Other books that might interest you

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  What It Is - Race Family and One...

  Clifford Thompson

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  An African-American writer's concise, heartfelt take on the state of his nation, exploring the war between the values he has always held and the reality with which he is confronted in twenty-first-century America.In the tradition of James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time and Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me comes Clifford Thompson's What It Is. Thompson was raised to believe in treating every person of every color as an individual, and he decided as a young man that America, despite its history of racial oppression, was his home as much as anyone else's. As a middle-aged, happily married father of biracial children, Thompson finds himself questioning his most deeply held convictions when the race-baiting Donald Trump ascends to the presidency—elected by whites, whom Thompson had refused to judge as a group, and who make up the majority in this country Thompson had called his own.In the grip of contradictory emotions, Thompson turns for guidance to the wisdom of writers he admires while knowing that the answers to his questions about America ultimately lie in America itself. Through interviews with a small but varied group of Americans he hears sharply divergent opinions about what is happening in the country while trying to find his own answers—conclusions based not on conventional wisdom or on what he would like to believe, but on what he sees.

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  The Queen and Prince Philip -...

  Helen Cathcart

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  Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip enjoyed seventy-three years of happy married life together—the longest marriage of any royal British couple in history. But how did they meet? What did their families think of their burgeoning relationship? What obstacles did the young couple face before and after their marriage? And how did a childhood friendship grow into the love story of the century?In The Queen and Prince Philip royal biographer Helen Cathcart superbly reconstructs the early years of Elizabeth and Philip's relationship, tracing their growing affection from the summer of 1939, when "Lilibet" was a teenager and Philip a dashing navy cadet, through their wartime courtship and magnificent wedding in 1947 at Westminster Abbey. She narrates their adjustment to new parenthood in Clarence House and how, shortly afterwards, both their lives changed forever when Elizabeth ascended the throne as Queen in 1952 and Philip became Prince Consort.Set against a revealing background of family and wider social events, this is the first full story of their early years together as husband and wife documented from family letters, royal journals, and the personal recollections of those close to the royal couple. The Queen and Prince Philip takes us behind the scenes of one of the most romantic royal love stories of all time.

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  Strong Like Water - How I Found...

  Laila Tarraf

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  Laila Tarraf was the Chief People Officer for Peet’s Coffee and Tea, the iconic Berkeley coffee roaster, but she had a secret: she was failing in the most important relationships in her life. Yes, she was a strong and effective business leader, the successful daughter of immigrants, and the mother of a toddler, but she was disconnected from her own feelings ­and had little patience for those of others.  
  All that changed, however, when three of the people most important to her—her husband, father, and mother—died in quick succession. Laila had spent her life leading from the head, convinced that any display of vulnerability would make her soft. But as this trifecta of losses led her to reconnect to her feelings, one painful step at a time, something remarkable happened: she became a better leader, a better mother, and a better person. Leading from the heart became the true source of her power. 
  This is a book about healing, about waking up, about learning who you are—who you really, truly are at the core—and reclaiming and embracing all the pieces of yourself you long ago abandoned in the name of survival. For women longing for balance, this is a path to opening our hearts and infusing our leadership and relationships with love, compassion, and authenticity. 
  “ Water is fluid, soft, and yielding. But water will wear away rock, which is rigid and cannot yield. As a rule, whatever is fluid, soft, and yielding will overcome whatever is rigid and hard. This is another paradox: what is soft is strong.” —Lao Tzu

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  The Shapeless Unease - A Year of...

  Samantha Harvey

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  “Sleeplessness gets the Susan Sontag illness-as-metaphor treatment in this pensive, compact, lyrical inquiry into the author’s nighttime demons.” —Kirkus Reviews In 2016, Samantha Harvey began to lose sleep. She tried everything to appease her wakefulness: from medication to therapy, changes in her diet to changes in her living arrangements. Nothing seemed to help.The Shapeless Unease is Harvey’s darkly funny and deeply intelligent anatomy of her insomnia, an immersive interior monologue of a year without one of the most basic human needs. Original and profound, and narrated with a lucid breathlessness, this is a startlingly insightful exploration of memory, writing and influence, death and the will to survive, from “this generation’s Virginia Woolf” (Telegraph).“Captures the essence of fractious emotions—anxiety, fear, grief, rage—in prose so elegant, so luminous, it practically shines from the page. Harvey is a hugely talented writer, and this is a book to relish.” —Sarah Waters, New York Times–bestselling author“Harvey writes with hypnotic power and poetic precision about—well, about everything: grief, pain, memory, family, the night sky, a lake at sunset, what it means to dream and what it means to suffer and survive . . . The big surprise is that this book about ‘shapeless unease’ is, in the end, a glittering, playful and, yes, joyful celebration of that glorious gift of glorious life.” —Daily Mail“What a spectacularly good book. It is so controlled and yet so wild . . . easily one of the truest and best books I’ve read about what it’s like to be alive now, in this country.” —Max Porter, award-winning author of Lanny

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  Scars That Have Shaped Me - How...

  Vaneetha Rendall Risner

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  Twenty-one surgeries by age thirteen. Years in the hospital. Verbal and physical bullying from schoolmates. Multiple miscarriages as a young wife. The death of a child. A debilitating progressive disease. Riveting pain. Abandonment. Unwanted divorce.Vaneetha Rendall Risner begged God for grace that would deliver her. But God offered something better: his sustaining grace.In The Scars That Have Shaped Me, Vaneetha does more than share her stories of pain; she invites other sufferers to taste with her the goodness of a sovereign God who will carry us in our darkest of days.

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  The Disaster Artist - My Life...

  Greg Sestero, Tom Bissell

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  Nineteen-year-old Greg Sestero met Tommy Wiseau at an acting school in San Francisco. Wiseau's scenes were rivetingly wrong, yet Sestero, hypnotized by such uninhibited acting, thought, "I have to do a scene with this guy." That impulse changed both of their lives. Wiseau seemed never to have read the rule book on interpersonal relationships (or the instructions on a bottle of black hair dye), yet he generously offered to put the aspiring actor up in his LA apartment. Sestero's nascent acting career first sizzled, then fizzled, resulting in Wiseau's last-second offer to Sestero of co-starring with him in The Room, a movie Wiseau wrote and planned to finance, produce, and direct—in the parking lot of a Hollywood equipment-rental shop. 
  Wiseau spent $6 million of his own money on his film, but despite the efforts of the disbelieving (and frequently fired) crew and embarrassed (and frequently fired) actors, the movie made no sense. Nevertheless, Wiseau rented a Hollywood billboard featuring his alarming headshot and staged a red carpet premiere. The Room made $1,800 at the box office and closed after two weeks. One reviewer said that watching The Room was like "getting stabbed in the head". 
  The Disaster Artist is Greg Sestero's laugh-out-loud funny account of how Tommy Wiseau defied every law of artistry, business, and friendship to make "the Citizen Kane of bad movies" (Entertainment Weekly), which is now an international phenomenon, with Wiseau himself beloved as an oddball celebrity. Written with award-winning journalist Tom Bissell, The Disaster Artist is an inspiring tour de force that reads like a page-turning novel, an open-hearted portrait of an enigmatic man who will improbably capture your heart.

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