In this revelatory, authoritative portrait of Donald J. Trump and the toxic family that made him, Mary L. Trump, a trained clinical psychologist and Donald’s only niece, shines a bright light on the dark history of their family in order to explain how her uncle became the man who now threatens the world’s health, economic security, and social fabric.
Mary Trump spent much of her childhood in her grandparents’ large, imposing house in the heart of Queens, where Donald and his four siblings grew up. She describes a nightmare of traumas, destructive relationships, and a tragic combination of neglect and abuse. She explains how specific events and general family patterns created the damaged man who currently occupies the Oval Office, including the strange and harmful relationship between Fred Trump and his two oldest sons, Fred Jr. and Donald.
A first-hand witness to countless holiday meals and family interactions, Mary brings an incisive wit and unexpected humor to sometimes grim, often confounding family events. She recounts in unsparing detail everything from her uncle Donald’s place in the family spotlight and Ivana’s penchant for re-gifting to her grandmother’s frequent injuries and illnesses and the appalling way Donald, Fred Trump’s favorite son, dismissed and derided him when he began to succumb to Alzheimer’s.
Numerous pundits, armchair psychologists, and journalists have sought to parse Donald J. Trump’s lethal flaws. Mary L. Trump has the education, insight, and intimate familiarity needed to reveal what makes Donald, and the rest of her clan, tick. She alone can recount this fascinating, unnerving saga, not just because of her insider’s perspective but also because she is the only Trump willing to tell the truth about one of the world’s most powerful and dysfunctional families.

In this revelatory, authoritative portrait of Donald J. Trump and the toxic family that made him, Mary L. Trump, a trained clinical psychologist and Donald’s only niece, shines a bright light on the dark history of their family in order to explain how her uncle became the man who now threatens the world’s health, economic security, and social fabric.
Mary Trump spent much of her childhood in her grandparents’ large, imposing house in the heart of Queens, where Donald and his four siblings grew up. She describes a nightmare of traumas, destructive relationships, and a tragic combination of neglect and abuse. She explains how specific events and general family patterns created the damaged man who currently occupies the Oval Office, including the strange and harmful relationship between Fred Trump and his two oldest sons, Fred Jr. and Donald.
A first-hand witness to countless holiday meals and family interactions, Mary brings an incisive wit and unexpected humor to sometimes grim, often confounding family events. She recounts in unsparing detail everything from her uncle Donald’s place in the family spotlight and Ivana’s penchant for re-gifting to her grandmother’s frequent injuries and illnesses and the appalling way Donald, Fred Trump’s favorite son, dismissed and derided him when he began to succumb to Alzheimer’s.
Numerous pundits, armchair psychologists, and journalists have sought to parse Donald J. Trump’s lethal flaws. Mary L. Trump has the education, insight, and intimate familiarity needed to reveal what makes Donald, and the rest of her clan, tick. She alone can recount this fascinating, unnerving saga, not just because of her insider’s perspective but also because she is the only Trump willing to tell the truth about one of the world’s most powerful and dysfunctional families.

Before Owen Michaels disappears, he manages to smuggle a note to his beloved wife of one year:
Despite her confusion and fear, Hannah Hall knows exactly to whom the note refers: Owen’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Bailey. Bailey, who lost her mother tragically as a child. Bailey, who wants absolutely nothing to do with her new stepmother.
As Hannah’s increasingly desperate calls to Owen go unanswered; as the FBI arrests Owen’s boss; as a US Marshal and FBI agents arrive at her Sausalito home unannounced, Hannah quickly realizes her husband isn’t who he said he was. And that Bailey just may hold the key to figuring out Owen’s true identity—and why he really disappeared.
Hannah and Bailey set out to discover the truth, together. But as they start putting together the pieces of Owen’s past, they soon realize they are also building a new future. One neither Hannah nor Bailey could have anticipated.

From inside the Vatican, the book that became a modern classic on sainthood in the Catholic Church. Working from church documents, Kenneth Woodward shows how saint-makers decide who is worthy of the church's highest honor. He describes the investigations into lives of candidates, explains how claims for miracles are approved or rejected, and reveals the role politics -- papal and secular -- plays in the ultimate decision. From his examination of such controversial candidates as Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador and Edith Stein, a Jewish philosopher who became a nun and was gassed at Auschwitz, to his insights into the changes Pope John Paul II has instituted, Woodward opens the door on a 2,000-year-old tradition.

