NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • For anyone who wants to see how today’s best and brightest got it right, got it wrong, and came out on top. What was the tipping point for Malcolm Gladwell? What unscripted event made Meryl Streep who she is? In this inspiration-packed book, Katie Couric reports from the front lines of the worlds of politics, entertainment, sports, philanthropy, the arts, and business—distilling the ingenious, hard-won insights of leaders and visionaries, who tell us all how to take chances, follow our passions, cope with criticism, and, perhaps most important, commit to something greater than ourselves. Among the many voices to be heard here are financial guru Suze Orman on the benefits of doing what’s right, not what’s easy; director Steven Spielberg on listening rather than being listened to; quarterback Drew Brees on how his (literal) big break changed his life; and novelist Curtis Sittenfeld on the secrets of a great long-term relationship (she suggests marrying someone less neurotic than you); not to mention: • Michael Bloomberg: “Eighty percent of success is showing up . . . early.” • Eric Stonestreet: “Remember that the old lady who’s taking forever in line is someone’s grandma.” • Joyce Carol Oates: “Read widely—what you want to read, and not what someone suggests that you should read.” • Jimmy Kimmel: “When in doubt, order the hamburger.” • Apolo Ohno: “It’s not about the forty seconds; it’s about the four years, the time it took to get there.” • Madeleine K. Albright: “Never play hide-and-seek with the truth.” Along the way, Couric reflects on the good advice—and the missteps—that have guided her from her early days as a desk assistant at ABC to her groundbreaking role as the first female anchor of the CBS Evening News . She reveals how the words of Thomas Jefferson helped her deal with her husband’s tragic death from cancer, and what encouraged her to leave the security of NBC’s Today show for a new adventure at CBS. Delightful, empowering, and moving, The Best Advice I Ever Got is the perfect book for anyone who is thinking about the future, contemplating taking a risk, or daring to make a leap into the great unknown.

"Mitch Albom has done it again with this moving memoir of love and loss. You can't help but fall for Chika. A page-turner that will no doubt become a classic." --Mary Karr, author of The Liars' Club and The Art of Memoir From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Tuesdays With Morrie comes Mitch Albom's most personal story to date: an intimate and heartwarming memoir about what it means to be a family and the young Haitian orphan whose short life would forever change his heart. Chika Jeune was born three days before the devastating earthquake that decimated Haiti in 2010. She spent her infancy in a landscape of extreme poverty, and when her mother died giving birth to a baby brother, Chika was brought to The Have Faith Haiti Orphanage that Albom operates in Port Au Prince. With no children of their own, the forty-plus children who live, play, and go to school at the orphanage have become family to Mitch and his wife, Janine. Chika's arrival makes a quick impression. Brave and self-assured, even as a three-year-old, she delights the other kids and teachers. But at age five, Chika is suddenly diagnosed with something a doctor there says, "No one in Haiti can help you with." Mitch and Janine bring Chika to Detroit, hopeful that American medical care can soon return her to her homeland. Instead, Chika becomes a permanent part of their household, and their lives, as they embark on a two-year, around-the-world journey to find a cure. As Chika's boundless optimism and humor teach Mitch the joys of caring for a child, he learns that a relationship built on love, no matter what blows it takes, can never be lost. Told in hindsight, and through illuminating conversations with Chika herself, this is Albom at his most poignant and vulnerable. Finding Chika is a celebration of a girl, her adoptive guardians, and the incredible bond they formed--a devastatingly beautiful portrait of what it means to be a family, regardless of how it is made.

From the scion of Hollywood royalty--son of Michael Douglas, grandson of Kirk Douglas--a moving, often shocking, ultimately inspiring memoir detailing his struggle to regain his dignity, humanity, and place in society after many years of drug abuse and almost eight years in prison. Cameron Douglas is born into wealth, privilege, and comfort. His parents are glamorous jet-setters, his father a superstar, his mother a beautiful socialite, his grandfather a legend. On the surface, his life seems golden. But by the age of thirty, he has taken a hellish dive: he's become a drug addict, a thief, and--after a DEA drug bust--a convicted drug dealer sentenced to five years in prison, with another five years added to his sentence while incarcerated. Eventually he will spend two years in solitary, where he manages, nonetheless, to hold fast to the brutal ethos of prison survival . . . until: he begins to reverse his savage transformation, to understand the psychological turmoil that has tormented him for years, and to prepare for what will be a profoundly challenging, but eventually deeply satisfying and successful, reentry into society at large. Sparing no one in his sphere--least of all himself--Cameron Douglas gives us a raw and unstintingly honest recounting of his harrowing, remarkable, and, in the end, inspiring life story.

