Featured Reads

Are you sleepwalking through life? New York Times bestselling author Deepak Chopra offers an accessible, powerful guide to personal transformation so you can unlock the power of awakened consciousness and grasp your limitless potential.

“Awakening is powerful, practical, and life-changing—it shows us how to move beyond fear and step into freedom, purpose, and possibility.”—Jay Shetty, #1 New York Times bestselling author and host of the On Purpose podcast

In this groundbreaking guide to spiritual and personal wellness, Deepak Chopra unveils profound discoveries on how we can connect with our true self and construct a life free from fear. Building on decades of spiritual teachings, Chopra illustrates through enlightening sutras how to move from a state of simply surviving to leading an awakened life that unlocks the dormant potential within each of us. He also offers a Wellbeing Index by which we can track our progress on this journey towards awakening, helping increase intuition, access to insight, and a growing sense of ourselves as constantly changing beings which are part of a larger whole. 

Awakening offers the power to free you from the limitations of ego into a life marked by inner and outer peace, purpose, and boundless possibility. Featuring mental exercises, meditations, and personal stories from his own spiritual journey, Chopra shakes us from the nightmare of a limited self, where worry and anxiety reign.  

Chopra's Awakening not only invites you to embrace a new way of being—conscious reality—where miracles are everyday occurrences, but also offers visionary guidance to access the boundless potential of your soul, realized here and now. Ultimately, through the practices in Awakening, Chopra aims to propel all humanity toward an epoch of unprecedented transformation.

The star of classic television series, including The Jeffersons and 227, reveals her difficult journey from a tempestuous childhood to becoming a confident Hollywood powerbroker and groundbreaker who paved the way for today's superstar talents.

Marla Gibbs has been a Hollywood icon for generations of fans. Now, at ninety-three, she chronicles her climb from a difficult youth in which she yearned for safety and love, to the high-stakes world of Hollywood where she became a confident powerbroker learning to work behind the scenes for fair pay, access, and more creative control for herself and her colleagues.

Told in her forthright voice, It's Never Too Late illuminates Gibbs' daring move to Los Angeles to rebuild her life after an abusive marriage, how she became an actor, and how she eventually learned to balance acting with show running. She was a "Boss Bae" decades before the term would become entertainment industry shorthand for a power flex. While developing 227 her lawyer won her "all rights, courtesies and privileges of an executive producer without the credit." Though the authority she wielded behind the scenes created deep tensions on and off the set, her hard-luck young life had prepared her to succeed even as her tenacity was put to the test. Her experiences laid the groundwork for powerbrokers like Shonda Rhimes and Issa Rae.

An inspiring personal portrait of triumph and Hollywood that reminds us we can leave the past behind, It's Never Too Late is the true tale of a remarkable life and a wise guidebook for aspiring artists, entrepreneurs, and entertainment fans.

A hilarious but nonetheless groundbreaking contribution to the argument about which force shapes American life the most. For two kinds of readers—those who know it’s football and those who are about to find out.

Chuck Klosterman—New York Times bestselling critic, journalist, and, yes, football psychotic—did not write this book to deepen your appreciation of the game. He’s not trying to help you become that person at the party, or to teach you how to make better bets, or to validate any preexisting views you might have about the sport (positive or negative). Football does, in fact, do all of those things. But not in the way such things have been done in the past, and never in a way any normal person would expect.

Cultural theorists talk about hyperobjects—phenomena that bulk so large that their true dimensions are hidden in plain sight. In 2023, 93 of the 100 most-watched programs on U.S. television were NFL football games. This is not an anomaly. This is how society is best understood. Football is not merely the country’s most popular sport; it is engrained in almost everything that explains what America is, even for those who barely pay attention. 

Klosterman gets to the bottom of all of it. He takes us to a metaphorical projection of Texas, where the religion of six-man football merges with America’s Team [sic] and makes an inexplicable impact on a boy in North Dakota. He dissects the question of natural greatness, the paradox of gambling and war, and the timeless caricature of the uncompromising head coach. He interrogates the perfection of football’s marriage with television and the morality of acceptable risk. He even conjures an extinction-level event. If Žižek liked the SEC more than he liked cinema, if Stephen Jay Gould cared about linebackers more than he cared about dinosaurs, if Steve Martin played quarterback instead of the banjo . . . it would still be nothing like this.