Begun in 1959 by a twenty-two-year-old Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary is a tangled love story of jealousy, treachery, and violent alcoholic lust in the Caribbean boomtown that was San Juan, Puerto Rico, in the late 1950s. The narrator, freelance journalist Paul Kemp, irresistibly drawn to a sexy, mysterious woman, is soon thrust into a world where corruption and get-rich-quick schemes rule and anything (including murder) is permissible.

"A Band of Angels" is fiction, but it is based on real events and people. The character of Ella was inspired by Ella Sheppard Moore, who was born February 4, 1851, in Nashville, Tennessee. Her father was able to free himself and young Ella from slavery, but before he could buy freedom for Ella's mother she was sold away. Ella was raised in Cincinnati, where she took music lessons. At fifteen, she was left penniless when her father died. She arrived at Fisk School in 1868 with only six dollars.Fisk was opened in 1866 as a school for former slaves and began offering college classes in 1871. That year, in a desperate attempt to save Fisk from closing, a music teacher named George White set out with a group of students on a singing tour to raise money. Although at first they only sang popular music of the day, they soon became famous for introducing spirituals to the world.Ella Sheppard was the pianist for the Jubilee Singers on their historic concert tours, which raised enough money to save the school and build Jubilee Hall, the first permanent structure in the South for the education of black students. Ella later married George Moore, had three children, and located her mother and a sister. She died in 1914. Today her great-granddaughter is a librarian at Fisk University who shares the history of the Jubilee Singers with visitors.Although none graduated from Fisk, the original Jubilee Singers were recognized with honorary degrees in 1978. Today, Jubilee Singers at Fisk University continue to keep alive a rich musical tradition that includes such songs as "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," "Many Thousand Gone," and "Go Down, Moses."

