#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE ECONOMIST * "I wrote this book not sure I could follow the road to character, but I wanted at least to know what the road looks like and how other people have trodden it."--David Brooks With the wisdom, humor, curiosity, and sharp insights that have brought millions of readers to his New York Times column and his previous bestsellers, David Brooks has consistently illuminated our daily lives in surprising and original ways. In The Social Animal, he explored the neuroscience of human connection and how we can flourish together. Now, in The Road to Character, he focuses on the deeper values that should inform our lives. Responding to what he calls the culture of the Big Me, which emphasizes external success, Brooks challenges us, and himself, to rebalance the scales between our "résumé virtues"--achieving wealth, fame, and status--and our "eulogy virtues," those that exist at the core of our being: kindness, bravery, honesty, or faithfulness, focusing on what kind of relationships we have formed. Looking to some of the world's greatest thinkers and inspiring leaders, Brooks explores how, through internal struggle and a sense of their own limitations, they have built a strong inner character. Labor activist Frances Perkins understood the need to suppress parts of herself so that she could be an instrument in a larger cause. Dwight Eisenhower organized his life not around impulsive self-expression but considered self-restraint. Dorothy Day, a devout Catholic convert and champion of the poor, learned as a young woman the vocabulary of simplicity and surrender. Civil rights pioneers A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin learned reticence and the logic of self-discipline, the need to distrust oneself even while waging a noble crusade. Blending psychology, politics, spirituality, and confessional, The Road to Character provides an opportunity for us to rethink our priorities, and strive to build rich inner lives marked by humility and moral depth. "Joy," David Brooks writes, "is a byproduct experienced by people who are aiming for something else. But it comes."

NATIONAL BESTSELLER For years, people have been asking Ezekiel “Zeke” Emanuel, the brash, outspoken, and fiercely loyal eldest brother in the Emanuel clan, the same question: What did your mom put in the cereal? Middle brother Rahm is the mayor of Chicago, erstwhile White House chief of staff, and one of the most colorful figures in American politics. Youngest brother Ari is a Hollywood superagent, the real-life model for the character of Ari Gold on the hit series Entourage . And Zeke himself, whom the other brothers consider to be the smartest of them all, is one of the world’s leading bioethicists and oncologists, and a former special advisor for health policy in the Obama administration. How did one family of modest means produce three such high-achieving kids? Here, for the first time, Zeke provides the answer. Set amid the tumult of Chicago in the 1960s and 1970s, Brothers Emanuel recounts the intertwined histories of these three rambunctious, hypercompetitive Jewish American boys, each with his own unique and compelling life story. But ultimately, this is the story of the entire Emanuel family: the tough, colorful Old World grandparents; a mischievous, loving father who immigrated to the United States with twenty-five dollars and who enthralled his boys with tales of his adventures in Israel’s war for independence; and a proud, politically engaged mother who took the boys with her to rallies and protests—including a civil rights march through the streets of Chicago led by Martin Luther King himself. Even as the Emanuels distinguished themselves as individuals, the bond of brotherhood that tied them together was never broken. Brothers Emanuel is a wry, rollicking, and often poignant narrative of how one American family succeeded in raising three extraordinary children. Praise for Brothers Emanuel “An endearing, honest and gripping account of an American success story.” — San Francisco Chronicle “A beautiful portrait of growing up Jewish in an urban environment during an era of profound social change.” — Publishers Weekly “This delightful memoir is a deeply personal tale of one family, but it’s also about much larger things: America and tribal identity, love and rivalry, and the moral lessons to be learned as you grow up.” —Walter Isaacson “Fascinating . . . a classic tale of an immigrant family.” — Chicago Tribune “Mighty entertaining.” —The Hollywood Reporter “A clear-eyed, candid memoir that is unique and yet quintessentially American.” —BookPage “A fun read.” —The Forward

"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.

Anger is universal. Unchecked, it can cause lasting damage in our lives: wrecked relationships, lost jobs, even serious disease. All of us have acted in anger -- and often wished we hadn't. Is there a way that really works to solve problems and assert ourselves without being angry? The answer is a resounding yes, if you follow the breakthrough precepts of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) set forth in this book. Dr. Albert Ellis and Dr. Raymond Chip Tafrate present here their proven approach to helping people deal effectively with emotional problems and show you how to use their techniques to systematically understand the roots and nature of your anger. Using easy-to-master instructions and exercises, readers can learn to live unhysterically in an often difficult and unfair world. REBT will reduce angry reactions and help to challenge and eliminate the anger that can frustrate success and happiness at home, at work, anywhere.