A century ago, Yale’s legendary coach Walter Camp wrote his unified theory of the game. He called it Football. Chuck Klosterman has given us a new Camp for the new age, rooted in a personal history he cannot escape.

America’s bestselling biographer reveals the origins of the most revolutionary sentence in the Declaration of Independence, the one that defines who we are as Americans—and explains how it should shape our politics today.

“Isaacson uses a jeweler’s loupe to scan what gives his snappy little book its engaging title….Isaacson skillfully teases fresh pith and resonance out of those familiar words.” —The Wall Street Journal

“A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.” —Kirkus Reviews

To celebrate America’s 250th anniversary, Walter Isaacson takes readers on a fascinating deep dive into the creation of one of history’s most powerful sentences: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Drafted by Thomas Jefferson and edited by Benjamin Franklin and John Adams, this line lays the foundation for the American Dream and defines the common ground we share as a nation.

Isaacson unpacks its genius, word by word, illuminating the then-radical concepts behind it. Readers will gain a fresh appreciation for how it was drafted to inspire unity, equality, and the enduring promise of America. With clarity and insight, he reveals not just the power of these words but describes how, in these polarized times, we can use them to restore an appreciation for our common values.

The deepest dive yet into the heart and soul, secret affairs, unexplored alliances, and bitter feuds of a generally worshipped, intermittently reviled American icon.

Perhaps no founding father is as mysterious as Thomas Jefferson. The author of the Declaration of Independence was both a gifted wordsmith and a bundle of nerves. His superior knowledge of the human heart is captured in the impassioned appeal he brought to the Declaration. But as a champion of the common man who lived a life of privilege on a mountaintop plantation of his own design, he has eluded biographers who have sought to make sense of his inner life. In Being Thomas Jefferson, acclaimed Jefferson scholar Andrew Burstein peels away layers of obfuscation, taking us past the veneer of the animated letter-writer to describe a confused lover and a misguided humanist, too timid to embrace antislavery.

Jefferson was a soft-spoken man who recoiled from direct conflict, yet a master puppeteer in politics. Whenever he left Monticello, where he could control his environment, he suffered debilitating headaches that plagued him for decades, until he finally retired from public life. So, what did it feel like to be Thomas Jefferson? Burstein explains the decision to take as his mistress Sally Hemings, the enslaved half-sister of his late wife, who bore him six children, none of whom he acknowledged. Presenting a society that encouraged separation between public and private, appearance and essence, Burstein paints a dramatic picture of early American culture and brings us closer to Jefferson's life and thought than ever before.

One of our leading experts on the brain and #1 New York Times bestselling author explores how chronic physical and emotional pain are both rooted in your brain's wiring, leaving you stuck in the doom loop and how you can break free to heal from the "doom loop" and reclaim a vibrant, pain-free life.

In the United States alone, one in five adults experiences chronic pain. For too long, when a doctor couldn't find the source of frequent pain, the patient was dismissively told "it's all in your head." Today, we know that our somatic responses to trauma, anxiety, and depression create real suffering, and that physical pain can lead to trauma, anxiety, and depression. Dr. Daniel Amen calls this "the doom loop"--the dance between physical and emotional pain. These doom loops interfere with our ability to live our lives. But we can shift the doom loop into a healing loop, and in this vital book, he shows us how.

Dr. Amen has been researching a new brain-based approach to pain. In Change Your Brain, Change Your Pain he draws on those studies to reveal:

• Pain producing versus pain soothing thought patterns
• Muscle tension and trauma vs calmness and clarity
• The use of medical and nutraceuticals to help calm the pathways
• The effects of diet, exercise, meditation, breath to help pain

Our current approach to understanding and treating physical and emotional pain is misguided. Change Your Brain, Change Your Pain offers a healthier way, one that involves less medication, less surgery, and better outcomes. Just like the human heart, the human brain is an organ, and that to be free of emotional or physical pain, it is critical to get the brain as healthy as it can be--not just physically, but emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually, as well.

New York Times bestselling author Rachel Held Evans inspired a generation of questioning and evolving believers. This book offers a collection of her most impactful essays--in print for the first time.