** Introduction
From the host of the popular WNYC podcast Death, Sex, & Money, Let’s Talk About Hard Things is an invitation to discuss the tough topics that all of us encounter. “You will laugh, cry, nod in recognition, and by the end, feel like no topic is off-limits when it comes to creating meaningful connection” (Lori Gottlieb, New York Times bestselling author of Maybe You Should Talk To Someone).
Anna Sale wants you to have that conversation. You know the one. The one that you’ve been avoiding or putting off, maybe for years. The one that you’ve thought “they’ll never understand” or “do I really want to bring that up?” or “it’s not going to go well, so why even try?”
Sale is the founder and host of WNYC’s popular, award-winning podcast Death, Sex, & Money, or as the New York Times dubbed her, “a therapist at happy hour.” She and her guests have direct and thought-provoking conversations, discussing topics that most of us are too squeamish, polite, or nervous to bring up. But Sale argues that we all experience these hard things, and by not talking to one another, we cut ourselves off, leading us to feel isolated and disconnected from the people who can help us most.
In Let’s Talk About Hard Things, Sale uses the best of what she’s learned from her podcast to reveal that when we have the courage to talk about hard things, we learn about ourselves, others, and the world that we make together. Diving into five of the most fraught conversation topics—death, sex, money, family, and identity—she moves between memoir, fascinating snapshots of a variety of Americans opening up about their lives, and expert opinions to show why having tough conversations is important and how to do them in a thoughtful and generous way. She uncovers that listening may be the most important part of a tough conversation, that the end goal should be understanding without the pressure of reconciliation, and that there are some things that words can’t fix (and why that’s actually okay).
Touching, personal, and inspiring, Let's Talk About Hard Things is a profound meditation on why communication can connect us instead of divide us and how we can all do it better.
** Editorial Reviews
----------------
"In Let's Talk About Hard Things, Anna Sale brings us fascinating conversations that feel both intensely personal and widely universal, then shows us how to start having them in our own lives. You will laugh, cry, nod in recognition, and by the end, feel like no topic is off limits when it comes to creating meaningful connection. I want to give a copy of this book to every family member, friend, and therapy patient I see.”
—Lori Gottlieb, host of Dear Therapists podcast and New York Times bestselling author of Maybe You Should Talk To Someone
"With tremendous empathy and thoughtfulness, Anna Sale models how to have the hard conversations—about love and grief and fear and so much else. Sale is a wise guide through the most difficult human terrain, and with her help, I'm now having conversations that before this book felt impossible."
—John Green, New York Times bestselling author of Turtles All the Way Down and The Fault in Our Stars
"Anna Sale has a real gift for cutting through the white noise that so often overwhelms our most urgent, high-stakes conversations. She's teaching us how to listen to one another again. No one can save us from life's plot twists—and no one should—but page by page, sentence by sentence, Sale is committed to seeing us through."
—Saeed Jones, author of How We Fight For Our Lives
“Let’s Talk About Hard Things is a gift. Filled with personal stories, complex emotions, and insight into the thorniest of interpersonal relationships, it is a balm, a challenge, and a celebration of our desire to be known in this world."
—Katie Couric, journalist and co-founder of Katie Couric Media
"The number one driver of human happiness, across time and culture, is meaningful connection to others. The road to connection is conversations. Anna Sale is giving us the encouragement, the example, and the tools to do the one thing that can bring us closer: talk about hard things.”
—Kelly Corrigan, host of Kelly Corrigan Wonders and bestselling author of Tell Me More
"It’s not surprising to learn that Anna Sale applies the same compassion and thoughtfulness she displays as host to her writing, but it is thrilling all the same to quickly find Let’s Talk About Hard Things as inviting and comforting as any episode of Death, Sex, & Money. It’s not easy to open up about what makes us most uncomfortable, but the stories shared throughout the book and Sale’s excellent writing around them shows how vital it is that we make the effort. And while I still occasionally squirm over the reality that there is only so much that I can control in life, I am grateful for the tools Let’s Talk About Hard Things provides in helping me deal with such an unfortunate circumstance. I was already a fan of Sale's as a podcaster and person, but happy to now be a fanboy of Anna Sale the writer, too.
—Michael Arceneaux, New York Times best selling author of I Can’t Date Jesus and I Don’t Want To Die Poor
“Kind honesty—not the type where someone is shaming you, but loving communication of who you are—is one of the hardest things to talk about. As the recovery movement has advised many: “Say what you mean, but don’t say it mean." Anna Sale’s book provides beautifully written hope that that we can talk about hard things and that makes hard things easier. Or at the very least, spoken. It’s like overhearing people like you in a support group in the coziest of book forms. It is thus a combination of my two favorite things: the vulnerability of shares in anonymous support groups and reading.”
—Maria Bamford, comedian and writer
“An empathetic debut…Fans of Sale’s podcast will find a familiar guide in her reflective and introspective voice, and those encountering her for the first time will find this a comfort in hard times.”
—Publishers Weekly
"Sale, host of the podcast Death, Sex & Money, explores how we can talk about difficult situations in order to better connect with family, friends, and coworkers. This debut covers five topics—death, sex, money, family, and identity—which Sale explores via stories from her own life and by interviewing a racially and economically diverse group of people. Not to be mistaken for a self-help guide, Sale’s book also analyzes the structural and cultural dynamics that impede meaningful conversations. Besides listeners of her podcast, this will appeal to any adult struggling to broach these topics."
—Library Journal
“Expanding on her hit WNYC podcast, Death, Sex & Money, journalist Sale urges readers to have difficult conversations about their lives. Sale is generous when divulging her tricky chats of yore…This book is a road map to navigating these sorts of conversations with friends and family; it also offers a sense of solidarity. Simply bearing witness to the struggles of strangers is sure to leave readers feeling less alone.”
—Booklist

Seeing in the Dark is a poetic love letter to the skies and a stirring report on the revolution now sweeping amateur astronomy, in which backyard stargazers linked globally by the Internet are exploring deep space and making discoveries worthy of the professionals. Timothy Ferris invites us all to become stargazers, recounting his lifelong experiences as an enthralled stargazer, and capturing the exquisite experience when ancient starlight strikes the eye and incites the mind. Reporting from around the globe -- from England and Italy to the Florida Keys and the Chilean Andes -- on the revolution that's putting millions in touch with the night sky, Ferris also offers an authoritative and magical description of what is out there to be seen, from the rings of Saturn to remote quasars whose light is older than Earth. Astronomy is the most accessible and democratic of all the sciences: Anyone can get started in it just by going outside with a star chart on a dark night and looking up. A pair of binoculars suffices to see galaxies millions of light-years away, and a small telescope can probe what Ferris calls the "blue waters" of deep space. An accessible, nontechnical invitation to get to know the sky, Seeing in the Dark encourages readers to make the glories of the stars a part of their lives. "The universe," Ferris writes, "is accessible to all, and can inform one's existence with a sense of beauty, reason, and awe as enriching as anything to be found in music, art, or poetry." An appendix includes star charts, observing guides, and tips on how you can get involved with the night sky.

