Breath Better Spent

Breath Better Spent
Author: DaMaris Hill
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 159
Release: 2022-01-25
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1635576628

A Netgalley "Must-Read Books by Black Authors in 2022" From the award-winning and critically acclaimed author of A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing comes a new book of narrative in verse that takes a personal and historical look at the experience of Black girlhood. In Breath Better Spent, DaMaris B. Hill hoists her childhood self onto her shoulders, together taking in the landscape of Black girlhood in America. At a time when Black girls across the country are increasingly vulnerable to unjust violence, unwarranted incarceration, and unnoticed disappearance, Hill chooses to celebrate and protect the girl she carries, using the narrative-in-verse style of her acclaimed book A Bound Woman is a Dangerous Thing to revisit her youth. There, jelly sandals, Double Dutch beats, and chipped nail polish bring the breath of laughter; in adolescence, pomegranate lips, turntables, and love letters to other girls' boyfriends bring the breath of longing. Yet these breaths cannot be taken alone, and as she carries her childhood self through the broader historical space of Black girls in America, Hill is forced to grapple with expression in a space of stereotype, desire in a space of hyper-sexuality, joy in a space of heartache. Paying homage to prominent Black female figures from Zora Neale Hurston to Whitney Houston and Toni Morrison, Breath Better Spent invites you to walk through this landscape, too, exploring the spaces-both visible and invisible-that Black girls occupy in the national imagination, taking in the communal breath of girlhood, and asking yourself: In a country like America, what does active love and protection of Black girls look like?

The Breath of a Whale

The Breath of a Whale
Author: Leigh Calvez
Publisher: Sasquatch Books
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2019-02-26
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1632171872

An ode to marine life and the natural world, from the New York Times–bestselling author of The Hidden Life of Owls This “intimate and spirited” essay collection “offers us the whale watch most of us can only dream of” as they reveal the elusive lives of whales in the Pacific Ocean—home to orcas, humpbacks, blue, gray, and sperm whales (Sy Montgomery, author of The Soul of an Octopus). Leigh Calvez has spent a dozen years researching, observing, and probing the lives of the giants of the deep. Here, she relates the stories of nature's most remarkable creatures, including the familial orcas in the waters of Washington State and British Columbia; the migratory humpbacks; the ancient, deep-diving blue whales, the largest animals on the planet. The lives of these whales are conveyed through the work of dedicated researchers who have spent decades tracking them along their secretive routes that extend for thousands of miles, gleaning their habits and sounds and distinguishing peculiarities. Calvez author invites the reader onto a small research catamaran maneuvering among 100-foot long blue whales off the coast of California; or to join the task of monitoring patterns of humpback whale movements at the ocean surface: tail throw, flipper slap, fluke up, or blow. To experience whales is breathtaking. To understand their lives deepens our connection with the natural world.

Happy Money

Happy Money
Author: Elizabeth Dunn
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2013-05-14
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1476740704

If you think money can’t buy happiness, you’re not spending it right. Two rising stars in behavioral science explain how money can buy happiness—if you follow five core principles of smarter spending. If you think money can’t buy happiness, you’re not spending it right. Two rising stars in behavioral science explain how money can buy happiness—if you follow five core principles of smarter spending. Happy Money offers a tour of new research on the science of spending. Most people recognize that they need professional advice on how to earn, save, and invest their money. When it comes to spending that money, most people just follow their intuitions. But scientific research shows that those intuitions are often wrong. Happy Money explains why you can get more happiness for your money by following five principles, from choosing experiences over stuff to spending money on others. And the five principles can be used not only by individuals but by companies seeking to create happier employees and provide “happier products” to their customers. Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton show how companies from Google to Pepsi to Crate & Barrel have put these ideas into action. Along the way, the authors describe new research that reveals that luxury cars often provide no more pleasure than economy models, that commercials can actually enhance the enjoyment of watching television, and that residents of many cities frequently miss out on inexpensive pleasures in their hometowns. By the end of this book, readers will ask themselves one simple question whenever they reach for their wallets: Am I getting the biggest happiness bang for my buck?

