The electrifying true story of a young couple shipwrecked at sea: a mind-blowing tale of obsession, survival, and partnership stretched to its limits. Maurice and Maralyn make an odd couple. He’s a loner, awkward and obsessive; she’s charismatic and ambitious. But they share a horror of wasting their lives. And they dream—as we all dream—of running away from it all. What if they quit their jobs, sold their house, bought a boat, and sailed away? Most of us begin and end with the daydream. But Maurice began to study nautical navigation. Maralyn made detailed lists of provisions. And in June 1972, they set sail. For nearly a year all went well, until deep in the Pacific, a breaching whale knocked a hole in their boat and it sank beneath the waves. What ensues is a jaw-dropping fight to survive in the wild ocean, with little hope of rescue. Alone together for months in a tiny rubber raft, starving and exhausted, Maurice and Maralyn have to find not only ways to stay alive but ways to get along, as their inner demons emerge and their marriage is put to the greatest of tests.
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The Next Conversation
The Next Conversation gives you immediately actionable strategies and phrases that will forever change how you communicate. Jefferson Fisher, trial lawyer and one of the leading voices on real-world communication, offers a tried-and-true framework that will show you how to transform your life and your relationships through practical phrases that will lead to powerful results.
Fake Work: How I Began to Suspect Capitalism is a Joke
In this genre-bending memoir, Leigh Claire La Berge reflects on her stint at one of the most prestigious management consulting firms in the country and what it teaches us about the absurdity of work—for readers of Bullshit Jobs and fans of Office Space and Sorry to Bother You.
The year is 1999, and the world is about to end. The only thing standing between corporate America and certain annihilation is a freshly employed twenty-two-year-old and her three-ring binders.
While headlines blazed with doomsaying prophecies about the looming Y2K apocalypse, our protagonist Leigh Claire was quickly introduced to the mysterious workings of The Process—a mythical and ever-changing corporate ethos The Anderson People (her fellow consultants) believe holds world saving powers. Her heroic task: printing physical copies of spreadsheets and sending them to a secure storage facility somewhere in the bowels of New Jersey. After a series of equally mundane tasks, and one well timed deployment of an anecdote about a legendary quarterback, she soon found herself jet-setting on the firm’s dime to thirty-minute lunch meetings in Johannesburg, giving impromptu lectures to Japanese executives about limiting liability at the end of the world, and leaping from burning vehicles on Mexico City’s busiest highway.
As present-day Leigh Claire reflects on the inanity of her former employment, we’re introduced to a carousel of characters plucked from a Mike Judge screenplay, and are treated to post-facto theoretical interjections about the nature of financialized capitalism that recall David Graeber at his best.
Scout Camp: Sex, Death, and Secret Societies Inside the Boy Scouts of America
In this timely, brave, and deeply personal true crime memoir, acclaimed journalist, author, creator of the True Crime This Week podcast, and former Boy Scout, James Renner, explores the dark side of an American institution, its pervasive culture of sexual abuse, and the traumatic—even deadly—repercussions of its long-buried secrets… In the summer of 1995, at the largest Boy Scout camp in Ohio, a night of sexual violence ended with one counselor dead and another hospitalized. The death was ruled “accidental.” It wouldn’t be the last death associated with Seven Ranges Reservation. James Renner, too, was a counselor at Seven Ranges that year. He was always sure there must be more to the story of Mike Klingler’s death, because Renner also knew firsthand that the 900-acre camp was not the safe getaway it was portrayed to be. On Friday nights the boys were ushered into the woods for a frightening ceremony in which they learned the rules for becoming good young men—and, above all, that keeping secrets was a scout’s duty. No matter how dark the secrets were. Determined to face his demons, Renner embarks on a journey back to that tumultuous summer and exposes a clandestine society that left indelible scars on the scouts and the staff who were there. For Renner himself, it meant opening up about his twisted upbringing, his issues with trust and sexuality, and a lifetime of self-medication. The result is a deeply personal, no-holds-barred, and vitally important true crime memoir.
Destroy This House
The Long family’s love was fierce, their lifestyle bizarre, and their deceptions countless. Once her parents were gone, Amanda Uhle realized she was closer to them than anyone else, yet she found herself utterly confounded by the lives they had led. Amanda’s striving fashion designer mother and her charismatic wheeler-dealer father wove a complex life together that spanned ten different homes across five states over forty perplexing years. Throughout her childhood, as her mother’s hoarding disorder flourished and her father’s schemes crumbled, contradictions abounded. They bartered for dental surgery and drove their massive Lincoln Town Car to the food bank. When financial ruin struck, they abandoned their repossessed mansion for humble parish housing, and Amanda’s father became a preacher. They swung between being filthy rich and dirt poor, devious and virtuous, lonely and loved, fake and real. In Destroy This House, Amanda sets out to document her parents’ unbelievable exploits and her own hard-won escape into independence. With humor and tenderness, Uhle has crafted a heartfelt and utterly unique memoir, capturing the raucousness, pain, joy, and ultimately, the boundless love that exists between all parents and children.