For a generation finding their footing in life after evangelicalism, Rachel Held Evans was one of the most trusted and beloved voices of our time. Stubborn in her hope, courageous in her questions, and devoted to inclusivity, her online writing was a sanctuary to the millions who read her words daily. Her death to a sudden illness in 2019 invoked a global outpouring of stories of her legacy and influence.
Today, her words still speak, and now for the first time, fans old and new can experience her most viral and enduring essays in print. Braving the Truth is an anthology and keepsake collection letting readers borrow the bravery Rachel was best known for. Edited by New York Times bestselling author and Rachel's dear friend Sarah Bessey, and interspersed with reflections from Matthew Paul Turner, Shauna Niequist, Lisa Sharon Harper, Glennon Doyle, and more, this special volume tackles topics such as:

• "An Evolving Faith: " On doubt, asking questions, and liberation from certainty
• "That Unholy American Trinity: " On patriarchy, white supremacy, and religious nationalism
• "Casseroles and Kingdom of the Hungry: " On the church
• "All right, then, I'll go to hell: " On gender and sexuality
• "Still a Bible Nerd: " On Scripture, biblical literalism, and a better way
• and more

"If you want to understand the Church today, you need to understand Rachel Held Evans," so writes Sarah Bessey. Thoughtful yet down-to-earth, immediate and timeless, this essay collection is a gift from the past to bring into the future--a treasury to revitalize, validate, embolden, and return to again and again.
 

A frank, hands-on guide to using AI at work, unpacking for the curious and skeptical alike the “24 Laws” of AI and revealing strategies that businesses of every size can use to free up time, innovate, and add to the bottom line—from a Wall Street Journal tech columnist

“The antidote to AI panic. Read it. You’ll breathe easier.”—Scott Galloway, NYU Stern School of Business professor and co-host of Pivot with Kara Swisher

“A clear, practical, and hype-free guide to the AI revolution that will resonate with anyone trying to figure out the how to make AI deliver real value.”—Ethan Mollick, Wharton professor and New York Times bestselling author of Co-Intelligence

AI is nothing to be afraid of. After all, AI is merely software. It’s great at some things and (at least right now) terrible at others. But for workers who take time to experiment with AI and develop expertise, AI will make them more productive and more creative, saving them time, giving them job security, and boosting their income.

In How to AI, Wall Street Journal columnist Christopher Mims introduces readers to people just like them who are at the forefront of using AI in the world of work. Imagine a freelance lawyer who suddenly has a whip-smart assistant to help her nail every deposition. Or a mom-and-pop contractor whose new software tool is automating construction bids that used to eat up hundreds of hours. 

But even as half a billion people around the world have leapt at the chance to use ChatGPT and other tools, millions of us have stayed on the sidelines. Are you one of them? Maybe you feel you should be using AI tools, but you don’t know where to begin. Or maybe you love AI but find yourself struggling to get your co-workers or employees on board. In How to AI, Mims teaches readers twenty-four simple but eye-opening “laws” about AI and how we should approach it, including:

• AI is an assistant, not a replacement.
• AI isn’t creative, but it can help you be.
• Give AI your least favorites things to do.
• AI can’t create finished products, but it’s great at prototypes.

Animated by the wit and brilliant explanatory power that have earned Mims’s Wall Street Journal columns a devoted following, How to AI will prepare readers to become a part of the AI revolution—and, most important, arm them with the tools to make it work for them.

The Pivotal Next Step in the Love Language(tm) Revolution

Now You Can Personalize the Love You Give... Even More!

Dr. Gary Chapman has helped more than 150 million people discover their love language. But discovering it is just the beginning. Love isn't one-size-fits-all. What says "I love you" to one person might not mean a thing to another.



Each love language has dialects--personal and powerful ways love is uniquely expressed and received. Miss them, and even the right language can fall flat.

In this long-awaited follow-up, Dr. Chapman and Drs. Les and Leslie Parrott take the world-changing concept of the 5 Love Languages® one step further. They reveal why love often gets lost in translation--and how learning to speak the right dialect at the right time is the key to deeper connection.

Whether you're dating, decades into marriage, raising children, caring for aging parents, or deepening lifelong friendships, this book provides you with the tools to make love personal and truly felt.

 

The love language that matters most is the one your loved one is longing to hear. --Dr. Gary Chapman

A larger-than-life new biography of country music legend and philanthropist Dolly Parton.

