The Gifts of the Year

The Gifts of the Year
Author: Jane Van Cleef
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2021-11-02
Genre:
ISBN: 9780578948683

A story of celebration with the characters of Hazel Village.

The Year of the Book

The Year of the Book
Author: Andrea Cheng
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 165
Release: 2012-05-22
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
ISBN: 0547684576

In Chinese, peng you means friend. But in any language, all Anna knows for certain is that friendship is complicated. When Anna needs company, she turns to her books. Whether traveling through A Wrinkle in Time, or peering over My Side of the Mountain, books provide what real life cannot—constant companionship and insight into her changing world. Books, however, can’t tell Anna how to find a true friend. She’ll have to discover that on her own. In the tradition of classics like Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy-Tacy books and Eleanor Estes’ One Hundred Dresses, this novel subtly explores what it takes to make friends and what it means to be one.

The Bookshop at 10 Curzon Street

The Bookshop at 10 Curzon Street
Author: John Saumarez Smith
Publisher: Quarto Publishing Group USA
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2005-10-01
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 178101163X

Collected mid-twentieth–century correspondence between the author of The Pursuit of Love and her former employer, the celebrated London bookseller. Nancy Mitford was a brilliant personality, a remarkable novelist and a legendary letter writer. It is not widely known that she was also a bookseller. From 1942 to 1946 she worked in Heywood Hill’s famous shop in Curzon Street, and effectively ran it when the male staff were called up for war service. After the war she left to live in France, but she maintained an abiding interest in the shop, its stock, and the many and varied customers who themselves form a cavalcade of the literary stars of post-war Britain. Her letters to Heywood Hill advise on recent French titles that might appeal to him and his customers, gossip engagingly about life in Paris, and enquire anxiously about the reception of her own books, while seeking advice about new titles to read. In return Heywood kept her up to date with customers and their foibles, and with aspects of literary and bookish life in London. Charming, witty, utterly irresistible, the correspondence gives brilliant insights into a world that has almost disappeared. Praise for The Bookshop at 10 Curzon Street “This volume of letters between [Nancy Mitford], then living in Paris, and G. Heywood Hill (1907–1986) is like a glass of champagne, from a good year, at a quiet garden party. It’s a beautiful day, one is among friends—but not too many—and laughter reigns.” —The New Criterion

Year Zero

Year Zero
Author: Ian Buruma
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2013-09-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 1101638699

“Year Zero is a remarkable book, not because it breaks new ground, but in its combination of magnificence and modesty.” —Wall Street Journal A marvelous global history of the pivotal year 1945 as a new world emerged from the ruins of World War II Year Zero is a landmark reckoning with the great drama that ensued after war came to an end in 1945. One world had ended and a new, uncertain one was beginning. Regime change had come on a global scale: across Asia (including China, Korea, Indochina, and the Philippines, and of course Japan) and all of continental Europe. Out of the often vicious power struggles that ensued emerged the modern world as we know it. In human terms, the scale of transformation is almost impossible to imagine. Great cities around the world lay in ruins, their populations decimated, displaced, starving. Harsh revenge was meted out on a wide scale, and the ground was laid for much horror to come. At the same time, in the wake of unspeakable loss, the euphoria of the liberated was extraordinary, and the revelry unprecedented. The postwar years gave rise to the European welfare state, the United Nations, decolonization, Japanese pacifism, and the European Union. Social, cultural, and political “reeducation” was imposed on vanquished by victors on a scale that also had no historical precedent. Much that was done was ill advised, but in hindsight, as Ian Buruma shows us, these efforts were in fact relatively enlightened, humane, and effective. A poignant grace note throughout this history is Buruma’s own father’s story. Seized by the Nazis during the occupation of Holland, he spent much of the war in Berlin as a laborer, and by war’s end was literally hiding in the rubble of a flattened city, having barely managed to survive starvation rations, Allied bombing, and Soviet shock troops when the end came. His journey home and attempted reentry into “normalcy” stand in many ways for his generation’s experience. A work of enormous range and stirring human drama, conjuring both the Asian and European theaters with equal fluency, Year Zero is a book that Ian Buruma is perhaps uniquely positioned to write. It is surely his masterpiece.