DYNAMIC DRIVE
In a world fixated on fleeting success, Molly Fletcher, renowned keynote speaker, podcast host, and entrepreneur, invites you to challenge the status quo and redefine your understanding of drive so that you can achieve greater fulfillment and purpose-driven success. Dynamic Drive offers her proven formula for engaging, sustaining, and maximizing high performance in all areas of your life. This isn’t just another self-help theory: Dynamic Drive is your practical guide to sculpting resilience and unlocking your true potential. Dive into the seven keys presented within these pages, each unlocking a new dimension of your potential, empowering you to forge a stronger mindset, harness more energy, embrace greater discipline, expand your curiosity, fortify resilience, foster increased connection, and exude greater confidence.
HOW TO WINTER
A blend of mindset science, original research, and cultural insights for cultivating a positive “wintertime mindset,” to vanquish winter blues and find joy and comfort in dark times year-round.
Do you dread the end of Daylight Saving Time and grouch about the long, chilly season of gray skies and ice? Do you find yourself in a slump every January and February? What if there were a way to rethink this time of year? Psychologist and winter expert Kari Leibowitz’s galvanizing How to Winter uses mindset science to help readers embrace winter as a season to be enjoyed, not endured—and in turn, learn powerful lessons that can impact our mental wellbeing throughout the year.
Kari Leibowitz moved above the Arctic Circle—where the sun doesn’t rise for two months each winter—expecting to research the season’s negative effects on mental health, only to find that inhabitants actually looked forward to it with delight and enthusiasm. Leibowitz has since travelled to places on earth with some of the coldest, darkest, longest and most intense winters, and discovered the power of “wintertime mindset”—viewing the season as full of opportunity and wonder. Impactful strategies for cultivating this wintertime mindset can teach us not just about braving the gray, cold months of the year, but also the darker and more difficult seasons of life.
In Tromsø, Norway, people live in rhythm with nature, adapting to the months-long Polar Night by honoring seasonal fluctuations in energy, slowing down, and resting more.
On the Isle of Lewis, off the coast of Scotland, communal gatherings around roaring fires embrace darkness and provide connection during long nights.
In Yamagata, Japan, families sink into steaming onsen baths, banishing the chill of winter with healthful soaks that improve sleep and reduce risk of heart attack.
Inspired by cutting-edge psychological and behavioral science research as well as cultures worldwide that find warmth and joy in winter’s extremes, How to Winter provides readers with concrete tools for making winter wonderful wherever they live and harnessing the power of small mindset changes with big impact to help readers embrace every season of life.
I’M SORRY FOR MY LOSS
More than a million people lose a pregnancy each year, whether through miscarriage, stillbirth, or termination for medical reasons. For most, the experience often casts a shadow of isolation, shame, and blame. Rebecca Little and Colleen Long, childhood friends who grew up to be journalists, both experienced late-term loss, and together they take an incisive, deeply reported look at the issue, working to shatter taboos that have made so many pregnant people feel ashamed and alone. They trace the experience of pregnancy loss and reproductive care from America’s founding to the present day, exposing the deep impact made by a dangerous tangle of laws, politics, medicine, racism, and misogyny.
THE ELEMENTS OF MARIE CURIE
The acclaimed Pulitzer Prize finalist and #1 New York Times bestselling author of Galileo’s Daughter crafts a luminous chronicle of the life and work of the most famous woman in the history of science, and the untold story of the many young women trained in her laboratory who were launched into stellar scientific careers of their own.
THE HARDER I FIGHT, THE MORE I LOVE YOU
In this evocative and deeply inquisitive literary memoir, singer-songwriter Neko Case paints a vivid portrait of an extraordinary life, one forged through a strained, poverty-stricken childhood in “slummy, one-horse towns”; obsessive desire; violence; bursts of comedy; and indispensable friendships—all of which carried her on a singular journey in becoming a beloved, Grammy-nominated artist.
“When music and art are not too exclusive or made on an oppressive industrial scale, they mend the world and light the fires that burn off the toxins in our souls. We want to love you in this way, and we want to pass this feeling on, and we want you to pass it on, too.”
Neko Case has long been revered as one of music’s most influential artists, whose authenticity, lyrical storytelling, and sly wit have endeared her to a legion of critics, musicians, and lifelong fans. In The Harder I Fight, the More I Love You, Case brings her trademark candor and precision to a memoir that traces her evolution from an invisible girl “raised by two dogs and a space heater” in poor, rural Washington state to her improbable emergence as an internationally-acclaimed artist.
In luminous, sharp-edged prose, Case shows readers what it’s like to be left alone for hours and hours as a child, to take refuge in the woods around her home, to channel that monotony and loneliness and joy that comes from music, camaraderie, and shared experience.
The Harder I Fight, the More I Love You is a rebellious meditation on identity and corruption, and a manifesto on how to make space for ourselves in this world, despite the obstacles we face: “I hope my words will cast a different spell of love and unreality, break down barriers… and invite everyone inside.”