I've reinvented my career, my interests, my life, many times over the past twenty years. This is the book I wish I had at the beginning of that long and often volatile journey. I found when I outsourced my self-esteem to only one outcome, disaster resulted. Reinvention was the key to ensuring that the outcomes in life were positive ones. And now the entire world: technology, governments, the shifting landscapes of opportunity and success, are all turning upside down, forcing us to reinvent as individuals and as a culture. ,Along my own journey I have read and encountered dozens of other successful leaders, artists, entrepreneurs, and mentors who I have learned the art of reinvention from. The journey has been intense. The obstacles were hard fought. And the adventures that led to me now finally sharing it all in this book has been both painful and exhilarating. I describe specific techniques, share stories, tell the stories of others, and give the ultimate guide to not only how but why it is critical for people to master the skills of reinvention. What I've learned: change is the only constant. Companies decay, technologies disappear, governments change, relationships change and opportunity is a shifting landscape. Reading the stories and learning the critical skills taught in Reinvent Yourself is how I found my own way through the chaos of change and onto the path of new opportunity and success. Again, this is the book I wish I had in my hands twenty years ago although I am glad that I am writing it now.

Psychologist, writer, speaker, advisor Dr. Joyce Brothers knows WHAT EVERY WOMAN SHOULD KNOW ABOUT MEN, and she tells it all in this explicit and informative guide to understanding and coping with the opposite sex. FEATURING: * New explanations of male development and behavior * Guidelines for creating a better home life and family * Strategies on dealing with men at work -- and with sexual harrassment * Answers to the age-old question: why don't men call when they promise they will? * Numerous hints for making sex more exciting and fulfilling and much, more more. Here is the book that will help women and men increase communication, improve relationships, and achieve lasting love and happiness.

From Hadley Freeman, bestselling author of House of Glass , comes a “riveting” ( The New York Times ) memoir about her experience as an anorexic and her journey to recovery. In 1995, Hadley Freeman wrote in her diary: “I just spent three years of my life in mental hospitals. So why am I crazier than I was before????” From the ages of fourteen to seventeen, Freeman lived in psychiatric wards after developing anorexia nervosa. Her doctors informed her that her body was cannibalizing her muscles and heart for nutrition, but they could tell her little else: why she had it, what it felt like, what recovery looked like. For the next twenty years, Freeman lived as a “functioning anorexic,” grappling with new forms of self-destructive behavior as the anorexia mutated and persisted. Anorexia is one of the most widely discussed but least understood mental illnesses. Through “sharp storytelling, solid research and gentle humor” ( The Wall Street Journal ), Freeman delivers an incisive and bracing work that details her experiences with anorexia—the shame, fear, loneliness, and rage—and how she overcame it. She interviews doctors to learn how treatment for the illness has changed since she was hospitalized and what new discoveries have been made about the illness, including its connection to autism, OCD, and metabolic rate. She learns why the illness always begins during adolescence and how this reveals the difficulties for girls to come of age. Freeman tracks down the women with whom she was hospitalized and reports on how their recovery has progressed over decades. Good Girls is an honest and hopeful story of resilience that offers a message to the nearly 30 million Americans who suffer from eating disorders: Life can be enjoyed, rather than merely endured.

"This book will challenge you to rethink your vision of a good life. With sharp insights and lucid prose, Paul Bloom makes a captivating case that pain and suffering are essential to happiness. It's an exhilarating antidote to toxic positivity." --Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Think Again and host of the TED podcast WorkLife One of Behavioral Scientist's "Notable Books of 2021" From the author of Against Empathy, a different kind of happiness book, one that shows us how suffering is an essential source of both pleasure and meaning in our lives Why do we so often seek out physical pain and emotional turmoil? We go to movies that make us cry, or scream, or gag. We poke at sores, eat spicy foods, immerse ourselves in hot baths, run marathons. Some of us even seek out pain and humiliation in sexual role-play. Where do these seemingly perverse appetites come from? Drawing on groundbreaking findings from psychology and brain science, The Sweet Spot shows how the right kind of suffering sets the stage for enhanced pleasure. Pain can distract us from our anxieties and help us transcend the self. Choosing to suffer can serve social goals; it can display how tough we are or, conversely, can function as a cry for help. Feelings of fear and sadness are part of the pleasure of immersing ourselves in play and fantasy and can provide certain moral satisfactions. And effort, struggle, and difficulty can, in the right contexts, lead to the joys of mastery and flow. But suffering plays a deeper role as well. We are not natural hedonists--a good life involves more than pleasure. People seek lives of meaning and significance; we aspire to rich relationships and satisfying pursuits, and this requires some amount of struggle, anxiety, and loss. Brilliantly argued, witty, and humane, Paul Bloom shows how a life without chosen suffering would be empty--and worse than that, boring.

