Summary Brené Brown’s The Power of Vulnerability: Teachings on Authenticity, Connection, and Courage, released by Sounds True in its expanded audio and print edition, distills the research and ideas that made Brown one of the most influential voices in American organizational and personal development culture. By 2018, Brown had already delivered what became the most-watched…
Jes Baker’s Things No One Will Tell Fat Girls: A Handbook for Unapologetic Living is exactly what it says it is: a direct, funny, and sometimes infuriating guide to inhabiting a fat body in a culture that has dedicated enormous institutional energy to making fat people feel their bodies are problems to be solved. Baker,…
Bearing the Unbearable by Joanne Cacciatore is a compassionate and profoundly wise guide to grief that honors the full weight of loss while offering genuine support to those who are suffering. About the Book Joanne Cacciatore is a grief counselor, researcher, and bereaved mother whose work has centered on traumatic loss for more than two…
Roy Bainton’s March 1917: On the Brink of Revolution and War, published by Amberley Publishing in 2019, takes as its subject one of the most consequential months in modern history and examines it with the granular attention that its significance demands. In March 1917, the Russian Empire collapsed with a speed that astonished even those…
Summary David Treleaven’s Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness: Practices for Safe and Transformative Healing, published in 2018 by W. W. Norton and Company, addresses a problem that had been quietly accumulating in mindfulness communities for years: the standard instruction to turn attention inward, to stay with difficult sensations, and to observe the mind without judgment can be actively…
Matthew La Plante’s Superlative: The Biology of Extremes, published by BenBella Books in 2019, takes a deceptively simple organizing principle and wrings from it a remarkably rich inquiry into how life works. The book examines biological extremes: the world’s oldest, fastest, largest, smallest, loudest, and most resilient organisms. But La Plante is not writing a…
Stuart Neville is one of the finest crime writers working in contemporary literary fiction, and Those We Left Behind is among his best work — a novel that uses the conventions of the police procedural to explore questions of guilt, loyalty, and the malformation of love with unusual psychological depth. Set in Belfast, it follows…
Linda Sue Park’s Prairie Lotus, published by Clarion Books in 2019, is a historical novel for middle-grade readers that does something genuinely difficult: it tells a story of systematic exclusion from inside the perspective of a child who experiences it not as history but as daily life. Set in the Dakota Territory in the 1880s,…
Real Tigers by Mick Herron is a compelling and brilliantly crafted espionage thriller that delivers biting satirical wit alongside genuine suspense in the third installment of the acclaimed Slough House series. About the Book Mick Herron’s Slough House series follows the “slow horses”—MI5 agents who have been sidelined for various failures and incompetencies, relegated to…
Summary Tarisai has grown up in a sprawling estate called the Bhekina House, raised by a woman known only as The Lady, isolated from other children, and trained to please. She is part Raybearer, part something else entirely, and she carries a power she does not fully understand: anyone she touches with her Ray can…
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