Stranger, Baby
Emily Berry - 2017
Stranger, Baby, its follow-up, is marked by the same sense of fantasy and play, estrangement and edgy humour for which she has become known. But these poems delve deeper again, in their off-kilter and often painful encounter with childhood loss. This is a book of mourning, recrimination, exhilaration and 'oceanic feeling': 'A meditation on a want that can never be answered.'
The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure
Jonathan Haidt - 2018
These three Great Untruths are part of a larger philosophy that sees young people as fragile creatures who must be protected and supervised by adults. But despite the good intentions of the adults who impart them, the Great Untruths are harming kids by teaching them the opposite of ancient wisdom and the opposite of modern psychological findings on grit, growth, and antifragility. The result is rising rates of depression and anxiety, along with endless stories of college campuses torn apart by moralistic divisions and mutual recriminations. This is a book about how we got here. First Amendment expert Greg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt take us on a tour of the social trends stretching back to the 1980s that have produced the confusion and conflict on campus today, including the loss of unsupervised play time and the birth of social media, all during a time of rising political polarization. This is a book about how to fix the mess. The culture of “safety” and its intolerance of opposing viewpoints has left many young people anxious and unprepared for adult life, with devastating consequences for them, for their parents, for the companies that will soon hire them, and for a democracy that is already pushed to the brink of violence over its growing political divisions. Lukianoff and Haidt offer a comprehensive set of reforms that will strengthen young people and institutions, allowing us all to reap the benefits of diversity, including viewpoint diversity. This is a book for anyone who is confused by what’s happening on college campuses today, or has children, or is concerned about the growing inability of Americans to live and work and cooperate across party lines.
Meet Cute: Some People Are Destined to Meet
Jennifer L. ArmentroutMeredith Russo - 2018
MEET CUTE is an anthology of original short stories featuring tales of "how they first met" from some of today’s most popular YA authors. Readers will experience Nina LaCour's beautifully written piece about two Bay Area girls meeting via a cranky customer service Tweet, Sara Shepard's glossy tale about a magazine intern and a young rock star, Nicola Yoon's imaginative take on break-ups and make-ups, Katie Cotugno's story of two teens hiding out from the police at a house party, and Huntley Fitzpatrick's charming love story that begins over iced teas at a diner. There’s futuristic flirting from Kass Morgan and Katharine McGee, a riveting transgender heroine from Meredith Russo, a subway missed connection moment from Jocelyn Davies, and a girl determined to get out of her small town from Ibi Zoboi. Jennifer Armentrout writes a sweet story about finding love from a missing library book, Emery Lord has a heartwarming and funny tale of two girls stuck in an airport, Dhonielle Clayton takes a thoughtful, speculate approach to pre-destined love, and Julie Murphy dreams up a fun twist on reality dating show contestants. This incredibly talented group of authors brings us a collection of stories that are at turns romantic and witty, epic and everyday, heartbreaking and real.
Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time
Rob Sheffield - 2007
Rob and Renee's life together - they wed after graduate school, both became music journalists, and were married only five years when Renee died suddenly on Mother's Day, 1997 - is shared through the window of the mix tapes they obsessively compiled. There are mixes to court each other, mixes for road trips, mixes for doing the dishes, mixes for sleeping - and, eventually, mixes to mourn Rob's greatest loss. The tunes were among the great musical output of the early 1990s - Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Pavement, Yo La Tengo, REM, Weezer - as well as classics by The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, Aretha Franklin and more. Mixing the skilful, tragic punch of Dave Eggers and the romantic honesty of Nick Hornby, LOVE IS A MIX TAPE is a story of lost love and the kick-you-in-the-gut energy of great pop music.