Celebrated for her indelible, Oscar-caliber performances in some of the most memorable films of the 1980s and 1990s, Debra Winger, in Undiscovered , her first book, demonstrates that her creative range extends from screen to page. Here is an intimate glimpse of an artist marvelously wide-ranging in her gifts. In fact, as this beguiling book reveals, Winger is that rare star who dared to resist the all-consuming industry that is Hollywood becoming her entire reason for being. "I love the work," she states, "and don't much care for the business." Yet she cares deeply for the people who have inspired her. We meet them (most famously, James Bridges, Bernardo Bertolucci; most dearly, her mother, husband, and sons) here, as Winger passionately makes her case for forging a life beyond acting -- and shows how she has done just that. Winger's screen performances have long been celebrated for their breathtaking emotional range, a quality that shines through in these pages. "When I was little," she writes, "someone told me that when you age, you turn into the person you were all your life." In this intriguing mix of reminiscence, poetry, storytelling, and insightful observation, a portrait of a life well-lived is strikingly rendered.

Two-time All Star Shawn Green shows how the surprising lessons the game has taught him transcend baseball and compose a life well lived. Shawn Green’s career statistics can be found on the backs of baseball cards in shoeboxes across America: 328 home runs, 1,071 RBIs, .282 career batting average, All-Star, Gold Glove, Silver Slugger...but numbers tell only part of the story. In the tradition of Phil Jackson’s Sacred Hoops, Shawn Green illustrates the spiritual practices that guided his career and enabled him to “bring stillness into the flow of life.” In The Way of Baseball, he shares the secrets to remaining focused both on and off the field, shedding light on a signature approach to living by using his remarkable baseball experiences to exemplify how one can find full awareness, presence, and, ultimately, fulfillment in any endeavor.

"Nearly all of us either have had or have heard of an experience in which a soul already departed reaches back to us who have been left behind.... Sometimes, it's no more than a whisper, a familiar smell in the air, or just the feeling of presence as vivid as when the loved one was still alive. These moments are just that...moments, a glimpse behind the veil; not a letter from heaven, but a postcard." (Dan Gordon, Postcards from Heaven) A postcard from heaven is not a revelation from on high -- rather, it's "a whisper, a familiar smell in the air, or just the feeling of presence" of someone who's passed away. It is just enough of a message to imply that what we call life is not ended by what we call death. Dan Gordon has been receiving these postcards all his life -- from his father, his older brother, and his son Zaki, who was killed in a car accident when he was only twenty-two. Postcards from Heaven is the beautiful, inspirational memoir of four generations of a remarkable family and how they remain interconnected, a part of one another's stories, even after passing to the other side. Here is the span of his father's long life, moving and funny, from the Russian Revolution to his improbable Depression-era courtship of a woman named Goddess -- Gordon's mother -- to his spiritual later years in Israel; his incorrigible older brother's mischievous magic, able to find humor even in cancer treatment; and his brilliant son, a natural storyteller who looked destined to follow his father into the movie business. These are the stories of their lives on earth as well as after death. Full of humor, compassion, and love, Postcards from Heaven comforts and assures us that those we loved can reach back to those of us still on earth -- and, if only we are attentive enough to listen, we can hear them say, Got here safe. It's really beautiful. Much love, till we meet again.

"This is a beautiful book, full of ideas that could help restore America’s genius for freedom and promise.” — Thomas Moore, New York Times bestselling author of Care of the Soul A lifelong Emerson lover, teacher, and spiritual seeker reveals how American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson’s twelve essential teachings hold the answer to living an authentic and fulfilling life, one that is in har[Bokinfo]