John Sellers was powerless to resist the call of indie rock -- once he finally heard it. In this hilarious and revealing memoir, Sellers meticulously charts his transformation from a teenage headbanger rebelling against his Dylan-obsessed father to a thirtysomething fixated on the obscure Ohio band Guided By Voices. Along the way, he commemorates the deaths of Ian Curtis and Kurt Cobain, makes a pilgrimage inspired by the Smiths, and riffs on Pavement and the other raucous bands that have ruled college radio since the 1980s. Packed with compulsively constructed lists, ridiculous formulas, and embarrassing confessions, this is a book for anybody who thinks that corporate rock still sucks.

Avoiding shellfish was easy. The stoning of adulterers proved a little more difficult - and potentially controversial. Was it enough to walk up to an adulterer and gently touch them with a stone? Even that could be grounds for accusations of assault, especially with female adulterers in Manhattan. So what's a good Bible-reading boy to do?
Raised in a secular family but increasingly interested in the relevance of faith in our modern world, A.J. Jacobs decides to dive in headfirst and attempt to obey the hundreds of less-publicised rules. The resulting spiritual journey is at once funny and profound, reverent and irreverent, personal and universal, and will make you see history's most influential book with new eyes.

One of the greatest satires in American literature, Mark Twain's 'A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court' begins when Hank Morgan, a skilled mechanic in a nineteenth-century New England arms factory, is struck on the head during a quarrel and awakens to find himself among the knights and magicians of King Arthur's Camelot. The 'Yankee' vows brashly to "boss the whole country inside of three weeks" and embarks on an ambitious plan to modernize Camelot with 19th c. industrial inventions like electricity and gunfire. It isn't long before all hell breaks loose!
Written in 1889, Mark 'A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court' is one of literature's first genre mash-ups and one of the first works to feature time travel. It is one of the best known Twain stories, and also one of his most unique. Twain uses the work to launch a social commentary on contemporary society, a thinly veiled critique of the contemporary times despite the Old World setting.
While the dark pessimism that would fully blossom in Twain's later works can be discerned in 'A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, ' the novel will nevertheless be remembered primarily for its wild leaps of imagination, brilliant wit, and entertaining storytelling.

Thousands of people have had near-death experiences, but scientists have argued that they are impossible. Dr. Eben Alexander was one of those scientists. A highly trained neurosurgeon, Alexander knew that NDEs feel real, but are simply fantasies produced by brains under extreme stress.
Then, Dr. Alexander’s own brain was attacked by a rare illness. The part of the brain that controls thought and emotion—and in essence makes us human—shut down completely. For seven days he lay in a coma. Then, as his doctors considered stopping treatment, Alexander’s eyes popped open. He had come back.
Alexander’s recovery is a medical miracle. But the real miracle of his story lies elsewhere. While his body lay in coma, Alexander journeyed beyond this world and encountered an angelic being who guided him into the deepest realms of super-physical existence. There he met, and spoke with, the Divine source of the universe itself.
Alexander’s story is not a fantasy. Before he underwent his journey, he could not reconcile his knowledge of neuroscience with any belief in heaven, God, or the soul. Today Alexander is a doctor who believes that true health can be achieved only when we realize that God and the soul are real and that death is not the end of personal existence but only a transition.
This story would be remarkable no matter who it happened to. That it happened to Dr. Alexander makes it revolutionary. No scientist or person of faith will be able to ignore it. Reading it will change your life.

As a young man Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) escaped from slavery in Baltimore, Maryland. He was fortunate to have been taught to read by his slave owner mistress, and he would go on to become one of the major literary figures of his time. He wrote three versions of his autobiography over the course of his lifetime and published his own newspaper. His very existence gave the lie to slave owners: with dignity and great intelligence he bore witness to the brutality of slavery.

