Download or read book How We Show Up written by Mia Birdsong and published by Hachette Go. This book was released on 2020-06-02 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Invitation to Community and Models for Connection After almost every presentation activist and writer Mia Birdsong gives to executives, think tanks, and policy makers, one of those leaders quietly confesses how much they long for the profound community she describes. They have family, friends, and colleagues, yet they still feel like they're standing alone. They're "winning" at the American Dream, but they're lonely, disconnected, and unsatisfied. It seems counterintuitive that living the "good life"--the well-paying job, the nuclear family, the upward mobility--can make us feel isolated and unhappy. But in a divided America, where only a quarter of us know our neighbors and everyone is either a winner or a loser, we've forgotten the key element that helped us make progress in the first place: community. In this provocative, groundbreaking work, Mia Birdsong shows that what separates us isn't only the ever-present injustices built around race, class, gender, values, and beliefs, but also our denial of our interdependence and need for belonging. In response to the fear and discomfort we feel, we've built walls, and instead of leaning on each other, we find ourselves leaning on concrete. Through research, interviews, and stories of lived experience, How We Show Up returns us to our inherent connectedness where we find strength, safety, and support in vulnerability and generosity, in asking for help, and in being accountable. Showing up--literally and figuratively--points us toward the promise of our collective vitality and leads us to the liberated well-being we all want.

Download or read book The Other Side of Life Book 1 Cyberpunk Elven Trilogy written by Jess C. Scott and published by Jess C Scott. This book was released on 2011-01-09 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ONE-LINE SUMMARY: A thieving duo's world turns upside down when an Elven rogue uncovers the heinous dealings of a megacorporation (The Other Side of Life, Book 1).SYNOPSIS: Anya and Leticia are partners-in-crime who steal for a living. Their world turns upside down after a chance encounter with fellow rogue, Ithilnin--the enigmatic leader of an Elven band of thieves.A scuffle to prove who's "the better thief" transforms into more than Anya and Ithilnin ever bargained for. They retrieve the missing piece of an ancient poem, before getting caught in the secret dealings of a megacorporation. What they uncover threatens to alter the very essence of not just human life, but the other side as well.Elven intrigue, cyberpunk action, and a deadly dose of danger come together in The Other Side of Life [Book #1 in the (Cyberpunk) Elven Trilogy].GENRE: Urban Fantasy / Cyberpunk / YA with adult crossover appealREVIEW: "Dear Jess: You are a very good writer - I like your plotting, your concept, the characters...pretty much everything. You are very gifted." - Dr. Uwe Stender, 2010

Download or read book Big Friendship written by Aminatou Sow and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2020-07-14 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A close friendship is one of the most influential and important relationships a human life can contain. Anyone will tell you that! But for all the rosy sentiments surrounding friendship, most people don’t talk much about what it really takes to stay close for the long haul. Now two friends, Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman, tell the story of their equally messy and life-affirming Big Friendship in this honest and hilarious book that chronicles their first decade in one another’s lives. As the hosts of the hit podcast Call Your Girlfriend, they’ve become known for frank and intimate conversations. In this book, they bring that energy to their own friendship—its joys and its pitfalls. Aminatou and Ann define Big Friendship as a strong, significant bond that transcends life phases, geographical locations, and emotional shifts. And they should know: the two have had moments of charmed bliss and deep frustration, of profound connection and gut-wrenching alienation. They have weathered life-threatening health scares, getting fired from their dream jobs, and one unfortunate Thanksgiving dinner eaten in a car in a parking lot in Rancho Cucamonga. Through interviews with friends and experts, they have come to understand that their struggles are not unique. And that the most important part of a Big Friendship is making the decision to invest in one another again and again. An inspiring and entertaining testament to the power of society’s most underappreciated relationship, Big Friendship will invite you to think about how your own bonds are formed, challenged, and preserved. It is a call to value your friendships in all of their complexity. Actively choose them. And, sometimes, fight for them.

Download or read book The New Better Off written by Courtney E. Martin and published by Seal Press. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are we living the good life—and what defines 'good', anyway? Americans today are constructing a completely different framework for success than their parents' generation, using new metrics that TEDWomen speaker and columnist Courtney Martin has termed collectively the "New Better Off". The New Better Offputs a name to the American phenomenon of rejecting the traditional dream of a 9-to-5 job, home ownership, and a nuclear family structure, illuminating the alternate ways Americans are seeking happiness and success. Including commentary on recent changes in how we view work, customs and community, marriage, rituals, money, living arrangements, and spirituality, The New Better Off uses personal stories and social analysis to explore the trends shaping our country today. Martin covers growing topics such as freelancing, collaborative consumption, communal living, and the breaking down of gender roles. The New Better Offis about the creative choices individuals are making in their vocational and personal lives, but it's also about the movements, formal and informal, that are coalescing around the "New Better Off" idea-people who are reinventing the social safety net and figuring out how to truly better their own communities.

