Society tells us that if we just looked a certain way, if we had the right products, if we were skinny enough, then we would be enough—we would have value. Society is wrong, but it took Katie H. Willcox years to understand this:“Over the course of my 30 short years, I have both worked as a professional model and been the exact opposite of our culture’s beauty ideal. I have struggled with my weight and felt like I didn’t and never would fit in. Then I had a powerful realization: my misery and self-loathing didn’t change with my weight or how ‘pretty’ society thought I was, so my looks weren’t the source of happiness and worth that I had believed them to be. But then, what was? And how had I come to invest so much of myself in beliefs that were so untrue?”In these pages, Katie shares the lessons she learned in her journey to find the answers to these questions. She reveals who gains from our feeling small and why we need to examine the messages we receive from our culture and our families. She explains how we can redefine beauty, make healthy the new “skinny,” and harness the power of our thoughts to choose self-love. Katie encourages us to discover our true magnificent selves, find our purpose, and pursue our dreams—and help others to do the same.Join the movement! Visit www.HealthyIsTheNewSkinny.com and follow us on Instagram @healthyisthenewskinny.

    There's no such thing as too many laughs! Dave Barry's quirky take on American life will shed new light on popular culture.

    Probing the surface of art-critical buzzwords, Chris Kraus brilliantly chronicles how the City of Angels has suddenly become the epicenter of the international art world and a microcosm of the larger culture. Why is Los Angeles so completely divorced from other realities of the city? Shrewd, analytic and witty, Video Green is to the Los Angeles art world what Roland Barthes' Mythologies were to the society of the spectacle: the live autopsy of a ghost city.

    The method employed is to take the obscurantist vocabulary of monotheism and translate it into plain language. In doing so, the book attempts to show that god worshippers themselves do not understand the things they claim to believe, and by which they live their lives. For the reader who believes in god, this polemical little volume may help them to understand why secularists get so frustrated and infuriated when in debate with god worshippers. For the secularist, this book is a reminder that not everyone is susceptible to reasoned argument. The reminder is a timely one for those who live in an era of the resurgence of Islamic Jihad. A clear understanding of the irrationality of monotheism is something which matters urgently when confronted by the global rise of religious fascism. What is said in this little book will no doubt be found impolite and overly-provocative by those authoritarian people within the politically correct establishment who conflate morality with niceness. They will probably utter the familiar refrain that we ought not to denigrate other people’s deeply and sincerely held beliefs. Instead we should live in a permanent state of apology for the crime of having minds of our own. But religions are no more above criticism than any other ideologies. They have no entitlement to a privileged status. Besides which, large numbers of god worshippers feel free to denigrate and insult everyone else’s deeply and sincerely held beliefs, so why should they have special permission to be hypocrites? Topics covered: 01. God 02. Prayer 03. Worship 04. God the Infinite 05. Immortality and Heaven 06. Soul / Spirit 07. Salvation 08. Faith 09. Spreading The Word 10. Theocracy 11. Theocracy and Nuclear Armageddon 12. God, Guilty of Genocide 13. Religion and Morality are Mutually Exclusive 14. God worship is Immoral 15. God worship is Obscene 16. Everything is God’s Fault 17. If it’s in The Book, then it Must be True 18. Claiming Incomprehensible Beliefs 19. Is Islamism the New Fascism? 20. The Moderates

    Each chapter serves a different purpose. The chapters are For The Scarred, For the Loving, For the Oppressed, and For the Healing. This book teaches you to love yourself and others. It teaches the difficulty of dealing with past traumas and the journey towards healing, despite when it feels as if your scars are set in stone. It's better experienced than described, so sit down with some coffee and allow yourself to feel-- and heal.

    In this witty, acute and often painfully funny book Veena Venugopal follows eleven women through their marriages and explores why the mother-in-law is the dreaded figure she is.Meet Deepa, whose bikini-wearing mother-in-law wont let her even wear jeans, Carla whose mother-in-law insists that her son keep all his stuff in his family home although he can spend the night at his wifes, Rachna who fell in love with her mother-in-law even before she met her fiancee only to find both her romances sour and Lalitha who finds that despite having had a hard-nut mother-in-law herself, she is turning out to be an equally unlikeable Mummyji.Full of incisive observations and deliciously wicked storytelling, The Mother-in-Law is a book that will make you laugh and cry and understand better the most important relationship in a married womans life.

    Essays from a tiny diner in the middle of the country.These are stories of love and adaptation at the broad intersection of commerce and community, and of how a pandemic changed everything and nothing about us.

