Discover the Celtic Circle of Belonging John O'Donohue, poet, philosopher, and scholar, guides you through the spiritual landscape of the Irish imagination. In Anam Cara, Gaelic for "soul friend," the ancient teachings, stories, and blessings of Celtic wisdom provide such profound insights on the universal themes of friendship, solitude, love, and death as: Light is generous The human heart is never completely born Love as ancient recognition The body is the angel of the soul Solitude is luminous Beauty likes neglected places The passionate heart never ages To benatural is to be holy Silence is the sister of the divine Death as an invitation to freedom

The acclaimed author of the groundbreaking bestseller Schoolgirls reveals the dark side of pink and pretty: the rise of the girlie-girl, she warns, is not that innocent. Pink and pretty or predatory and hardened, sexualized girlhood influences our daughters from infancy onward, telling them that how a girl looks matters more than who she is. Somewhere between the exhilarating rise of Girl Power in the 1990s and today, the pursuit of physical perfection has been recast as a source the source of female empowerment. And commercialization has spread the message faster and farther, reaching girls at ever-younger ages.But, realistically, how many times can you say no when your daughter begs for a pint-size wedding gown or the latest Hannah Montana CDAnd how dangerous is pink and pretty anyway especially given girls' successes in the classroom and on the playing fieldBeing a princess is just make-believe, after all; eventually they grow out of it. Or do theyDoes playing Cinderella shield girls from early sexualization or prime them for itCould today's little princess become tomorrow's sexting teenAnd what if she doesWould that make her in charge of her sexuality or an unwitting captive to it?Those questions hit home with Peggy Orenstein, so she went sleuthing. She visited Disneyland and the international toy fair, trolled American Girl Place and Pottery Barn Kids, and met beauty pageant parents with preschoolers tricked out like Vegas showgirls. She dissected the science, created an online avatar, and parsed the original fairy tales. The stakes turn out to be higher than she or we ever imagined: nothing less than the health, development, and futures of our girls. From premature sexualization to the risk of depression to rising rates of narcissism, the potential negative impact of this new girlie-girl culture is undeniable yet armed with awareness and recognition, parents can effectively counterbalance its influence in their daughters' lives.Cinderella Ate My Daughter is a must-read for anyone who cares about girls, and for parents helping their daughters navigate the rocky road to adulthood.

In this sweeping history of vodka scion Pyotr Smirnov and his family, distinguished journalist Linda Himelstein plumbs a great riddle of Russian history through the story of a humble serf who rose to create one of the most celebrated business empires the world has ever known. At the center of this vivid narrative, Pyotr Smirnov comes to life as a hero of wonderful complexity a man of intense ambition and uncanny business sense, a patriarch of a family that would help define Russian society and suffer from the Revolution's aftermath, and a loyalist to a nation that would one day honor him as a treasure of the state.Born in a small village in 1831, Smirnov relied on vodka a commodity that in many ways defines Russia to turn a life of scarcity and anonymity into one of immense wealth and international recognition. Starting from the backrooms and side streets of 19th century Moscow, Smirnov exploited a golden age of emancipation and brilliant grassroots marketing strategies to popularize his products and ensconce his brand within the thirsts and imaginations of drinkers around the world. His vodka would be gulped in the taverns of Russia and Europe, praised with accolades at World Fairs, and become a staple on the tables of Tsars. His improbable ascent set against a sobriety crusade supported by Chekhov and Tolstoy, mounting political uprisings and labor strikes, the eventual monopolization of the vodka trade by the state would crumble amidst the chaos of the Bolshevik revolution. Only a set of bizarre coincidences including an incredible prison escape by one of Smirnov's sons in 1919 would prevent Smirnov's legacy from fading into oblivion.Set against a backdrop of political and ideological currents that would determine the course of global history from the fall of the Tsars to the rise of Communism, from vodka's popularization by none other than James Bond to Smirnoff's emergence as a multi-billion dollar brand Smirnov's story of triumph and tragedy is a captivating historical touchstone. The King of Vodka is much more than a biography of an extraordinary man. It is a work of narrative history on an epic scale.