Download or read book We Used to Be Friends written by Amy Spalding and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2020-01-07 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two best friends grow up—and grow apart—in this innovative contemporary YA novel Told in dual timelines—half of the chapters moving forward in time and half moving backward—We Used to Be Friends explores the most traumatic breakup of all: that of childhood besties. At the start of their senior year in high school, James (a girl with a boy’s name) and Kat are inseparable, but by graduation, they’re no longer friends. James prepares to head off to college as she reflects on the dissolution of her friendship with Kat while, in alternating chapters, Kat thinks about being newly in love with her first girlfriend and having a future that feels wide open. Over the course of senior year, Kat wants nothing more than James to continue to be her steady rock, as James worries that everything she believes about love and her future is a lie when her high-school sweetheart parents announce they’re getting a divorce. Funny, honest, and full of heart, We Used to Be Friends tells of the pains of growing up and growing apart.

Download or read book All the Words I Should Have Said written by Naim and published by . This book was released on 2016-12-10 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Friendship First From New Sparks to Chosen Family How Our Friends Pave the Way for Lifelong Happiness written by Gyan Yankovich and published by The Experiment, LLC. This book was released on 2024-09-10 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our friends enrich every part of our lives. Now you can make them matter the most. Despite modern technology and the ample ways we have to keep in touch, we risk neglecting our relationships with the people who have the most profound effect on our well-being: our friends. Weaving together personal stories, interviews with experts, and social research, Friendship First empowers you to nurture relationships with friends both new and old. Journalist Gyan Yankovich reveals how friendships play a vital role in our happiness with insights on how to: Deepen workplace friendships outside the office Invite friends into activities typically reserved for families Use social media to strengthen connections Maintain friendships through major life transitions. An ode to group chats and chosen family, Friendship First invites you to care for and count on those who matter most.

Download or read book Washed Up written by Skye Moody and published by Sasquatch Books. This book was released on 2010-08-03 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ocean gives up many prizes, just setting them on our beaches for us to find. From rubber ducks that started out somewhere in Indonesia to land Venice Beach, to an intact refrigerator makes it way to the Jersey Shore. Chunks of beeswax found on the Oregon coast are the packing remnants of 18th century Spanish gold. Author Skye Moody walks the coast, dons her wet suit, and heads out to sea to understand the excellent debris that accrues along the tideline. There she finds advanced military technology applied to locating buried Rolexes, hardcore competitive beachcombing conventions, and isolated beach communities whose residents are like flotsam congregated at the slightest obstacle on the coastline. This book confirms that the world is a mysterious place and that treasure is out there to be found.

Download or read book The Lonely Hunter written by Aimée Lutkin and published by Dial Press. This book was released on 2022-02-08 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When can we say we’ll be single forever—and that’s okay? One woman questions our society’s pathologizing of loneliness in this crackling, incisive blend of memoir and cultural reporting. “The Lonely Hunter challenged everything I assumed about the nature of loneliness and what it means to lead an authentic life.”—Doree Shafrir, author of Thanks for Waiting and Startup: A Novel ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2022—Cosmopolitan, She Reads One evening, thirtysomething writer Aimée Lutkin found herself at a dinner party surrounded by couples. When the conversation turned to her love life, Lutkin stated simply, “I don’t really know if I’m going to date anyone ever again. Some people are just alone forever.” Her friends rushed to assure her that love comes when you least expect it and to make recommendations for new dating apps. But Lutkin wondered, Why, when there are more unmarried adults than ever before, is there so much pressure to couple up? Why does everyone treat me as though my real life won’t start until I find a partner? Isn’t this my real life, the one I’m living right now? Is there something wrong with me, or is there something wrong with our culture? Over the course of the next year, Lutkin set out to answer these questions and to see if there really was some trick to escaping loneliness. She went on hundreds of dates; read the sociologists, authors, and relationship experts exploring singlehood and loneliness; dove into the wellness industrial complex; tossed it all aside to binge-watch Netflix and eat nachos; and probed the capitalist structures that make alternative family arrangements nearly impossible. Chock-full of razor-sharp observations and poignant moments of vulnerability, The Lonely Hunter is a stirring account of one woman’s experience of being alone and a revealing exposé of our culture’s deep biases against the uncoupled. Blazingly smart, insightful, and full of heart, this is a book for anyone determined to make, follow, and break their own rules.

Download or read book The Four Loves written by Clive Staples Lewis and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1991 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analyzes the feelings and problems involved in different types of human love, including familial affection, friendship, passion, and charity.

Download or read book Perfect Girls Starving Daughters written by Courtney E. Martin and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2007-04-17 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through extensive research and hair-raising anecdotes, a journalist exposes the variety and extremes of the epidemic of eating disorders among young women and issues a wake-up call that cannot be ignored.