    As a child in the segregated Baltimore of the early 1960s, Smith absorbed the words of her parents, teachers, neighbors—even train conductors—and realized that there was something more being communicated than the actual words:The conductor's voice had a mild kind of grandeur that was a cousin to the vocal tones I had heard at funerals—"Ashes-to-ashes"—and at christenings and weddings. These are words that have been said many times, but the person who speaks them understands that each time it must be said as if it matters, because it does matter. We never know what lies ahead, and we never know what just happened, and all words must house respect of those two unknowns.In Talk to Me, Smith looks back at a singular career as a seeker and interpreter of language in America, revealing the methodology behind her extraordinary search for the truth and nuances of verbal communication. For thirty years, the defining thesis of Smith's work has been that how we speak is just as important in communicating truth and identity as what we say. Everything from individual vocal tone to grammar, Smith demonstrates, can be as identifiable and revealing as a fingerprint. Her journey has taken her from the rarefied bastions of academia to riot-torn streets; she has conducted hundreds of interviews with subjects ranging from women prisoners to presidents of the United States. In 1995, her ongoing investigation led her to Washington, D.C. After all, what better place to wage an inquiry into the power of language and the language of power than in the city where "message" is a manufactured product? What happens when we as citizens accept—which we seem to be doing more and more—our chosen leaders' failure to tell the truth? And how can we know that we are hearing what Washington really has to say when everything we receive is filtered through the media? Armed with a blazing intellect and a tape recorder, Smith tackled these questions head-on, conducting more than four hundred interviews with people both inside and outside the power structure of Washington. She recorded these sessions in her trademark verbatim transcripts, which include every tic and verbal utterance of her subjects. More than thirty of these remarkable documents appear in this book, including interviews with Bill Clinton, Anita Hill, Studs Terkel, George Bush, Mike McCurry, and Helen Thomas. After five years of searing investigation into the world of the politicians, spin doctors, and power brokers who are steering the course of our country from inside the beltway, Smith has come away with a revelatory assessment—by turns devastating and hopeful—of the lexicon of power and politics in America. Talk to Me is a landmark contribution from a woman whose pioneering insights into language speak volumes.

    In her memoir, she vividly recounts falling in love, finding a job, getting drunk, getting dumped, realizing that Ivan from the corner shop might just be the only reliable man in her life, and that absolutely no one can ever compare to her best girlfriends. Everything I Know About Love is about bad dates, good friends and—above all else— realizing that you are enough.Glittering with wit and insight, heart and humor, Dolly Alderton’s unforgettable debut weaves together personal stories, satirical observations, a series of lists, recipes, and other vignettes that will strike a chord of recognition with women of every age—making you want to pick up the phone and tell your best friends all about it. Like Bridget Jones’ Diary but all true, Everything I Know About Love is about the struggles of early adulthood in all its terrifying and hopeful uncertainty.

    You meet one when life doesn't go as planned. Survival requires immediate dependence and trust in a stranger in a white coat. As soon as the imminent danger has passed— they are off to the next case. Many patients don't realize that their stories stay with those that served them. Patients have the most to teach about humility and humanity."Compassion Amidst the Chaos" is brimming with the tension, anguish, exhaustion, relief, gratitude, and compassion that are all part of a typical day at work in the ER. Travel with Dr. Chris Davis through the cases he remembers most from his 35-year career as an emergency medicine doctor.

    Editor Stephen Cope has made a judicious selection of Oppen's extant writings outside of poetry, including the essay "The Mind's Own Place" as well as "Twenty-Six Fragments," which were found on the wall of Oppen's study after his death. Most notable are Oppen's "Daybooks," composed in the decade following his return to poetry in 1958. iSelected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers is an inspiring portrait of this essential writer and a testament to the creative process itself.

    It was a dream that would lead him into a nightmare of sexual and physical abuse from which he has still not recovered. Stewart was abused every day for four years by his junior football coach. He suffered in silence and embarked on a successful career that saw him play for Manchester City, Tottenham Hotspur, Liverpool and Sunderland, scoring in an FA Cup final and winning caps for England. Behind it all, he was a broken man – many times he wished he could end his life. He turned to drink and drugs as a way of coping with his devastating secret. In 2016, Stewart was sitting at his office desk one morning when he read a Daily Mirror story about a footballer who had been abused. His world was about to change… Paul Stewart: Damaged is one of the most powerful and emotionally charged football life stories you will read.

    

    Len Goodman tells all about his new-found fame, his experiences on Strictly Come Dancing, and also on the no.1 US show Dancing with the Stars and his encounters with the likes of Heather Mills-McCartney and John Sergeant. But the real story is in his East End roots. And Len's early life couldn't be more East End. The son of a Bethnal Green costermonger he spent his formative years running the fruit and veg barrow and being bathed at night in the same water Nan used to cook the beetroot. There are echoes of Billy Elliot too. Though Len was a welder in the London Docks, he dreamt of being a professional footballer, and came close to making the grade had he not broken his foot on Hackney Marshes. The doctor recommended ballroom dancing as a light aid to his recovery. And Len, it turned out, was a natural. At first his family and work mates mocked, but soon he had made the final of a national competition and the welders descended en masse to the Albert Hall to cheer him on. With his dance partner, and then wife Cheryl, Len won the British Championships in his late twenties and ballroom dancing became his life. Funny and heart-warming, Len Goodman's autobiography has all the honest East End charm of Tommy Steele, Mike Read or Roberta Taylor.

    Miki grew up in the small town of Levice in Czechoslovakia. In 1944, his life changed forever. At the age of 13, Miki and his family were sent to the concentration camps at Auschwitz. Miki survived against all odds and ultimately triumphed to live a life of love. “Miki Popik shares an incredible tale of survival, courage and resilience. He speaks of his life as a child in Czechoslovakia at the dawn of World War II, of his imprisonment at two concentration camps, of his family’s struggles for survival, and his efforts after the war to locate his family. Though he was the only one from his extended family to survive, he felt very fortunate to have learned where in a mass grave in Mühldorf, Germany, his father and brother had been interred. Mühldorf was a sub-camp of the infamous Dachau, not far from Munich. Miki’s story moves like none other.” – Alan S. Blaustein, JD, MD “In 2012, my classmates and I from the Sherman Block Supervisory Leadership Institute were fortunate to hear you speak at the Museum of Tolerance. Your words were truly inspiring! I left the museum that day speechless and humbled. I realized that nothing in my life can be assimilated to what you have experienced in yours. It shed a new light on the human race and how we treat one another.” – Sergeant Robert O’Brine, San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Dept.