A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing

A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing
Author: DaMaris B. Hill
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2020-01-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 1635574617

Nominated for an NAACP Image Award A Publishers Weekly Top 10 History Title for the season Booklist's Top 10 Diverse Nonfiction titles for the year BookRiot's "50 Must-Read Poetry Collections" Most Anticipated Books of the Year--The Rumpus, Nylon A revelatory work in the tradition of Claudia Rankine's Citizen, DaMaris Hill's searing and powerful narrative-in-verse bears witness to American women of color burdened by incarceration. “It is costly to stay free and appear / sane.” From Harriet Tubman to Assata Shakur, Ida B. Wells to Sandra Bland and Black Lives Matter, black women freedom fighters have braved violence, scorn, despair, and isolation in order to lodge their protests. In A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing, DaMaris Hill honors their experiences with at times harrowing, at times hopeful responses to her heroes, illustrated with black-and-white photographs throughout. For black American women, the experience of being bound has taken many forms: from the bondage of slavery to the Reconstruction-era criminalization of women; from the brutal constraints of Jim Crow to our own era's prison industrial complex, where between 1980 and 2014, the number of incarcerated women increased by 700%.* For those women who lived and died resisting the dehumanization of confinement--physical, social, intellectual--the threat of being bound was real, constant, and lethal. In A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing, Hill presents bitter, unflinching history that artfully captures the personas of these captivating, bound yet unbridled African-American women. Hill's passionate odes to Zora Neale Hurston, Lucille Clifton, Fannie Lou Hamer, Grace Jones, Eartha Kitt, and others also celebrate the modern-day inheritors of their load and light, binding history, author, and reader in an essential legacy of struggle. *The Sentencing Project

Breath

Breath
Author: James Nestor
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2020-05-26
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0735213631

A New York Times Bestseller A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2020 Named a Best Book of 2020 by NPR “A fascinating scientific, cultural, spiritual and evolutionary history of the way humans breathe—and how we’ve all been doing it wrong for a long, long time.” —Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Big Magic and Eat Pray Love No matter what you eat, how much you exercise, how skinny or young or wise you are, none of it matters if you’re not breathing properly. There is nothing more essential to our health and well-being than breathing: take air in, let it out, repeat twenty-five thousand times a day. Yet, as a species, humans have lost the ability to breathe correctly, with grave consequences. Journalist James Nestor travels the world to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it. The answers aren’t found in pulmonology labs, as we might expect, but in the muddy digs of ancient burial sites, secret Soviet facilities, New Jersey choir schools, and the smoggy streets of São Paulo. Nestor tracks down men and women exploring the hidden science behind ancient breathing practices like Pranayama, Sudarshan Kriya, and Tummo and teams up with pulmonary tinkerers to scientifically test long-held beliefs about how we breathe. Modern research is showing us that making even slight adjustments to the way we inhale and exhale can jump-start athletic performance; rejuvenate internal organs; halt snoring, asthma, and autoimmune disease; and even straighten scoliotic spines. None of this should be possible, and yet it is. Drawing on thousands of years of medical texts and recent cutting-edge studies in pulmonology, psychology, biochemistry, and human physiology, Breath turns the conventional wisdom of what we thought we knew about our most basic biological function on its head. You will never breathe the same again.