Initially mentored by William Lloyd Garrison, Douglass spoke widely, often to large crowds, using his own story to condemn slavery. He broke with Garrison to become a political abolitionist, a Republican, and eventually a Lincoln supporter. By the Civil War and during Reconstruction, Douglass became the most famed and widely travelled orator in the nation. He denounced the premature end of Reconstruction and the emerging Jim Crow era. In his unique and eloquent voice, written and spoken, Douglass was a fierce critic of the United States as well as a radical patriot. He sometimes argued politically with younger African Americans, but he never forsook either the Republican party or the cause of black civil and political rights.

In this remarkable biography, David Blight has drawn on new information held in a private collection that few other historian have consulted, as well as recently discovered issues of Douglass’s newspapers. Blight tells the fascinating story of Douglass’s two marriages and his complex extended family. Douglass was not only an astonishing man of words, but a thinker steeped in Biblical story and theology. There has not been a major biography of Douglass in a quarter century. David Blight’s
affords this important American the distinguished biography he deserves.

The narrative of the Silicon Valley generation that launched five major high-tech industries in seven years, laying the foundation for today’s technology-driven world.
At a time when the five most valuable companies on the planet are high-tech firms and nearly half of Americans say they cannot live without their cell phones,
reveals the untold story of how we got here. This is the gripping tale of seven exceptional men and women, pioneers of Silicon Valley in the 1970s and early 1980s. Together, they worked across generations, industries, and companies to bring technology from Pentagon offices and university laboratories to the rest of us. In doing so, they changed the world.

In
historian Leslie Berlin introduces the people and stories behind the birth of the Internet and the microprocessor, as well as Apple, Atari, Genentech, Xerox PARC, ROLM, ASK, and the iconic venture capital firms Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. In the space of only seven years and thirty-five miles, five major industries—personal computing, video games, biotechnology, modern venture capital, and advanced semiconductor logic—were born.

During these same years, the first ARPANET transmission came into a Stanford lab, the university began licensing faculty innovations to businesses, and the Silicon Valley tech community began mobilizing to develop the lobbying clout and influence that have become critical components of modern American politics. In other words, these were the years when one of the most powerful pillars of our modern innovation and political systems was first erected.

Featured among well-known Silicon Valley innovators like Steve Jobs, Regis McKenna, Larry Ellison, and Don Valentine are Mike Markkula, the underappreciated chairman of Apple who owned one-third of the company; Bob Taylor, who kick-started the Arpanet and masterminded the personal computer; software entrepreneur Sandra Kurtzig, the first woman to take a technology company public; Bob Swanson, the cofounder of Genentech; Al Alcorn, the Atari engineer behind the first wildly successful video game; Fawn Alvarez, who rose from an assembler on a factory line to the executive suite; and Niels Reimers, the Stanford administrator who changed how university innovations reach the public. Together, these troublemakers rewrote the rules and invented the future.

What happens in our brains to make us feel fear, love, hate, anger, joy? Do we control our emotions, or do they control us? Do animals have emotions? How can traumatic experiences in early childhood influence adult behavior, even though we have no conscious memory of them? In
Joseph LeDoux investigates the origins of human emotions and explains that many exist as part of complex neural systems that evolved to enable us to survive.

One of the principal researchers profiled in Daniel Goleman's
LeDoux is a leading authority in the field of neural science. In this provocative book, he explores the brain mechanisms underlying our emotions -- mechanisms that are only now being revealed.

For decades, women have relied on OUR BODIES, OURSELVES to provide the most comprehensive, honest, and up-to-date information on everything from emotional well-being to birth control. Now, in OUR BODIES, OURSELVES: MENOPAUSE, the same team brings readers the most trustworthy, new information available and confronts misinformation and scare tactics. Discussing menopause in the context of the rich and varied life experiences of women from diverse backgrounds, this reference emphasizes self-care and prevention strategies, such as good nutrition and exercise, as the foundation of health through the menopausal transition and beyond. With clear, accessible language and a balanced look at every issue (including hormone replacement therapy) OUR BODIES, OURSELVES: MENOPAUSE provides women with the information they need to make decisions about their bodies.