To Love What Is


Book Description

A personal story of crisis, commitment, and hope from the best-selling author of Memoirs of An Ex-Prom Queen One day it happens, the dreaded thing that will change your life forever, the more dreadful because, though you've half expected it, you don't know what form it will take or when it will come, and whether or not you will rise to the challenge. For Alix Kates Shulman, it happened on July 22, 2004, at two a.m. on a coastal Maine island in a remote seaside cabin with no electricity, running water, or road to reach it—where the very isolation that makes it a perfect artist's retreat renders it as risky as life itself. She woke to find that her beloved seventy-five-year-old husband had fallen the nine feet from their sleeping loft and was lying on the floor below, naked and deathly still. Though Scott would survive, he suffered an injury that left him seriously brain impaired. He was the same—but not the same. Each of us has imagined with dread the occurrence of just such an event outside our control that will permanently alter the course of our lives. In this elegant memoir, Shulman describes life on the other side: the ongoing anxieties and risks—and surprising rewards—she experiences as she reorganizes her world and her priorities to care for her husband and discovers that what might have seemed a grim life sentence to some has evolved into something unexpectedly rich.




The Book that Made Me


Book Description

Essays by popular children's authors reveal the books that shaped their personal and literary lives, explaining how the stories they loved influenced them creatively, politically, and intellectually.




All About Love


Book Description

A New York Times bestseller and enduring classic, All About Love is the acclaimed first volume in feminist icon bell hooks' "Love Song to the Nation" trilogy. All About Love reveals what causes a polarized society, and how to heal the divisions that cause suffering. Here is the truth about love, and inspiration to help us instill caring, compassion, and strength in our homes, schools, and workplaces. “The word ‘love’ is most often defined as a noun, yet we would all love better if we used it as a verb,” writes bell hooks as she comes out fighting and on fire in All About Love. Here, at her most provocative and intensely personal, renowned scholar, cultural critic and feminist bell hooks offers a proactive new ethic for a society bereft with lovelessness--not the lack of romance, but the lack of care, compassion, and unity. People are divided, she declares, by society’s failure to provide a model for learning to love. As bell hooks uses her incisive mind to explore the question “What is love?” her answers strike at both the mind and heart. Razing the cultural paradigm that the ideal love is infused with sex and desire, she provides a new path to love that is sacred, redemptive, and healing for individuals and for a nation. The Utne Reader declared bell hooks one of the “100 Visionaries Who Can Change Your Life.” All About Love is a powerful, timely affirmation of just how profoundly her revelations can change hearts and minds for the better.




What Love Is


Book Description

A rising star in philosophy examines the cultural, social, and scientific interpretations of love to answer one of our most enduring questions What is love? Aside from being the title of many a popular love song, this is one of life's perennial questions. In What Love Is, philosopher Carrie Jenkins offers a bold new theory on the nature of romantic love that reconciles its humanistic and scientific components. Love can be a social construct (the idea of a perfect fairy tale romance) and a physical manifestation (those anxiety- inducing heart palpitations); we must recognize its complexities and decide for ourselves how to love. Motivated by her own polyamorous relationships, she examines the ways in which our parameters of love have recently changed-to be more accepting of homosexual, interracial, and non-monogamous relationships-and how they will continue to evolve in the future. Full of anecdotal, cultural, and scientific reflections on love, What Love Is is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand what it means to say "I love you." Whether young or old, gay or straight, male or female, polyamorous or monogamous, this book will help each of us decide for ourselves how we choose to love.




Journey to Love


Book Description

The Journey to Love is our first step toward learning to accept love from others and to love those around us. Finding love in our everyday lives and relationships can be difficult. In this collection of 40 short, story-driven readings, Matt Mikalatos helps us open ourselves to love in the world around us and to set aside control and embrace the wild, untamed vulnerability of loving and being loved. This is an easy book to read over 40 days—or finish in a couple of hours. Each entry includes questions and exercises to help with reflection, transformation, or discussion with friends or a book club. The goal is to find ourselves more loving and able to receive more love. Are you ready to join the Journey to Love?