In 1997, amid Aerosmith's sold-out world tour and number one album release, word about Joey's troubles was reported in the press.Despite the advice he had received to play it down, Joey revealed in an interview his ongoing struggles with depression. The response from fans and people battling those same internal demons was overwhelming. Joey who has been the drummer in Aerosmith since it was founded in 1970 and is the first member of the band to release his own book now tells the complete story: the early days of the band, glamorous drug-addled events leading up to their eventual sobriety, battles within his family and among bandmates, and the explosive internal dynamics in Aerosmith that continue to unleash a fury of endless creativity. This is not just another rock 'n' roll memoir. In addition to the never-before-told Aerosmith war stories that abound in the book, Hit Hard unpacks the history of a rock star who was both fragile and tough, who after years of insane wildness became willing to accept help and finally kick a serious alcohol and drug addiction, only to find that the real terrors and hard work were still ahead. It's the story of an average kid from an average American suburb who went through physical and emotional trauma. It's about years of depression and the nervous breakdown at the height of the band's comeback success. Ultimately, Hit Hard is about how Joey recognized his confusion between love and abuse, awakening to the kind of self-acceptance and compassion that make relationships possible in the "real world" as a member of the biggest band in American history.

Alex Rodriguez is the highest-paid player in the history of baseball, a once-in-a-generation talent poised to break many of the sport's most hallowed records. In 2007 he became the youngest player, at 32, ever to hit 500 home runs, solidifying his status as the greatest player in the modern game, and months later he signed a contract that would keep him with the Yankees through the end of his career. His reputation changed drastically in February 2009 when Selena Roberts broke the news in Sports Illustrated that A-Rod had used performance-enhancing drugs during his 2003 MVP season with the Texas Rangers. Her report prompted a contrite Rodriguez to admit illegal drug use during his 2001–2003 seasons with the Rangers, who had signed him to the most expensive contract in Major League Baseball history. Although he admitted to three seasons of steroid use, the man teammates call "A-Fraud" was still hiding the truth. In the first definitive biography of Alex Rodriguez, Roberts assembles the strands of a bizarre and extraordinary life: from his boyhood in New York and the Dominican Republic through his near-mythic high school career and fast track to the big leagues, the whole of A-Rod's career mirrors the rise and fall of the steroid generation. Roberts goes beyond the sensational headlines, probing A-Rod's childhood to reveal a man torn by obligation to his family and the pull of his insatiable hedonism, a conflict--epitomized by his relationship with Madonna and devotion to Kabbalah--that led to the end of his six-year marriage. Roberts sheds new light on A-Rod's abuse of performance-enhancing drugs, a practice he appears to have begun as early as high school and that extended into his Yankee years. She chronicles his secretive real estate deals, gets inside the negotiations for his latest record-breaking contract with the Yankees, and examines the insecurities that compel him to seek support from a motivational guru before every game. In A-Rod, Roberts captures baseball's greatest player as a tragic figure in pinstripes: the man once considered the clean exception of the steroid generation revealed as an unmistakable product of its greed and dissolution.

With its unique combination of depth, clarity, and humor that has enchanted millions, this beloved classic by bestselling author Gary Zukav opens the fascinating world of quantum physics to readers with no mathematical or technical background. "Wu Li" is the Chinese phrase for physics. It means "patterns of organic energy," but it also means "nonsense," "my way," "I clutch my ideas," and "enlightenment." These captivating ideas frame Zukav's evocative exploration of quantum mechanics and relativity theory. Delightfully easy to read, The Dancing Wu Li Masters illuminates the compelling powers at the core of all we know.