A Real Housewife of New York City reveals the Jewish mother's secrets to life, love and happiness. The Jewish Mother knows what she wants-and what you should want too. Here, readers will learn how to make her methods their own, and give and get love and happiness in great amounts. Jill Zarin, the breakout star of Bravo's hit series The Real Housewives of New York , teams up with her sister, Lisa Wexler, award-winning host of the daily radio program The Lisa Wexler Show , and her mother, the estimable Gloria Kamen, who made a splash on Jill's series last year. With real-life stories from the mother/daughter trio illustrating their wise and witty tips on dating, marriage, money, and more, Secrets of a Jewish Mother is all the advice readers didn't know they needed but will never forget.

I believe this book you hold in your hands can help you do two things. First, it can help you recall that ancient conversation we have all had with our Creator, enabling you to recall your life's mission and the gifts you've been given to complete it. And second, it can help you rearrange your gifts for the part of that mission you'll be working on in the next phase of your life. --- foreword by richard bolles

In her remarkable national bestseller, Necessary Losses, Judith Viorst explored how we are shaped by the various losses we experience throughout our lives. Now, in her wise and perceptive new book, Imperfect Control, she shows us how our sense of self and all our important relationships are colored by our struggles over control: over wanting it and taking it, loving it and fearing it, and figuring out when the time has come to surrender it. Writing with compassion, acute psychological insight, and a touch of her trademark humor, Viorst invites us to contemplate the limits and possibilities of our control. She shows us how our lives can be shaped by our actions and our choices. She reminds us, too, that we sometimes should choose to let go. And she encourages us to find our own best balance between power and surrender.

An invaluable guidebook, which contends that the most vexing problems facing women today isn't that doors of opportunity aren't open but that not enough women are walking through them Feminist icon Gloria Feldt pulls no punches in this new book, which argues that the most confounding problem facing women today isn't that doors of opportunity aren't open, but that not enough women are walking through them. From the boardroom to the bedroom, public office to personal relationships, she asserts that nobody is keeping women from parity-except themselves. Feldt puts women's power into an historical context, showing the ways in which women have made huge leaps forward in the past, only to pull back right when they were at the threshold. Feldt argues that there's no excuse-whether it's the way women are socialized, or pressure to conform, or work/life balance issues-for women today not to own their power. Women are still facing unequal pay, being passed over for promotions, entering public office at a much lesser rate than men, and oftentimes still struggling with traditional power dynamics in their interpersonal relationships. Feldt's solution to all these places where women face inequality is the same: we need to shift the way we think to achieve true parity with our male counterparts. No Excuses is divided into nine chapters that organized around how women can change the way they think, and therefore the way they act. These include: Know Your History and You Can Create the Future of Your Choice; Define the Terms-First; Embrace Controversy; Employ Every Medium; and other helpful ideas for using the tools and resources women already have to create the changes they want to see. No Excuses is a timely and invaluable book to help women equalize gender power in politics, work, and love.

Evaluating the lifestyles, struggles, and dehumanization of children with Autism over the years, University of Chicago professor Bruno Bettelheim provides insight on the life of these children from the perspectives of what can and cannot be seen. Focusing on three case histories, The Empty Fortress provides an introduction to the problems and struggles that an autistic child faces during their early years. One of the most popular books in communicating the theory of psychogenesis, Bruno Bettelheim presents both a scientific and personal analysis of autism.

NAMED ONE OF THE 100 MUST-READ BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY TIME MAGAZINE “A cheerful, mischievous rebuke to all that spiritual sincerity and floaty nonattachment and sugary loving kindness” ( The Wall Street Journal ), this first and only comprehensive examination of the universal, but widely misunderstood, practice of grudge-holding will show you how to use grudges to be your happiest, most optimistic, and most forgiving self. Secretly, we all hold grudges, but most of us probably think we shouldn’t, and many of us deny that we do. To bear a grudge is too negative, right? Shouldn’t we just forgive and move on? Wrong, says prolific crime novelist and self-appointed grudge guru Sophie Hannah, in her groundbreaking and irreverent self-help guide. Yes, it’s essential to think positively if we want to live happy lives, but even more crucial is how we get to the positive. Denying our negative emotions and experiences is likely to lead only to more pain, conflict, and stress. What if our grudges are good for us? What if we could embrace them, and use them to help ourselves and others, instead of feeling ashamed of our inability to banish negative emotions and memories from our lives? With contributions from expert psychotherapists as well as extracts from her own extensive catalog of grudges, Sophie Hannah investigates the psychological origins of grudges and also offers not-so-obvious insights into how we should acknowledge—and embrace—them in order to improve the quality of our interpersonal relationships and senses of self. Grudges do not have to fill us with hate or make us toxic, bitter, and miserable. If we approach the practice of grudge-holding in an enlightened way, it will do the opposite—we will become more forgiving. For fans of Sophie Hannah’s bestselling crime novels who have ever wondered what is going on in her unusual, brilliant mind, How to Hold a Grudge is “a perfect document” ( The New York Times ) that also reveals everything we need to know about the many different forms of grudge, the difference between a grudge and not-a-grudge (not as obvious as it seems), when we should let a grudge go, and how to honor a grudge and distill lessons from it. Hannah’s practical, compassionate, and downright funny guide can turn us into better, happier people.

