Academic Life

For more than 30 years, Patience Gray, author of the celebrated cookbook Honey from a Weed, lived in a remote area of Puglia in southernmost Italy. She lived without electricity, modern plumbing, or a telephone, grew much of her own food, and gathered and ate wild plants alongside her neighbors in this economically impoverished region. She was fond of saying that she wrote only for herself and her friends, yet her growing reputation brought a steady stream of international visitors to her door.

How did a boy from small-town New York become the world’s most successful writer? How does he do it? He has always wanted to write the kind of novel that would be read and reread so many times that the binding breaks and the book literally falls apart. As he says, “I’m still working on that one.”

“How do I become more confident?” is the question Lydia Fenet hears almost every time she speaks to women across the country. Navigating a two-decade career at the world’s leading auction house while raising three children, Lydia had her own journey of learning self-assurance. Through stories of overcoming challenges in both her work and personal lives, she demonstrates that confidence isn’t something that only some people are born with; rather, it’s inside every one of us, waiting to be claimed.

Laurie Zaleski never aspired to run an animal rescue; that was her mother Annie’s dream. But from girlhood, Laurie was determined to make the dream come true. Thirty years later as a successful businesswoman, she did it, buying a 15-acre farm deep in the Pinelands of South Jersey. She was planning to relocate Annie and her caravan of ragtag rescues - horses and goats, dogs and cats, chickens and pigs - when Annie died, just two weeks before moving day. In her heartbreak, Laurie resolved to make her mother’s dream her own.

This book includes a timeline of John Muir's life, providing historical context for his spiritual views and writings.

Conversations with RBG is a remarkable and unique audiobook, an informal portrait of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, drawing on a series of her conversations with Jeffrey Rosen, starting in the 1990s and continuing through the Trump era. Rosen, a veteran legal journalist, scholar, and president of the National Constitution Center, shares with us the justice’s observations on a variety of topics, and her intellect, compassion, sense of humor, and humanity shine through.

The first volume of the Cosmic Trigger series describes in vivid elucidation the perils of a spiritual journey. Volume two of the series presents the author’s “bridge”—how Bob grew into his expanded perspective of the Multiverse. In this third and final volume, Bob digs even deeper and uncovers the masks of reality and the reality of masks. Warning: This book may reveal more about what is "real" in reality than you might find comfortable!

As one of the world's leading brain surgeons, Dr Jandial is the last hope for many patients who have extreme forms of cancer - patients who can't be saved, but deserve more time. Life on a Knife's Edge is his account of the resilience, courage and belief he has witnessed in his patients, and the lessons he has learned from them.

In gripping prose, one of the world's leading cardiac surgeons lays bare both the wonder and the horror of a life spent a heartbeat away from death. When Stephen Westaby witnessed a patient die on the table during open-heart surgery for the first time, he was struck by the quiet, determined way the surgeons walked away. As he soon understood, this detachment is a crucial survival strategy in a profession where death is only a heartbeat away. In Open Heart, Westaby reflects on over 11,000 surgeries, showing us why the procedures have never become routine and will never be.

In Seed to Dust, Marc Hamer paints a beautiful portrait of the garden that “belongs to everyone.” He describes a year in his life as a country gardener, with each chapter named for the month he’s in. As he works, he muses on the unusual folklores of his beloved plants. He observes the creatures who scurry and hide from his blade or rake. And he reflects on his own life: living homeless as a young man, his loving relationship with his wife and children, and - now - feeling the effects of old age on body and mind.

At age ninety-one, Soros still looms large on the global stage, and yet the man himself is surprisingly little understood. Biographers have attempted to tell the story of George Soros, but no single account of his life can capture his extraordinary, multifaceted character. Now, in this ambitious and revealing new book, Soros's longtime publisher, Peter L. W. Osnos, has assembled an intriguing set of contributors from a variety of different perspectives—public intellectuals, journalists, scholars, and nonprofit leaders—to paint a full picture of the man beyond the media portrayals.

Lisa Sugar has an amazing job. She spends her days at PopSugar creating content about pop culture, must-have handbags and makeup, healthy recipes, and Instagram-worthy sweets. She manages an enormously successful, growing company with employees who love what they do. And her life is just as great at home. She and her husband have three daughters, and she's the number one soccer mom who loves reading bedtime stories every night.

“His vision made giants out of men and organizations.” A pioneer, an adventurer, a great industrialist and a caring, courageous human being…the story of J.R.D. Tata is fascinating. His biography is the tale of determination, integrity and prodigious intelligence.

Harvard geometer and Fields medalist Shing-Tung Yau has provided a mathematical foundation for string theory, offered new insights into black holes, and mathematically demonstrated the stability of our universe. In this autobiography, Yau reflects on his improbable journey to becoming one of the world’s most distinguished mathematicians. With complicated ideas explained for a broad audience, listeners not only get insights into the life of an eminent mathematician, but also an accessible way to understand advanced and highly abstract concepts in mathematics and theoretical physics.

President Nixon called him the most dangerous man in America, while Terence McKenna believed he made more people happy than anyone else in history. Few people have divided opinion as strongly as Dr. Timothy Leary.

Top academic counselor Ana Homayoun has helped turn even the most disorganized, scattered, and unfocused boys into successful young people who consistently meet their personal and academic challenges. She does this by getting back to basics - starting with a simple fact: Most boys needs to be taught how to get organized, how to study, and - most important - how to visualize, embrace, and meet their own goals.

It begins with numbness on her left leg. Then it spreads. Even though an MRI finds a "mass" on her brainstem, it takes two more years for Meredith O'Brien to learn what is causing that numbness. Months after her sixty-five-year-old mother dies from a fast-moving cancer, weeks after her father is hospitalized and she experiences an unexpected job change, she learns she has multiple sclerosis. Suddenly, Meredith, a married mother of three teens, has to figure out how to move forward into a life she no longer recognizes.

The last 20 years have brought us the rise of the Internet, the development of artificial intelligence, the ubiquity of once unimaginably powerful computers, and the thorough transformation of our economy and society. Through it all, Ellen Ullman lived and worked inside that rising culture of technology, and in Life in Code she tells the continuing story of the changes it wrought with a unique, expert perspective.

As 'a little girl from a little school in a little village in North Yorkshire', she only went into the law because her headteacher told her she wasn't clever enough to study history. She became the most senior judge in the country, but it was an unconventional path to the top. Wise, warm and inspiring, Spider Woman shows how the law shapes our world and supports us in crisis. It is the story of how Lady Hale found that she could overcome the odds, which shows that anyone from similar beginnings will find that they can cope, too.

George Stephenson is one of the world’s most famous engineers. His pioneering work on steam-powered locomotion would supercharge the industrial revolution in the United Kingdom and help bring about the heyday of the British Empire.