In 1975, a new group of Peace Corps volunteers landed on the island nation of Tonga. Among them was Deborah Gardner -- a beautiful twenty-three-year-old who, in the following year, would be stabbed twenty-two times and left for dead inside her hut.Another volunteer turned himself in to the Tongan police, and many of the other Americans were sure he had committed the crime. But with the aid of the State Department, he returned home a free man. Although the story was kept quiet in the United States, Deb Gardner's death and the outlandish aftermath took on legendary proportions in Tonga.Now journalist Philip Weiss "shines daylight on the facts of this ugly case with the fervor of an avenging angel" (Chicago Tribune), exposing a gripping tale of love, violence, and clashing ideals. With bravura reporting and vivid, novelistic prose, Weiss transforms a Polynesian legend into a singular artifact of American history and a profoundly moving human story.

The Apple Trees at Olema includes work from Robert Hass's first five books Field Guide, Praise, Human Wishes, Sun Under Wood, and Time and Materials as well as a substantial gathering of new poems, including a suite of elegies, a series of poems in the form of notebook musings on the nature of storytelling, a suite of summer lyrics, and two experiments in pure narrative that meditate on personal relations in a violent world and read like small, luminous novellas. From the beginning, his poems have seemed entirely his own: a complex hybrid of the lyric line, with an unwavering fidelity to human and nonhuman nature, and formal variety and surprise, and a syntax capable of thinking through difficult things in ways that are both perfectly ordinary and really unusual. Over the years, he has added to these qualities a range and a formal restlessness that seem to come from a skeptical turn of mind, an acute sense of the artifice of the poem and of the complexity of the world of lived experience that a poem tries to apprehend.Hass's work is grounded in the beauty of the physical world. His familiar landscapes San Francisco, the northern California coast, the Sierra high country are vividly alive in his work. His themes include art, the natural world, desire, family life, the life between lovers, the violence of history, and the power and inherent limitations of language. He is a poet who is trying to say, as fully as he can, what it is like to be alive in his place and time. His style formed in part by American modernism, in part by his long apprenticeship as a translator of the Japanese haiku masters and Czeslaw Milosz combines intimacy of address, a quick intelligence, a virtuosic skill with long sentences, intense sensual vividness, and a light touch. It has made him immensely readable and his work widely admired.

Ken Carey is one of the greatest living teachers Read him, and you'll have hope.'MARIANNE WILLIAMSONExploring the transformative impact of Native American spirituality on contemporary events, this is the third book in Ken Carey's be

the QueenElizabeth II was not born to be queen. She came into the world on April 21, 1926, the equivalent of the modern Princess Beatrice, first-born daughter of the Duke of York, destined to flutter on the royal fringe. So while Lilibet was brought up with almost religious respect for the crown, there seemed no chance of her inheriting it. Her head was never turned by the personal prospect of grandeur which is why she would prove so very good at her job. Elizabeth II's lack of ego was to prove the paradoxical secret of her greatness. For more than thirty years, acclaimed author and royal biographer Robert Lacey has been gathering material from members of the Queen's inner circle her friends, relatives, private secretaries, and prime ministers. Now, in The Queen, Lacey offers a life of the celebrated monarch, told in six succinct chapters, accentuated by elegant color and black-and-white photographs that capture the distinctive flavor of passing eras and reveal how Elizabeth II adapted or, on occasions, regally declined to adapt to changing times.

In the tradition of Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods and A. J. Jacobs's The Know-It-All, Craig J. Heimbuch takes a wry look at some of our most deeply cherished cultural beliefsCraig J. Heimbuch had never even thought of owning a gun when, in his early thirties, he was given a twelve-gauge Winchester over-under shotgun by his father. The black sheep, so to speak, of his Midwestern family, Craig was possibly the only male Heimbuch never to have taken an animal. But now that he had a shotgun, he figured he might as well try it out, and in so doing, explore the meaning of manhood while getting closer to his hunting-enthusiast dad.And Now We Shall Do Manly Things is the witty, moving, and insightful story of one man's quest to free himself from the shackles of his domesticated suburban lifestyle by immersing himself for one year in the hunting culture his family has always cherished. Along the way Heimbuch learns what putting food on the table once entailed and what it means to be a man in America and discovers that it's possible to be a committed father, a loving spouse, and a hunter without being mistaken for a gun-toting lunatic.

