Book picks similar to
The Essential Pearls & Gems of Ibn Taymiyyah by ابن تيمية
islam
abandoned
deen-over-dunya
english
...then just stay fat.
Shannon Sorrels - 2012
Oz and Bob Greene -- definitely not your traditional this-is-how-to-lose-weight manual.A multi-degreed certified personal trainer and owner of an award-winning fitness training and nutrition studio in Phoenix, Sorrels has heard every excuse for not exercising and committing to a weight-management program: I’m too busy I’ve been out of town TV was good last night I had to go out to dinner a lot this week I’ve been sick The conference lunch had bad food choices My job is stressful I’m PMSing I’ve been busy I’m backed up (and I don’t mean scheduling) They made me a cake I’m too busy I need wine I’m genetically fat My family is sick I’m allergic to South African bee pollen My car is at the shop My dog is sick These are new shoes My metabolism thinks I’m starving My child failed a test Dunkin' Donuts had a sale I usually weigh-in in the morning The soft serve yogurt with Oreo toppings was for calcium I’m too busy My cat is sick Beer helps me relax My tree fell over I forgot to wash my workout clothes I’m tired These are different clothes My pinky nail fell off My fridge died; I had to eat it all The moon is out of phase with Jupiter I’m too busyAnd to the people who made those excuses, she has wanted to say, “…then just stay fat.”Sorrels knows of what she speaks. The word “diet” has been part of her vocabulary since she was 9 years old. She spent many years upset, depressed, frustrated and confused. She lost weight and then gained it back. She read books, listened to tapes and joined programs. She fumbled around until she figured it out, and when she did she changed careers and started Physix.She also found a way to share her thoughts and frustrations: writing.This book isn’t a step-by-step weight-loss or fitness plan. There already are plenty of those, and Sorrels doesn’t agree with most of them anyway.Instead, it is intended to motivate and entertain, spur some heated debates – and maybe even put an end to all of the excuses.
I Am Malala: The Story of the Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban
Malala Yousafzai - 2012
When I almost died it was just after midday.When the Taliban took control of the Swat Valley in Pakistan, one girl spoke out. Malala Yousafzai refused to be silenced and fought for her right to an education.On Tuesday, October 9, 2012, when she was fifteen, she almost paid the ultimate price. She was shot in the head at point-blank range while riding the bus home from school, and few expected her to survive. Instead, Malala's miraculous recovery has taken her on an extraordinary journey from a remote valley in northern Pakistan to the halls of the United Nations in New York. At sixteen, she has become a global symbol of peaceful protest and the youngest-ever Nobel Peace Prize laureate.I Am Malala is the remarkable tale of a family uprooted by global terrorism, of the fight for girls' education, of a father who, himself a school owner, championed and encouraged his daughter to write and attend school, and of brave parents who have a fierce love for their daughter in a society that prizes sons.
Snow
Orhan Pamuk - 2002
Following years of lonely political exile in Western Europe, Ka, a middle-aged poet, returns to Istanbul to attend his mother's funeral. Only partly recognizing this place of his cultured, middle-class youth, he is even more disoriented by news of strange events in the wider country: a wave of suicides among girls forbidden to wear their head scarves at school. An apparent thaw of his writer's curiosity–a frozen sea these many years–leads him to Kars, a far-off town near the Russian border and the epicenter of the suicides. No sooner has he arrived, however, than we discover that Ka's motivations are not purely journalistic; for in Kars, once a province of Ottoman and then Russian glory, now a cultural gray-zone of poverty and paralysis, there is also Ipek, a radiant friend of Ka's youth, lately divorced, whom he has never forgotten. As a snowstorm, the fiercest in memory, descends on the town and seals it off from the modern, westernized world that has always been Ka's frame of reference, he finds himself drawn in unexpected directions: not only headlong toward the unknowable Ipek and the desperate hope for love–or at least a wife–that she embodies, but also into the maelstrom of a military coup staged to restrain the local Islamist radicals, and even toward God, whose existence Ka has never before allowed himself to contemplate. In this surreal confluence of emotion and spectacle, Ka begins to tap his dormant creative powers, producing poem after poem in untimely, irresistible bursts of inspiration. But not until the snows have melted and the political violence has run its bloody course will Ka discover the fate of his bid to seize a last chance for happiness. Blending profound sympathy and mischievous wit, Snow illuminates the contradictions gripping the individual and collective heart in many parts of the Muslim world. But even more, by its narrative brilliance and comprehension of the needs and duties