The Year of Magical Thinking

The Year of Magical Thinking
Author: Joan Didion
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2007-02-13
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0307279723

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • From one of America’s iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion that explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage—and a life, in good times and bad—that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child. Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later—the night before New Year’s Eve—the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma. This powerful book is Didion’ s attempt to make sense of the “weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness ... about marriage and children and memory ... about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.

The One Year Book of Discovering Jesus in the Old Testament

The One Year Book of Discovering Jesus in the Old Testament
Author: Nancy Guthrie
Publisher: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2012-10-08
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1414371489

We tend to look to the New Testament to tell us about Jesus, yet it was the Old Testament about which Jesus said, “the Scriptures point to me!” In The One Year Book of Discovering Jesus in the Old Testament, Bible teacher Nancy Guthrie takes readers from Genesis through Malachi, shining the light of Christ on the promise of a descendent who will put an end to the curse of sin; the story of a father who offers up his son as a sacrifice; the symbol of a temple where people can meet with God; the prophecy of a servant who will suffer; the person of a king who will rule with righteousness—and so much more. Day by day throughout the year, readers will see the beauty of Christ in fresh new ways, creating a deeper understanding and appreciation for who Jesus is and what he accomplished through his Cross and Resurrection.

What the Eyes Don't See

What the Eyes Don't See
Author: Mona Hanna-Attisha
Publisher: One World
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2018-06-19
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0399590838

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • The dramatic story of the Flint water crisis, by a relentless physician who stood up to power. “Stirring . . . [a] blueprint for all those who believe . . . that ‘the world . . . should be full of people raising their voices.’”—The New York Times “Revealing, with the gripping intrigue of a Grisham thriller.” —O: The Oprah Magazine Here is the inspiring story of how Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, alongside a team of researchers, parents, friends, and community leaders, discovered that the children of Flint, Michigan, were being exposed to lead in their tap water—and then battled her own government and a brutal backlash to expose that truth to the world. Paced like a scientific thriller, What the Eyes Don’t See reveals how misguided austerity policies, broken democracy, and callous bureaucratic indifference placed an entire city at risk. And at the center of the story is Dr. Mona herself—an immigrant, doctor, scientist, and mother whose family’s activist roots inspired her pursuit of justice. What the Eyes Don’t See is a riveting account of a shameful disaster that became a tale of hope, the story of a city on the ropes that came together to fight for justice, self-determination, and the right to build a better world for their—and all of our—children. Praise for What the Eyes Don’t See “It is one thing to point out a problem. It is another thing altogether to step up and work to fix it. Mona Hanna-Attisha is a true American hero.”—Erin Brockovich “A clarion call to live a life of purpose.”—The Washington Post “Gripping . . . entertaining . . . Her book has power precisely because she takes the events she recounts so personally. . . . Moral outrage present on every page.”—The New York Times Book Review “Personal and emotional. . . She vividly describes the effects of lead poisoning on her young patients. . . . She is at her best when recounting the detective work she undertook after a tip-off about lead levels from a friend. . . . ‛Flint will not be defined by this crisis,’ vows Ms. Hanna-Attisha.”—The Economist “Flint is a public health disaster. But it was Dr. Mona, this caring, tough pediatrican turned detective, who cracked the case.”—Rachel Maddow

The Plague Year

The Plague Year
Author: Lawrence Wright
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2021-06-08
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0593320735

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Looming Tower, and the pandemic novel The End of October: an unprecedented, momentous account of Covid-19—its origins, its wide-ranging repercussions, and the ongoing global fight to contain it "A book of panoramic breadth ... managing to surprise us about even those episodes we … thought we knew well … [With] lively exchanges about spike proteins and nonpharmaceutical interventions and disease waves, Wright’s storytelling dexterity makes all this come alive.” —The New York Times Book Review From the fateful first moments of the outbreak in China to the storming of the U.S. Capitol to the extraordinary vaccine rollout, Lawrence Wright’s The Plague Year tells the story of Covid-19 in authoritative, galvanizing detail and with the full drama of events on both a global and intimate scale, illuminating the medical, economic, political, and social ramifications of the pandemic. Wright takes us inside the CDC, where a first round of faulty test kits lost America precious time . . . inside the halls of the White House, where Deputy National Security Adviser Matthew Pottinger’s early alarm about the virus was met with confounding and drastically costly skepticism . . . into a Covid ward in a Charlottesville hospital, with an idealistic young woman doctor from the town of Little Africa, South Carolina . . . into the precincts of prediction specialists at Goldman Sachs . . . into Broadway’s darkened theaters and Austin’s struggling music venues . . . inside the human body, diving deep into the science of how the virus and vaccines function—with an eye-opening detour into the history of vaccination and of the modern anti-vaccination movement. And in this full accounting, Wright makes clear that the medical professionals around the country who’ve risked their lives to fight the virus reveal and embody an America in all its vulnerability, courage, and potential. In turns steely-eyed, sympathetic, infuriated, unexpectedly comical, and always precise, Lawrence Wright is a formidable guide, slicing through the dense fog of misinformation to give us a 360-degree portrait of the catastrophe we thought we knew.