The team that refused to give up their manager in his final season A comeback that changed baseball After thirty-three seasons managing in Major League Baseball, Tony La Russa thought he had seen it all that is, until the 2011 Cardinals. Down ten and a half games with little more than a month to play, the Cardinals had long been ruled out as serious postseason contenders. Yet in the face of those steep odds, this team mounted one of the most dramatic and impressive comebacks in baseball history, making the playoffs on the night of the final game of the season and going on to win the World Series despite being down to their last strike twice.Now La Russa gives the inside story behind this astonishing comeback and his remarkable career, explaining how a team with so much against it was able to succeed on baseball's biggest stage. Opening up about the devastating injuries, the bullpen struggles, the crucial games, and the players who made it all possible, he reveals how the team's character shaped its accomplishments, demonstrating how this group came together in good times and in bad to become that rarest of things: a team that actually enjoyed it when the odds were against them. But this story is much more than that of a single season. As La Russa, the third-winningest manager in baseball history, explains, their season was the culmination of a lifetime spent studying the game. Laying bare his often scrutinized and frequently misunderstood approach to managing, he explains his counterintuitive belief in process over result, present moments over statistics, and team unity over individual talent. Along the way he shares the stories from throughout his career that shaped his outlook from his first days managing the Chicago White Sox to his championship years with the Oakland A's, to his triumphant tenure as St. Louis's longest-serving manager. Setting the record straight on his famously intense style, he explores the vital yet overlooked role that his personal relationships with his players have contributed to his victories, ultimately showing how, in a sport often governed by cold, hard numbers, the secret to his success has been surprisingly human. Speaking candidly about his decision to retire, La Russa discusses the changes that he'd observed both in the game and in himself that told him, despite his success, it was time to hang up his spikes. The end result is a passionate, insightful, and remarkable look at our national pastime that takes you behind the scenes of the comeback that no one thought possible and inside the mind of one of the game's greatest managers.

Are you the type of person who stays up nights wondering how they get the paper tag into Hershey's KissesOr why portholes are roundEven if you don't lose sleep over such matters, you have to admit that such questions are, well, worthy of consideration. Here, from David Feldman, creator of the Imponderables series, are the latest questions on the minds of his devoted readers and fans. No question from his readers is too small or obscure for Feldman to tackle. From the return of red Ms (they are back, if you've missed it) to new-car smell, the answers to life's little mysteries are dissected in these pages. Although it's all done in great fun, there is also an educational edge to the answers, as Feldman ferrets out top experts in diverse fields to come up with his entertaining answers. And their answers may surprise you from the detailed physics involved in why cans of Diet Coke float but regular Coke doesn't, all the way to why they put crinkly paper into pairs of men's socks (but only one sock, not both).Complete with drawings by longtime Imponderables illustrator Kassie Schwan, and a special section updating answers to questions in previous books in the series, this eleventh book of Imponderables is sure to entertain the thousands of Feldman fans who have purchased over 2 million copies to date. Prepare to be delighted!

Journalist and poker fanatic Andy Bellin takes readers on a raucous journey into the shut-up-and-deal world of professional poker. From basement games to the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas, you'll look over his shoulder as he learns to count cards, read a legendary player's body language, hang in there when the chips are down, and take his beatings like a man. Even if you don't know the difference between a flop and a river card, Bellin keeps you in the game with his portraits of the colorful players, dreamers, hustlers, and eccentrics who populate this strange subculture. Along with learning what goes on behind the scenes in illegal poker clubs, you'll get great advice on how to play Texas Hold'em, today's game of choice for big-money players.