The Happiness Project

The Happiness Project
Author: Gretchen Rubin
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2012-06-26
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1443418196

What if you could change your life--without changing your life? Gretchen had a good marriage, two healthy daughters, and work she loved--but one day, stuck on a city bus, she realized that time was flashing by, and she wasn’t thinking enough about the things that really mattered. “I should have a happiness project,” she decided. She spent the next year test-driving the wisdom of the ages, current scientific studies, and lessons from popular culture about how to be happier. Each month, she pursued a different set of resolutions: go to sleep earlier, quit nagging, forget about results, or take time to be silly. Bit by bit, she began to appreciate and amplify the happiness that already existed in her life. Written with humour and insight, Gretchen’s story will inspire you to start your own happiness project. Now in a beautiful, expanded edition, Gretchen offers a wealth of new material including happiness paradoxes and practical tips on many daily matters: being a more light-hearted parent, sticking to a fitness routine, getting your sweetheart to do chores without nagging, coping when you forget someone’s name and more.

When Breath Becomes Air

When Breath Becomes Air
Author: Paul Kalanithi
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2016-02-04
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1473523494

**THE MILLION COPY BESTSELLER** 'Rattling. Heartbreaking. Beautiful,' Atul Gawande, bestselling author of Being Mortal What makes life worth living in the face of death? At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade's training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, the next he was a patient struggling to live. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi's transformation from a medical student asking what makes a virtuous and meaningful life into a neurosurgeon working in the core of human identity - the brain - and finally into a patient and a new father. Paul Kalanithi died while working on this profoundly moving book, yet his words live on as a guide to us all. When Breath Becomes Air is a life-affirming reflection on facing our mortality and on the relationship between doctor and patient, from a gifted writer who became both. 'A vital book about dying. Awe-inspiring and exquisite. Obligatory reading for the living' Nigella Lawson

The Ever Breath

The Ever Breath
Author: Julianna Baggott
Publisher: Delacorte Press
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2009-12-22
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 0375893687

Follow the secret passageway . . . and discover the magic! In a world where locust fairies flutter and firebreathers burst from snowbanks, two children are having the adventure of their lives. Truman and his twin sister, Camille, have just met their grandmother . . . and she’s a little strange. She whispers a tale about something called the Ever Breath, an amber orb that maintains the balance between our world and a dreamy one of imagination—and evil. Soon Truman and Camille find themselves in the Breath World, a magical place where ogres clash and a mouse holds the key to a mystery. Some creatures want to help them—and some want them D-E-A-D. That’s because the Ever Breath has been stolen, and an epic battle is raging to bring it safely back. Can the twins save not only one world—but two?

Time to Breathe

Time to Breathe
Author: Bill Mitchell
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2020-09-17
Genre: Self-Help
ISBN: 1472973003

Ever feel like you're so busy and stressed that you forget to breathe? Right now life has never seemed more overwhelming. The COVID pandemic, working from home and lockdowns have turned our working lives upside down, further blurring the line between work and home. We are taking less annual leave, working longer hours than ever and worried about redundancies. There are so many physical and emotional demands on us at the moment it makes it hard not to feel like we are all edging closer and closer to burnout. Dr Bill Mitchell is here to help - a psychologist with decades of experience specialising in helping the overwhelmed, overstressed and overscheduled rebalance their personal and professional lives. In Time to Breathe, Dr Bill brings you invaluable tried and tested, practical solutions from his clinical practice that will help you prioritise what is most important and ensure you stay in a happy, energised space – no matter what is going on around you. Find out how to build resilience in yourself and your family, and how to prevent the drift towards burnout and poor mental health that so many of us suffer from in our busy modern lives. Your family – and your boss – will thank you.

A Feather on the Breath of God

A Feather on the Breath of God
Author: Sigrid Nunez
Publisher: Picador
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2005-12-27
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1429944943

From Sigrid Nunez, the National Book Award-winning author of The Friend, comes A Feather on the Breath of God: a mesmerizing story about the tangled nature of relationships between parents and children, between language and love A young woman looks back to the world of her immigrant parents: a Chinese-Panamanian father and a German mother. Growing up in a housing project in the 1950s and 1960s, she escapes into dreams inspired both by her parents' stories and by her own reading and, for a time, into the otherworldly life of ballet. A yearning, homesick mother, a silent and withdrawn father, the ballet--these are the elements that shape the young woman's imagination and her sexuality.