Contemporary spiritual teacher Sogyal Rinpoche's The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying dealt with how to use the consciousness of our mortality to live a better life. Now the author of the perennial bestseller Who Dies? tells us how to live mindfully each moment, each hour, each day as if it were all that was left.

'Marianne Williamson reveals, with elegant simplicity, that love is not a mere sentiment of emotion, but the ultimate truth at the heart of creation' Deepak Chopra For millians of Westerners, the quest for material gain has led to increasing frustration and unhappiness. Now, says spiritual philosopher Marianne Williamson, our hunger for worldly gain has been transformed, for many of us, into hunger for spiritual renewal. What we deeply long for most is the experience of paradise. In this inspiring new work, Williamson explores different aspects of the power of that vision - the possibility of the highest love made manifest on Earth - in a series of reflective essays accompanied by prayers and meditations. Topics include the power of faith, innocence, being seen, forgiveness, blamelessness, healing, surrender, serenity, beauty and unity. For people seeking to enhance their lives, Williamson's insights lay the groundwork for spiritual evolution and fulfillment. Her practical advice will guide readers towards a place where passion, creativity and freedom - most important, the freedom to express and infinite love - are recognised not only as the soul's most potent desire, but also as the ultimate destiny of the human race.

After being innocently embroiled in a school scandal, teacher Judith Hay decides there is only one thing she can do: leave Britain. The small village of Vevey in Languedoc near Montpellier seems the perfect answer. Life is cheap and the views are pretty. Vevey, however, may well be the French answer to St Mary's Mead, hiding an abundance of vice behind its pretty facades. Soon, she meets her fellow expats and something seems odd. It appears that many escaped Britain for their own, dark, reasons rather than for the sunny climate. Behind their somber faces, even the French seem furtive, and still harbour Nazi secrets. There is one local expat in particular, Gerald, who makes her shudder. If he is really as depraved as she thinks he is, his evil plans hatched with a local Frenchman will need to be stopped

A provocative book that explains why men are so afraid of commitment -- and what women can do about it. Why is it so hard for a man to say "I love you"? Why is it so hard for a man to ask a woman to marry him, even if this is exactly what he wants? Women work hard at relationships but all too often, just when things seem to be going well, men tend to pull away, cheating themselves out of the happiness they really want...and leaving women feeling hurt and confused. It doesn't have to be that way. In Why Men Won't Commit, celebrated psychologist Dr. George Weinberg explains the secret fears that make men run away from relationships and the simple things that women can do to overcome them. Men want lasting relationships just as much as women do, but they fear that commitment means loss -- most of all, the loss of masculinity. Men are far more fearful and insecure than most women imagine, with the same basic needs dictating their behavior: • The need to be special. • The need to travel light -- to minimize obligations and maximize independence. • The need for loyalty. • The need to be close emotionally, whether or not they can ask for it. Once women understand these needs, they can help men see that commitment is a strength, and not a weakness. Why Men Won't Commit will show women how to enter places where her man has not allowed any other woman to go...and stay there in a loving, committed relationship.

A daughter is forever. No matter how old she is, in your heart she'll always be that little girl full of imagination, dreams, and fantastic potential -- the one who captured your heart the day she came into your life... Bestselling poet Susan Polis Schutz and Grammy Award-winning songwriter Donna Fargo, along with many other authors, have contributed to this book some of the most eloquent words any daughter could ever receive. This is a beautiful, lasting way to convey your love for your daughter, your confidence in her, and your promise to always be there for her no matter where life takes her... "My day always becomes wonderful when I see your pretty face smiling so sweetly. There is such warmth and intelligence radiating from you. It seems that every day you grow smarter and more beautiful." - Susan Polis Schutz

The New York Times bestselling author of A Return to Love turns to contemporary thinkers for a wide-ranging collection of essays on topics from relationships to religion, education and the environment.