Pitch Perfect: The Quest for Collegiate A Cappella Glory
Mickey Rapkin - 2008
But what had been largely an Ivy League phenomenon has, in the past fifteen years, exploded. And it's not what you think. There are now more than 1,200 a cappella groups at colleges across the country. The very best of these collegiate groups square off in the annual International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella showdown marked by wrenching close calls and exhilarating triumphs. And, really, where else can you hear Michael Jackson's Bad in four-part harmony? In Pitch Perfect, GQ editor Mickey Rapkin follows a season in a cappella through all its twists and turns, covering the breathtaking displays of vocal talent, the groupies (yes, a cappella singers have groupies), the rockstar partying (and run-ins with the law), and all the bitter rivalries. Along the way are encounters with boldfaced names such as President George W. Bush, Prince, David Letterman, Barack Obama, Barbra Streisand, Hillary Clinton, Marisa Tomei, Amanda Bynes, Nick Lachey, Merv Griffin, Jim Carrey, Microsoft's Paul Allen, John Legend, and Jessica Biel. At the heart of the narrative are three a cappella groups whose interactions are anything but harmonious: the historic Tufts Beelzebubs, founded more than forty years ago with 40,000 albums sold since, and struggling to record a new album that lives up to the hype; Divisi of the University of Oregon, a relatively new, all-female group attempting to overcome a loss in the 2005 championship; and the University of Virginia Hullabahoos, the so-called bad boys of collegiate a cappella, who will attempt to compete on a higher level this year while retaining their casual soul. Bringing a lively new twist to America's fascination with talent showdowns and peerless performers, Pitch Perfect is sure to strike a chord with readers.
What Teachers Make: In Praise of the Greatest Job in the World
Taylor Mali - 2012
It's a book that will be treasured and shared by every teacher in America—and everyone who's ever loved or learned from one.
Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World
Tony Wagner - 2012
He explores what parents, teachers, and employers must do to develop the capacities of young people to become innovators. In profiling compelling young American innovators such as Kirk Phelps, product manager for Apple’s first iPhone, and Jodie Wu, who founded a company that builds bicycle-powered maize shellers in Tanzania, Wagner reveals how the adults in their lives nurtured their creativity and sparked their imaginations, while teaching them to learn from failures and persevere. Wagner identifies a pattern—a childhood of creative play leads to deep-seated interests, which in adolescence and adulthood blossom into a deeper purpose for career and life goals. Play, passion, and purpose: These are the forces that drive young innovators. Wagner shows how we can apply this knowledge as educators and what parents can do to compensate for poor schooling. He takes readers into the most forward-thinking schools, colleges, and workplaces in the country, where teachers and employers are developing cultures of innovation based on collaboration, interdisciplinary problem-solving, and intrinsic motivation. The result is a timely, provocative, and inspiring manifesto that will change how we look at our schools and workplaces, and provide us with a road map for creating the change makers of tomorrow. Creating Innovators will feature its own innovative elements: more than sixty original videos that expand on key ideas in the book through interviews with young innovators, teachers, writers, CEOs, and entrepreneurs, including Thomas Friedman, Dean Kamen, and Annmarie Neal. Produced by filmmaker Robert A. Compton, the videos are embedded into the ebook edition in video-enabled eReaders and accessible in this print edition via QR codes placed throughout the chapters or via www.creatinginnovators.com.
Birthday Letters
Ted Hughes - 1998
And few episodes in postwar literature have the legendary stature of Hughes's romance with, and marriage to, the great American poet Sylvia Plath.The poems in Birthday Letters are addressed (with just two exceptions) to Plath, and were written over a period of more than twenty-five years, the first a few years after her suicide in 1963. Some are love letters, others haunted recollections and ruminations. In them, Hughes recalls his and Plath's time together, drawing on the powerful imagery of his work--animal, vegetable, mythological--as well as on Plath's famous verse.Countless books have discussed the subject of this intense relationship from a necessary distance, but this volume--at last--offers us Hughes's own account. Moreover, it's a truly remarkable collection of poems in its own right.
A Lush and Seething Hell: Two Tales of Cosmic Horror
John Hornor Jacobs - 2019
P. Lovecraft, The Sea Dreams It Is the Sky examines life in a South American dictatorship. Centered on the journal of a poet-in-exile and his failed attempts at translating a maddening text, it is told by a young woman trying to come to grips with a country that nearly devoured itself.In My Heart Struck Sorrow, a librarian discovers a recording from the Deep South—which may be the musical stylings of the Devil himself.Breathtaking and haunting, A Lush and Seething Hell is a terrifying and exhilarating journey into the darkness, an odyssey into the deepest reaches of ourselves that compels us to confront secrets best left hidden.
Tales from Shakespeare
Charles Lamb - 1807
Presents an introduction to Shakespeare's greatest plays including Hamlet Othello, As You Like It, The Taming of the Shrew, The Tempest and Pericles.
