Leading from the Roots: Nature-Inspired Leadership Lessons for Today’s World
Leading from the Roots: Nature-Inspired Leadership Lessons for Today’s World is a transformative book in the field of organizational leadership. In the Introduction and the following eleven chapters, Dr. Kathleen E. Allen delineates how leaders in the 21st century can shift their perspectives, attitudes, and practices from a traditional, mechanistic, and top-down organizational system to…
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Nature Based Leadership: Living, Learning, Serving, and Leading
Stephen B. Jones offers a way of “being in” the natural world that connects us to the higher goals of insight, purpose, and action. In his book Nature Based Leadership: Living, Learning, Serving, and Leading, published in December 2016, Jones engages all the human portals—mind, heart, body, soul, and sprit—to focus our attention on nature as we experience it on Earth.
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No Enemies, No Hatred: Selected Essays and Poems
Liu Xiaobo is the author of hundreds of essays and seventeen books. Most of the essays in No Enemies, No Hatred are from the period between 2004 and 2008, and reflect, in the service of freedom of speech, how words followed by action can change the direction of a country.
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The View From Lazy Point
The View From Lazy Point: A Natural Year In An Unnatural World by Carl Safina is a book about love. It is not your typical story about a romance in the works or one that goes south. But it is a love story, nonetheless. Love that envelops both humanity and the Earth and everything that lives…
The Fire Next Time
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin was first published in 1963 during the emerging Civil Rights Movement and was an instant best seller. A brilliant social critic, public intellectual, and interpreter of racial myths and beliefs, Baldwin captured the zeitgeist of a country riven by race. Without prejudice or fear, he deconstructed the institution of racism in America.
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration
The Warmth of Other Suns is a magisterial book examining the Great Migration from the South that began during World War I and lasted until the 1970s. According to Wilkerson, the Great Migration changed the dynamic between the North and the South in ways no one could have imagined.
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Arte of Now: Practice of Immediacy in the Arts
The beauty of Nicolee McMahon’s Arte of Now: Practice of Immediacy in the Arts lies in the wisdom of creativity itself, a wisdom demonstrated 30,000 to 40,000 years ago when Homo sapiens painted prehistoric rock art (parietal art) on the walls of caves. Realistic and extinct animals, handprints, abstract dot paintings, and geometric shapes graced the cave walls, evidence that our ancestors had evolved a brain capacity that began at least 200,000 years ago. Neuroscience shows that humans are “wired to create” and use their whole brain to do so.
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Tiger and Clay – Syria Fragments
“There are memories for which we can live more than a life time.” Photographs over the past several years have shown migrants and refugees crossing the Mediterranean Sea, some of them dying as they flee war, poverty, drought, and authoritarian regimes.
The Longest War
Consider 9/11 and the Arab Spring of 2011 as opposing bookends to a decade of repression, fear, and fetishized violence. 9/11—the worst terrorist attack on United States soil—killed nearly 3,000 people, and the United States faced unprecedented vigilance against further terrorist threats. The Arab Spring was sparked in Tunisia after a fruit vendor set himself…
The Partnership: Five Cold Warriors and Their Quest to Ban The Bomb
Unless you are a World War II history buff, you may have missed the fact that the island of Tinian in the Northern Mariana Islands played an important role in ending the war. After the United States invaded the island in July 1944 and seized it from Japan in the Battle of Tinian, the military…
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My Beloved World
You would be remiss if you didn’t ask how Justice Sotomayor transcended the adversity of her childhood: dangerous neighborhoods, chronic poverty, an alcoholic father, an unhappy mother. Yet My Beloved World is a memoir suffused with gratitude, generosity, and love.
Three Days in Damascus: A Memoir
In the extreme, a trip can become an existential, life-altering experience that changes your sense of yourself and the world around you. Such was the kind of trip that Kim Schultz—writer, actor, playwright—took in 2009 to Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria.
The Long Emancipation: The Demise of Slavery in the United States
As discussed by the scholar Ira Berlin in his monograph The Long Emancipation, the struggle for freedom is, at its core, about agency: Who accomplished it? How was it accomplished? Why?
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A Singular Woman
For many, Ann Dunham is known as the mother of the 44th U.S. president who happened to be white, and that’s just about all they know about her. In A Singular Woman, Janny Scott retrieves Dunham from the bin of misrepresentation and presents an accomplished woman.
Reading Obama
It has been said that President Barack Obama is like a Rorschach test—people project onto him their interpretations and feelings and beliefs. From the perspective of the left, he is a cool pragmatist. From the right, he is a socialist. When debates about health care reform heated up during the summer of 2009, the left…
Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking
Quiet is a must-read for introverts and extroverts alike. This best-selling book by Susan Cain offers a ground-breaking understanding of the power of introverts in a culture that has a “preference for extroversion.”
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Alfred Maurer
Art historian Daphne Deeds’ essay Alfred Maurer: The First American Modern educates the reader about modernism and connects in a style that is both erudite and accessible.
The New Jim Crow
Why has an academic book with a title that includes this mix—“Jim Crow,” “mass incarceration,” and “colorblindness”— resonated with the public? Clearly, Alexander has hit a nerve. Something profound is happening in American society.
How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character
In his recently published book, How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character, Paul Tough posits that character goes hand in hand with success. As he defines and describes it, character is not a moralizing agent tied to moral laws, but rather a composite of individual strengths that can be taught, learned, and practiced.…
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Winner Take All Politics
According to Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, co-authors of Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer—And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class, economic inequality in the United States is not in the eye of the beholder. It is real, most apparently in the “real economy,” and it is present, most conspicuously, in the…
Cinderella Ate My Daughter
In “Cinderella,” as told in the Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales (1974) first published in Germany in 1817 as “Aschenputtel,” Cinderella’s mother dies, her father remarries, and her two new stepsisters—“beautiful but black of heart”—make her give up her pretty clothes and put on an old grey bedgown and wooden shoes, and they force her to work all…
Cleopatra: A Life
Who was Cleopatra? The erotic queen of Egypt? “The wanton seductress” who consorted with the two most powerful Romans of her time—Julius Caesar and Mark Antony? The “insatiable, treacherous, blood-thirsty, power-crazed” destroyer of men, a woman who “hailed from the intoxicating land of sex and excess”—“the occult, alchemical East?” From the writings of Cicero, Augustus…
No Way Down
When you think about a life worth living, what comes to mind? Helping others in need? Giving your children your love and attention and rearing them to become generous and loving human beings as adults? Being productive at your job and striving to do the very best you can? Living every day in harmony with…