In Ain't Nobody's Fool: The Life and Times of Dolly Parton, Martha Ackmann chronicles the life of an American Original. From her impoverished childhood in the Smoky Mountains to international stardom as a singer, songwriter, actress, businesswoman, and philanthropist, Dolly Parton has exceeded everyone's expectations except her own. During a time when the Beatles set the standard for contemporary music, Dolly appeared on a local country music television show that her high school classmates thought was pure cornpone. The day after her high school graduation, she boarded a bus for Nashville, but record executives turned her down. One said her voice sounded like a screech owl. 

When Dolly finally got her foot in the door, her talent and focus catapulted her to the top of country charts, the pop world, and movie stardom. Yet her success came at a price. Shunned by many in Nashville who saw her ambition as a betrayal of her country music roots, Dolly became the target of death threats, lawsuits, and a judge who threatened to throw her in jail. She nearly collapsed on-stage and later succumbed to depression that pushed her to the brink, but she refused to be counted out and came back stronger than ever developing Dollywood, the amusement park that became the economic engine of East Tennessee, and founding the Imagination Library that provides free books to children around the world. Her philanthropy to health organizations led to creation of the Moderna COVID vaccine. And, finally, she returned to her roots, recording bluegrass albums that became the most celebrated of her unparalleled 60-year career. 

Ain't Nobody's Fool is a deep dive into the social, historical, and personal forces that made Dolly Parton one of the most beloved and unifying figures in public life and includes interviews with friends, family members, school mates, Nashville neighbors, members of her band, studio musicians, producers, and many others. It also features never before seen photographs and unearthed documents shedding light on her family's hardscrabble life. More than anything, Martha Ackmann's fresh and animated new book proves Dolly Parton knows just who she is and she ain't nobody's fool.

Leading mental health advocate and licensed marriage and family therapist, Kati Morton, explores our common struggle and contradiction with control in ourselves and relationships, giving readers the ability to not only ask themselves whydo I keep doing this, but have the insight to find a real answer.



Many of us were told to stuff our feelings down when we were younger. We were taught that that our emotional reactions and responses should be controlled so we didn't embarrass or upset our parents and those around us. However, if that control oozes over into our relationships it's considered a bad thing. Controlling our friends or romantic partners is seen as toxic. Control is a precarious thing. Some sides of control are meant to keep us safe, while others harm connections. So, what are we supposed to do?



In Why Do I Keep Doing This? licensed family and marriage therapist , Kati Morton, explores this common struggle and contradiction with control. Kati shows how our upbringing and anxiety are often connected to our struggle to take up space. We can feel like we are too much by just existing in the same place as someone else, or that we are less deserving of their time and care. This struggle with asserting ourselves, or taking what we require can harm our development. We sometimes think the only way to feel okay and get what we need is to please everyone else first. Why Do I Keep Doing This? is a vital tool in helping us understand why control can be so attractive, but if left unmonitored can become detrimental to our lives. We all go through tough times and face uncertain futures, and we do what we can to cope, but as we get older and in an attempt to get wiser, we have to notice what behaviors are holding us back and change them.



Why Do I Keep Doing This? will shed light on shared struggles as readers follow Kati through some key points of growth in her own life while incorporating what she has learned as a therapist and content creator who knows how to create lasting healthy change. This book gives readers the ability to not only ask themselves why do I keep doing this? but also have the insight to find a real answer.

 

From the author of the international bestseller Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop, a heartfelt invitation to reflect on your relationship with reading and celebrate the joys of books.

Why do we read? What is it that we hope to take away from the intimate, personal experience of reading for pleasure?

How often do we ask these profound, expansive questions of ourselves and of our relationship to the joy of reading? In each of the essays in Every Day I Read, Hwang Bo-reum contemplates what living a life immersed in reading means. She goes beyond the usual questions of what to read and how often, exploring the relationship between reading and writing, when to turn to a bestseller vs. browse the corners of a bookstore, the value of reading outside of your favorite genre, falling in love with book characters, and more.

Every Day I Read provides many quiet moments for introspection and reflection, encouraging book-lovers to explore what reading means to each of us. While this is a book about books, at its heart is an attitude to life, one outside capitalism and climbing the corporate ladder. Lifelong and new readers will take inspiration from it, including a treasure trove of book recommendations blended seamlessly within.