Stop Doing That Sh*t: End Self-Sabotage and Demand Your Life Back
Gary John Bishop - 2019
Bishop explains how our destructive cycles come down to the way that we’re wired. He then identifies different types of people and the ways we fu*k ourselves over: We can’t save money. We land in the same type of toxic relationship. We’re stuck in a rut at work. Analyzing why we act the way we do, including what our common grenades are that blow up our lives, Bishop then shows how we can interrupt the cycle and stop self-sabotaging our lives.Written in the same in your face style as Unfu*k Yourself, Stop Doing that Sh*t will help us get in touch with our psychological machinery so we learn to interrupt negative thoughts and behavior before they start, allowing us to give our attention to something else, and start to find success in the areas we thought we never could.We can take back our lives. We may have fu*ked up in the past, but Stop Doing That Sh*t will show us how to break the patterns in order to live the lives we yearn to have.
Natural History
Dan Chiasson - 2005
This collection suggests that a person is like a world, full of mysteries and wonders–and equally in need of an encyclopedia, a compendium of everything known. The long title sequence offers entries such as “The Sun” (“There is one mind in all of us, one soul, / who parches the soil in some nations / but in others hides perpetually behind a veil”), “The Elephant” (“How to explain my heroic courtesy?”), “The Pigeon” (“Once startled, you shall feel hours of weird sadness / afterwards”), and “Randall Jarrell” (“If language hurts you, make the damage real”). The mysteriously emotional individual poems coalesce as a group to suggest that our natural world is populated not just by fascinating creatures–who, in any case, are metaphors for the human as Chiasson considers them– but also by literature, by the ghosts of past poetries, by our personal ghosts. Toward the end of the sequence, one poem asks simply, “Which Species on Earth Is Saddest?” a question this book seems poised to answer. But Chiasson is not finally defeated by the sorrows and disappointments that maturity brings. Combining a classic, often heartbreaking musical line with a playful, fresh attack on the standard materials of poetry, he makes even our sadness beguiling and beautiful.
Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak
Marc Falkoff - 2007
detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. According to Department of Defense data, fewer than half of them are accused of committing any hostile act against the United States or its allies. In hundreds of cases, even the circumstances of their initial detainment are questionable. This collection gives voice to the men held at Guantánamo. Available only because of the tireless efforts of pro bono attorneys who submitted each line to Pentagon scrutiny, Poems from Guantánamo brings together twenty-two poems by seventeen detainees, most still at Guantánamo, in legal limbo. If, in the words of Audre Lorde, poetry “forms the quality of light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change,” these verses—some originally written in toothpaste, others scratched onto foam drinking cups with pebbles and furtively handed to attorneys—are the most basic form of the art. Death Poem by Jumah al Dossari Take my blood. Take my death shroud and The remnants of my body. Take photographs of my corpse at the grave, lonely. Send them to the world, To the judges and To the people of conscience, Send them to the principled men and the fair-minded. And let them bear the guilty burden before the world, Of this innocent soul. Let them bear the burden before their children and before history, Of this wasted, sinless soul, Of this soul which has suffered at the hands of the "protectors or peace." Jumah al Dossari is a thirty-three-year old Bahraini who has been held at Guantanamo Bay for more than five years. He has been in solitary confinement since the end of 2003 and, according to the U.S. military, has tried to kill himself twelve times while in custody.
The Latte Factor: Why You Don't Have to Be Rich to Live Rich
David Bach - 2019
Drawing on the author’s experiences teaching millions of people around the world to live a rich life, this fast, easy listen reveals how anyone—from millennials to baby boomers—can still make his or her dreams come true.In this compelling, heartwarming parable, Bach and his bestselling coauthor John David Mann (The Go-Giver) tell the story of Zoey, a twenty-something woman living and working in New York City. Like many young professionals, Zoey is struggling to make ends meet under a growing burden of credit card and student loan debt, working crazy hours at her dream job but still not earning enough to provide a comfortable financial cushion. At her boss’s suggestion, she makes friends with Henry, the elderly barista at her favorite Brooklyn coffee shop. Henry soon reveals his “Three Secrets to Financial Freedom,” ideas Zoey dismisses at first but whose true power she ultimately comes to appreciate. Over the course of a single week, Zoey discovers that she already earns enough to secure her financial future and realize her truest dreams—all she has to do is make a few easy shifts in her everyday routine. The Latte Factor demystifies the secrets to achieving financial freedom, inspiring you to realize that it’s never too late to reach for your dreams. By following the simple, proven path that Henry shows Zoey, anyone can make small changes today that will have big impact for a lifetime, proving once again that “David Bach is the financial expert to listen to when you’re intimidated by your finances” (Tony Robbins, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Money: Master the Game).