Reviews
True Believer
“True Believer” is a story about having the courage to do what you love.
Through exhilaration and grief, the comic follows Lucy Bellwood's early experiences as a cartoonist in Portland. It is a meditation on where art fits into our lives, and what it really means to create and tell stories.
The Opposite of Loneliness
Marina Keegan's star was on the rise when she graduated magna cum laude from Yale in May 2012. She had a play that was to be produced at the New York International Fringe Festival and a job waiting for her at the New Yorker. Tragically, five days after graduation, Marina died in a car crash.
As her family, friends, and classmates, deep in grief, joined to create a memorial service for Marina, her unforgettable last essay for the Yale Daily News, "The Opposite of Loneliness," went viral, receiving more than 1.4 million hits. She had struck a chord.
Even though she was just twMarina Keegan's star was on the rise when she graduated magna cum laude from Yale in May 2012. She had a play that was to be produced at the New York International Fringe Festival and a job waiting for her at the New Yorker. Tragically, five days after graduation, Marina died in a car crash.
As her family, friends, and classmates, deep in grief, joined to create a memorial service for Marina, her unforgettable last essay for the Yale Daily News, "The Opposite of Loneliness," went viral, receiving more than 1.4 million hits. She had struck a chord.
Even though she was just twenty-two when she died, Marina left behind a rich, expansive trove of prose that, like her title essay, captures the hope, uncertainty, and possibility of her generation. "The Opposite of Loneliness" is an assemblage of Marina's essays and stories that, like "The Last Lecture", articulates the universal struggle that all of us face as we figure out what we aspire to be and how we can harness our talents to make an impact on the world. enty-two when she died, Marina left behind a rich, expansive trove of prose that, like her title essay, captures the hope, uncertainty, and possibility of her generation. "The Opposite of Loneliness" is an assemblage of Marina's essays and stories that, like "The Last Lecture", articulates the universal struggle that all of us face as we figure out what we aspire to be and how we can harness our talents to make an impact on the world.
Love and the Mystery of Betrayal
What is it like to recover from betrayal of trust today in a culture that is blind to the trauma and impatient with grief? When her long-time partner suddenly left her shortly before their wedding, the author found nothing had prepared her for the depth and duration of the pain. Despite having lived through her husband's death years earlier, she was stunned by the intensity of the suffering and could not understand why this shock hit so hard. Her loss of faith in this one person precipitated an existential and spiritual crisis that called her very understanding of human nature into question and she wanted to know why. As she wrested with what turned out to be a massive trauma, she began to keep careful notes of her inner life--she wanted to capture the paradoxes of love, grief and longing mixed with bewilderment and post-traumatic stress. With bracing frankness and fearlessness, she succeeds.
“Love and the Mystery of Betrayal” seamlessly blends research and reflection, love and heartbreak, rage and transformation, and the personal with the collective. The deep, engaging writing provides the type of solace only a kindred spirit who has been there can. This achingly moving chronicle and meditation on the mysteries of love and betrayal shows how faith and love can triumph even after the most life-shattering revelations and loss.
Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt
Flash Boys is about a small group of Wall Street guys who figure out that the U.S. stock market has been rigged for the benefit of insiders and that, post–financial crisis, the markets have become not more free but less, and more controlled by the big Wall Street banks. Working at different firms, they come to this realization separately; but after they discover one another, the flash boys band together and set out to reform the financial markets. This they do by creating an exchange in which high-frequency trading—source of the most intractable problems—will have no advantage whatsoever.
The characters in Flash Boys are fabulous, each completely different from what you think of when you think “Wall Street guy.” Several have walked away from jobs in the financial sector that paid them millions of dollars a year. From their new vantage point they investigate the big banks, the world’s stock exchanges, and high-frequency trading firms as they have never been investigated, and expose the many strange new ways that Wall Street generates profits.
The light that Lewis shines into the darkest corners of the financial world may not be good for your blood pressure, because if you have any contact with the market, even a retirement account, this story is happening to you. But in the end, Flash Boys is an uplifting read. Here are people who have somehow preserved a moral sense in an environment where you don’t get paid for that; they have perceived an institutionalized injustice and are willing to go to war to fix it.
