff shows how men and women in extremity have looked to each other across time to recover hope and resilience. Recreating the moments when great figures found the courage to confront their fate and the determination to continue unafraid, On Consolation takes those stories into the present, movingly contending that we can revive these traditions of consolation to meet the anguish and uncertainties of our precarious twenty-first century.By Ram Dass. 2001
A spiritual teacher offers advice on living with mindfulness, focusing on the path from aging to dying and beyond. He…
shares stories from his own life and provides meditations for dealing with the ups and downs of aging. 2000By Suleika Jaouad. 2021
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A searing, deeply moving memoir of illness and recovery that traces one young woman&’s journey…
from diagnosis to remission to re-entry into &“normal&” life—from the author of the Life, Interrupted column in The New York Times &“I was immersed for the whole ride and would follow Jaouad anywhere. . . . Her writing restores the moon, lights the way as we learn to endure the unknown.&”—Chanel Miller, The New York Times Book Review &“Beautifully crafted . . . affecting . . . a transformative read . . . Jaouad&’s insights about the self, connectedness, uncertainty and time speak to all of us.&”— The Washington Post In the summer after graduating from college, Suleika Jaouad was preparing, as they say in commencement speeches, to enter &“the real world.&” She had fallen in love and moved to Paris to pursue her dream of becoming a war correspondent. The real world she found, however, would take her into a very different kind of conflict zone. It started with an itch—first on her feet, then up her legs, like a thousand invisible mosquito bites. Next came the exhaustion, and the six-hour naps that only deepened her fatigue. Then a trip to the doctor and, a few weeks shy of her twenty-third birthday, a diagnosis: leukemia, with a 35 percent chance of survival. Just like that, the life she had imagined for herself had gone up in flames. By the time Jaouad flew home to New York, she had lost her job, her apartment, and her independence. She would spend much of the next four years in a hospital bed, fighting for her life and chronicling the saga in a column for The New York Times . When Jaouad finally walked out of the cancer ward—after countless rounds of chemo, a clinical trial, and a bone marrow transplant—she was, according to the doctors, cured. But as she would soon learn, a cure is not where the work of healing ends; it&’s where it begins. She had spent the past 1,500 days in desperate pursuit of one goal—to survive. And now that she&’d done so, she realized that she had no idea how to live. How would she reenter the world and live again? How could she reclaim what had been lost? Jaouad embarked—with her new best friend, Oscar, a scruffy terrier mutt—on a 100-day, 15,000-mile road trip across the country. She set out to meet some of the strangers who had written to her during her years in the hospital: a teenage girl in Florida also recovering from cancer; a teacher in California grieving the death of her son; a death-row inmate in Texas who&’d spent his own years confined to a room. What she learned on this trip is that the divide between sick and well is porous, that the vast majority of us will travel back and forth between these realms throughout our lives. Between Two Kingdoms is a profound chronicle of survivorship and a fierce, tender, and inspiring exploration of what it means to begin again