The Make-or-Break Year

The Make-or-Break Year
Author: Emily Krone Phillips
Publisher: The New Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2019-01-08
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1620973243

A Washington Post Bestseller An entirely fresh approach to ending the high school dropout crisis is revealed in this groundbreaking chronicle of unprecedented transformation in a city notorious for its "failing schools" In eighth grade, Eric thought he was going places. But by his second semester of freshman year at Hancock High, his D's in Environmental Science and French, plus an F in Mr. Castillo's Honors Algebra class, might have suggested otherwise. Research shows that students with more than one semester F during their freshman year are very unlikely to graduate. If Eric had attended Hancock—or any number of Chicago's public high schools—just a decade earlier, chances are good he would have dropped out. Instead, Hancock's new way of responding to failing grades, missed homework, and other red flags made it possible for Eric to get back on track. The Make-or-Break Year is the largely untold story of how a simple idea—that reorganizing schools to get students through the treacherous transitions of freshman year greatly increases the odds of those students graduating—changed the course of two Chicago high schools, an entire school system, and thousands of lives. Marshaling groundbreaking research on the teenage brain, peer relationships, and academic performance, journalist turned communications expert Emily Krone Phillips details the emergence of Freshman OnTrack, a program-cum-movement that is translating knowledge into action—and revolutionizing how teachers grade, mete out discipline, and provide social, emotional, and academic support to their students. This vivid description of real change in a faulty system will captivate anyone who cares about improving our nation's schools; it will inspire educators and families to reimagine their relationships with students like Eric, and others whose stories affirm the pivotal nature of ninth grade for all young people. In a moment of relentless focus on what doesn't work in education and the public sphere, Phillips's dramatic account examines what does.

The 100-Year Life

The 100-Year Life
Author: Lynda Gratton
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 299
Release: 2020-05-28
Genre: Self-Help
ISBN: 152662284X

What will your 100-year life look like? A new edition of the international bestseller, featuring a new preface 'Brilliant, timely, original, well written and utterly terrifying' Niall Ferguson Does the thought of working for 60 or 70 years fill you with dread? Or can you see the potential for a more stimulating future as a result of having so much extra time? Many of us have been raised on the traditional notion of a three-stage approach to our working lives: education, followed by work and then retirement. But this well-established pathway is already beginning to collapse – life expectancy is rising, final-salary pensions are vanishing, and increasing numbers of people are juggling multiple careers. Whether you are 18, 45 or 60, you will need to do things very differently from previous generations and learn to structure your life in completely new ways. The 100-Year Life is here to help. Drawing on the unique pairing of their experience in psychology and economics, Lynda Gratton and Andrew J. Scott offer a broad-ranging analysis as well as a raft of solutions, showing how to rethink your finances, your education, your career and your relationships and create a fulfilling 100-year life. · How can you fashion a career and life path that defines you and your values and creates a shifting balance between work and leisure? · What are the most effective ways of boosting your physical and mental health over a longer and more dynamic lifespan? · How can you make the most of your intangible assets – such as family and friends – as you build a productive, longer life? · In a multiple-stage life how can you learn to make the transitions that will be so crucial and experiment with new ways of living, working and learning? Shortlisted for the FT/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award and featuring a new preface, The 100-Year Life is a wake-up call that describes what to expect and considers the choices and options that you will face. It is also fundamentally a call to action for individuals, politicians, firms and governments and offers the clearest demonstration that a 100-year life can be a wonderful and inspiring one.