Kitchen Confidential
A deliciously funny, delectably shocking banquet of wild-but-true tales of life in the culinary trade from Chef Anthony Bourdain, laying out his more than a quarter-century of drugs, sex, and haute cuisine—now with all-new, never-before-published material.
New York Chef Tony Bourdain gives away secrets of the trade in his wickedly funny, inspiring memoir/expose. Kitchen Confidential reveals what Bourdain calls "twenty-five years of sex, drugs, bad behavior and haute cuisine.”
Daring Greatly
Researcher and thought leader Dr. Brené Brown offers a powerful new vision that encourages us to dare greatly: to embrace vulnerability and imperfection, to live wholeheartedly, and to courageously engage in our lives.
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; . . . who at best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.”
— Theodore Roosevelt
Every day we experience the uncertainty, risks, and emotional exposure that define what it means to be vulnerable, or to dare greatly. Whether the arena is a new relationship, an important meeting, our creative process, or a difficult family conversation, we must find the courage to walk into vulnerability and engage with our whole hearts.
Mandela's Way: Lessons on Life, Love, and Courage
A compact, profoundly inspiring book that captures the spirit of Nelson Mandela, distilling the South African leader’s wisdom into 15 vital life lessons.
We long for heroes and have too few. Nelson Mandela, who recently celebrated his ninety-fourth birthday, is the closest thing the world has to a secular saint. He liberated a country from a system of violent prejudice and helped unite oppressor and oppressed in a way that had never been done before.
Now Richard Stengel, the editor of Time magazine, has distilled countless hours of intimate conversation with Mandela into fifteen essential life lessons. For nearly three years, including the critical period when Mandela moved South Africa toward the first democratic elections in its history, Stengel collaborated with Mandela on his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, and traveled with him everywhere. Eating with him, watching him campaign, hearing him think out loud, Stengel came to know all the different sides of this complex man and became a cherished friend and colleague.
Minimalism: Live a Meaningful Life
Do you jump out of bed every morning excited about the day in front of you? Do you live a life defined by deep meaning, endless passion, excellent health, empowering relationships, and constant growth?
You can.
Ultimately, the eight chapters and ninety-eight sections inside this book are meant to help you take small actions each day that will radically improve your life over a short period of time.
This book’s foreword and first chapter go into vast detail on our personal backgrounds, our troubled pasts, our depression, and how we made changes that transformed our lives over two years. These chapters discuss why didn’t feel fulfilled by our careers and why we turned to our society’s idea of a meaningful life: we bought stuff, we spent too much money, and we lived paycheck to paycheck trying to purchase happiness in every trip to the shopping mall or luxurious vacation we could find. Instead of finding our passion, instead of searching for our mission, we pacified ourselves with ephemeral indulgences, inducing a crack-cocaine high that didn’t last far past the checkout line.
Querencia
In the late 1970s, Stephen Bodio, a Boston-based writer, amateur naturalist, and falconer, happened into Magdalena, New Mexico, on the way somewhere else. He never left. With an assortment of birds, dogs, snakes, and books, he took up residence in a ramshackle two-story house along US 60 and set out to live in the way of country people."Querencia"--the Zen-like Spanish term means something like the tiny pocket of one's inner life where one is truly at home--details a decade of life there.
Throughout the early pages of his memoir, Stephen finds himself tested by the locals for his knowledge of raptor birds, of snakes, of dogs. When he begins to pass the tests, his transformation is complete, earning him a home, a place in the heart. Querencia offers a fine brief on rural living, alternately reveling in country matters and acknowledging the difficulties involved in such exercises as luring cows home from the mountain wilderness into which they've strayed while steering clear of venomous reptiles and combative bull elk. It's a treasure.
Julie & Julia
Powell needs something to break the monotony of her life. So, she invents a deranged assignment: She will take her mother's dog-eared copy of Julia Child's 1961 classic, "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," and cook all 524 recipes in the span of just one year.