Download or read book Friend of My Youth written by Alice Munro and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-04-25 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “wickedly funny” (Newsweek) collection of ten short stories from Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro, “one of the most eloquent and gifted writers of contemporary fiction” (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times). “Each of her collections demonstrates such linguistic skill, delicacy of vision, and . . . moral strength and clarity.”—Chicago Tribune A woman haunted by dreams of her dead mother. An adulterous couple stepping over the line where the initial excitement ends and the pain begins. A widow visiting a Scottish village in search of her husband’s past—and instead discovering unsetting truths about a total stranger. The miraculously accomplished stories in this collection not only astonish and delight, but also convey the unspoken mysteries at the heart of all human experience. The mastery—the almost numinous ability to say the unsayable—makes Friend of My Youth a genuine literary event.

Download or read book Option B written by Sheryl Sandberg and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2017-04-24 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • From authors of Lean In and Originals: a powerful, inspiring, and practical book about building resilience and moving forward after life’s inevitable setbacks After the sudden death of her husband, Sheryl Sandberg felt certain that she and her children would never feel pure joy again. “I was in ‘the void,’” she writes, “a vast emptiness that fills your heart and lungs and restricts your ability to think or even breathe.” Her friend Adam Grant, a psychologist at Wharton, told her there are concrete steps people can take to recover and rebound from life-shattering experiences. We are not born with a fixed amount of resilience. It is a muscle that everyone can build. Option B combines Sheryl’s personal insights with Adam’s eye-opening research on finding strength in the face of adversity. Beginning with the gut-wrenching moment when she finds her husband, Dave Goldberg, collapsed on a gym floor, Sheryl opens up her heart—and her journal—to describe the acute grief and isolation she felt in the wake of his death. But Option B goes beyond Sheryl’s loss to explore how a broad range of people have overcome hardships including illness, job loss, sexual assault, natural disasters, and the violence of war. Their stories reveal the capacity of the human spirit to persevere . . . and to rediscover joy. Resilience comes from deep within us and from support outside us. Even after the most devastating events, it is possible to grow by finding deeper meaning and gaining greater appreciation in our lives. Option B illuminates how to help others in crisis, develop compassion for ourselves, raise strong children, and create resilient families, communities, and workplaces. Many of these lessons can be applied to everyday struggles, allowing us to brave whatever lies ahead. Two weeks after losing her husband, Sheryl was preparing for a father-child activity. “I want Dave,” she cried. Her friend replied, “Option A is not available,” and then promised to help her make the most of Option B. We all live some form of Option B. This book will help us all make the most of it.

Download or read book The Girlfriends Guidebook written by Marian Jordan and published by B&H Publishing Group. This book was released on 2011 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A biblically-based look at how women can improve their friendships with other women by focusing more on honesty and love rather than competition, manipulation, etc. Includes book club questions.

Download or read book The Four Loves written by C. S. Lewis and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2017-02-14 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The revered author's classic work that examines the four types of human love: affection, friendship, erotic love, and the love of God.? In this work Lewis examines four varieties of love, as approached from the Greek language: storge, the most basic form; philia, the rarest and perhaps most insightful; eros, passionate love; and agape, the love of God, the greatest and least selfish. ?Throughout this compassionate and reasoned study, he encourages readers to open themselves to all forms of love—the key to understanding that brings us closer to God.? "There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable . . . draw nearer to God, not be trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to Him; throwing away all defensive armor. If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as the way in which they should break, so be it."? In Four Loves, C. S. Lewis explores love to help you · Strengthen your interpersonal relationships · Understand the different between needed pleasures and appreciation pleasures and need-love and gift-love · Care for the people in your life, avoid pitfalls, and improve your relationship God The Four Loves holds a mirror to our current society and leaves no doubt that our modern understanding of love is heavily misunderstood.

Download or read book Do it Anyway written by Courtney E. Martin and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Profiles eight activists, including peace activist Rachel Corrie, prison reentry social worker Raul Diaz, filmmaker Emily Abt, environmental justice advocate Nia Martin-Robinson, radical philanthropist Tyrone Boucher, actor Rosario Dawson, and eighth-grade teacher Dena Simmons; and discusses the need for young people to get involved with causes about which they care.

Download or read book Love Other Curses written by Michael Thomas Ford and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2019-04-09 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “I’m pretty sure I’m the only guy in my school who can replace a faulty kick-down switch and also create the perfect smoky eye.” The Weyward family has been haunted by a curse for generations—if a Weyward falls in love before their seventeenth birthday, the person they love dies. Sam doesn’t plan to fall for anyone in the weeks before his birthday. He’ll spend his time working at the Eezy-Freeze with his dad; cooking up some midsummer magic with his grandmother, great-grandmother, and great-great-grandmother (the Grands); and experimenting with drag with the help of the queens at the Shangri-La, the local gay club. But when a new guy comes to town, Sam finds himself in trouble when they strike up a friendship that might be way more than that. As Sam’s birthday approaches and he still hasn’t quite fallen in love, the curse seems to get more powerful and less specific about who it targets. A mysterious girl Sam talks to on the phone late at night and a woman he’s only seen in a dream might have the answers he’s been looking for—but time is running out to save the people he cares about.