No writer has surpassed the epic achievement of J.R.R. Tolkien, who spent decades refining his Middle-earth--a world that has felt so real to so many readers that it is almost impossible to imagine that any single person could have simply created it, seemingly out of thin air. In The Tower and the Ruin, Michael D. C. Drout takes us deep into Tolkien's genius, allowing us to glimpse the making of not only The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and The Silmarillion but also lesser-known books such as The Fall of Gondolin as well as Tolkien's poetry and innovative scholarship.

Drout, who has spent decades reading, studying, and teaching Tolkien, allows us to understand the author's methods and to embrace his works as never before. With great erudition and sparkling prose, Drout shows us how Tolkien invented myths, legends, cultures, languages, histories, and an intricate, multivocal narrative. We come to understand how Tolkien drew upon and modified material he found in Beowulf, the Kalevala, and other medieval literature from northern Europe, using the subtle qualities of those famous works as inspiration for his own. We also see the process by which he created the complex form of sorrow that is the primary emotional effect of his mature works, a sadness "blessed without bitterness," carefully woven through a tapestry of themes that has resonated with generations of readers.

Sweeping and hugely perceptive--and enhanced throughout by Drout's personal reflections on how Tolkien has shaped his own life and relationships--The Tower and the Ruin illuminates Tolkien anew and will come to be seen as an essential work for anyone who has journeyed to Middle-earth.

A sweeping exploration of the Arctic--and how it's being transformed by climate change--from National Geographic writer Neil Shea

As warming reshapes our planet, the Arctic--a region that once seemed unchangeable, beyond the reach of modern problems--is quickly coming undone. While the old cold world can still be glimpsed in the movements of caribou, the hidden lives of wolves, and the hunting skill of an Iñupiaq elder, look closer and you'll find a new Arctic appearing in its place.

In Frostlines, Neil Shea blends natural history, anthropology, and travel writing to explore how the beauty, chaos, and power of change in the far north are reflected in the lives of people and animals. He sojourns with a wolf pack on Canada's Ellesmere Island and travels with Indigenous hunters in Alaska, Nunavut, and the Northwest Territories. He tracks dwindling caribou herds across the top of North America, searches for vanished Vikings in Greenland, and visits the front line of the new Cold War rising between Russia and Europe. What Shea finds is not one Arctic but many--all still linked by shattering cold, seasons of darkness, and a pure, inimitable light.

Written with masterful prose and a spark of adventure, Frostlines is an expansive yet intimate revelation of the Arctic during a time of transformation, and a journey along the threshold of a stunning and sometimes frightening world that's emerging right before our eyes.

From acclaimed historian and author of the “marvelous” (The New York Times Book Review) The Last American Aristocrat comes a captivating new biography of Teddy Roosevelt, exploring the life of America’s 26th president and his pivotal role in shaping the dawn of the American Century.

Theodore Roosevelt was one of America’s most fascinating presidents—a complex man both publicly and privately. In this sweeping biography, historian David S. Brown takes us on an electrifying journey through Theodore Roosevelt’s life—from his privileged New York upbringing to his transformative presidency that reshaped America’s role on the global stage.

In the Arena vividly brings Roosevelt to life as a man of striking contradictions: a rugged outdoorsman with a love for books, a war hero who earned a Nobel Peace Prize, and a larger-than-life figure whose energy seemed boundless. Through compelling storytelling and meticulous research, Brown explores the pivotal moments that forged Roosevelt’s indomitable spirit, from battling childhood asthma to witnessing the deaths of both his mother and his wife on the same day, to wrangling cattle in the West and preserving 150 million acres of national land.

Challenging traditional views, In the Arena offers a fresh perspective on Roosevelt’s groundbreaking political legacy, including his Square Deal policies that laid the groundwork for modern social welfare programs. It also unpacks his bold foreign policy, which expanded America’s global influence and set the stage for its rise as a world power. Brown argues that Roosevelt’s charisma and performative presidency helped bridge the old Victorian values with the new industrial age, capturing the attention of the middle-class and making him a leader that the people loved.

Drawing comparisons to works like David McCullough’s Mornings on Horseback, Brown’s narrative stands out for its rich detail and sharp insights. More than just an account of a presidency—it’s an exploration of a life lived on the edge of greatness and is a must-read for anyone who wants to better understand this critical period of American history.