Dean Silverthorne's mother may be dead, but she still has matchmaking to do.When an injury dashes NFL Quarterback Dean Silverthorne's Super Bowl dreams, he heads back to Deer Lick, Montana with a chip on his wounded shoulder, more determined than ever to get back in the game. He loves his kooky family, but this trip home is going to be a very brief Christmas visit. His game plan doesn't include an instant attraction to Emma Hart, a feisty kindergarten teacher who seems to be the only person in Deer Lick not interested in the hometown hero. Or his dearly departed mom popping up with mistletoe in hand and meddling on the mind. Now Dean can't help but wonder if there's more to love than life between the goal posts.

This book is the follow-up to its immediate predecessor, The Quality School. Based on the work of W. Edwards Deming and on Dr. Glasser's own choice theory, it is written for teachers who are trying to abandon the old system of boss-managing, which is effective for less than half of all students. William Glasser, M.D., explains that only through lead-management can teachers create classrooms in which all students not only do competent work but begin to do quality work. These classrooms are the core of a quality school. The book begins by explaining that to persuade students to do quality schoolwork, teachers must first establish warm, totally noncoercive relationships with their students; teach only useful material, which means stressing skills rather than asking students to memorize information; and move from teacher evaluation to student self-evaluation. There are no generalities in this book: It provides the specifics that classroom teachers seek as they begin the move to quality schools.

The explosive bestseller that revolutionized our understanding of the addictive process. With a new introduction addressing the backlash to the co-dependency movement.

Ready, Set, Grow!Young girls before the onset of puberty have a curiosity abouttheir soon-to-be changing bodiesthat needs addressing in a simplerway than for their older sisters. In Madaras's proven, trust-worthy,friendly voice and style, this entirelynew book now brings them thesame kind of thoughtful, down-toearthinformation but at a readingand comprehension level that's just right for them.Responding throughout to reallifequestions and observationsfrom younger girls, Madarasexplores the changes that arehappening, or about to happen, tothem, including: the developmentof breasts, body hair, and bodyfat; the changes in their reproductiveorgans, both inside and out;their first period and all the complexfeelings surrounding it; theunwelcome appearance of acneand new body odors; and, perhapsmost important, how to respectand celebrate their unique bodies,even when the outside world isnot always so accepting.Lively cartoon drawings throughoutmake the book not only helpful,but fun to read, too.

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) was a genius so universal that his popularity, extraordinary even during his lifetime, has never ceased to grow. It now encircles the globe: Beethoven's most famous works are as beloved in Beijing as they are in Boston.Edmund Morris, the author of three bestselling presidential biographies and a lifelong devotee of Beethoven, brings the great composer to life as a man of astonishing complexity and overpowering intelligence. A gigantic, compulsively creative personality unable to tolerate constraints, he was not so much a social rebel as an astute manipulator of the most powerful and privileged aristocrats in Germany and Austria, at a time when their world was threatened by the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte.But Beethoven's achievement rests in his immortal music. Struggling against progressive, incurable deafness (which he desperately tried to keep secret), he nonetheless produced towering masterpieces, such as his iconic Fifth and Ninth symphonies. With sensitivity and insight, Edmund Morris illuminates Beethoven's life, including his interactions with the women he privately lusted for but held at bay, and his work, whose grandeur and beauty were conceived "on the other side of silence."

Dishwasher is the true story of a man on a mission: to clean dirty dishes professionally in every state in America. Part adventure, part parody, and part miraculous journey of self-discovery, it is the unforgettable account of Pete Jordan's transformation from itinerant seeker into "Dishwasher Pete" unlikely folk hero, writer, publisher of his own cult zine, and the ultimate professional dish dog and how he gave it all up for love.Includes an excerpt from Pete Jordan's new book In the City of Bikes.

A memoir of a father obsessed with control and the daughter who fights his suffocating grasp, House Rules explores the complexities of their compelling and destructive relationship as Rachel fights to escape, and, later, to make sense of what remains of her family.