You Are What You Love


Book Description

You are what you love. But you might not love what you think. In this book, award-winning author James K. A. Smith shows that who and what we worship fundamentally shape our hearts. And while we desire to shape culture, we are not often aware of how culture shapes us. We might not realize the ways our hearts are being taught to love rival gods instead of the One for whom we were made. Smith helps readers recognize the formative power of culture and the transformative possibilities of Christian practices. He explains that worship is the "imagination station" that incubates our loves and longings so that our cultural endeavors are indexed toward God and his kingdom. This is why the church and worshiping in a local community of believers should be the hub and heart of Christian formation and discipleship. Following the publication of his influential work Desiring the Kingdom, Smith received numerous requests from pastors and leaders for a more accessible version of that book's content. No mere abridgment, this new book draws on years of Smith's popular presentations on the ideas in Desiring the Kingdom to offer a fresh, bottom-up rearticulation. The author creatively uses film, literature, and music illustrations to engage readers and includes new material on marriage, family, youth ministry, and faith and work. He also suggests individual and communal practices for shaping the Christian life.




True Love


Book Description

A Glamour Best Book of 2020 • A Bustle Best Books of 2020 • Winner of an Audiofile Earphones Award • An Entertainment Weekly 30 Hottest Book of the Summer • A Refinery29 25 Book You’ll Want To Read This Summer Selection • A Chicago Review of Books 10 Must-Read Books of the Month • A LitHub Most Anticipated Book of the Year • A The Millions Most Anticipated Book of the Year • A Shondaland 15 Hot Books for Summer One of today’s most provocative literary writers—the author of the critically-acclaimed Sunshine State and the Los Angeles Times First Fiction Award finalist Binary Star—captures the confused state of modern romance and the egos that inflate it in a dark comedy about a woman's search for acceptance, identity, and financial security in the rise of Trump. Nina is a struggling writer, a college drop-out, a liar, and a cheater. More than anything she wants love. She deserves it. From the burned-out suburbs of Florida to the anonymous squalor of New York City, she eats through an incestuous cast of characters in search of it: her mother, a narcissistic lesbian living in a nudist polycule; Odessa, a single mom with even worse taste in men than Nina; Seth, an artist whose latest show is comprised of three Tupperware containers full of trash; Brian, whose roller-coaster affair with Nina is the most stable “relationship” in his life; and Aaron, an aspiring filmmaker living at home with his parents, with whom Nina begins to write her magnum opus. Nina’s quest for fulfillment is at once darkly comedic, acerbically acute, and painfully human—a scathing critique of contemporary society, and a tender examination of our anguished yearning for connection in an era defined by detachment.




Living the Simply Luxurious Life


Book Description

What can you uniquely give the world? We often sell ourselves short with self-limiting beliefs, but most of us would be amazed and delighted to know that we do have something special - our distinctive passions and talents - to offer. And what if I told you that what you have to give will also enable you to live a life of true contentment? How is that possible? It happens when you embrace and curate your own simply luxurious life. We tend to not realize the capacity of our full potential and settle for what society has deemed acceptable. However, each of us has a unique journey to travel if only we would find the courage, paired with key skills we can develop, to step forward. This book will help you along the deeper journey to discovering your best self as you begin to trust your intuition and listen to your curiosity. You will learn how to: - Recognize your innate strengths - Acquire the skills needed to nurture your best self - Identify and navigate past societal limitations often placed upon women - Strengthen your brand both personally and professionally - Build a supportive and healthy community - Cultivate effortless style - Enhance your everyday meals with seasonal fare - Live with less, so that you can live more fully - Understand how to make a successful fresh start - Establish and mastermind your financial security - Experience great pleasure and joy in relationships - Always strive for quality over quantity in every arena of your life Living simply luxuriously is a choice: to think critically, to live courageously, and to savor the everydays as much as the grand occasions. As you learn to live well in your everydays, you will elevate your experience and recognize what is working for you and what is not. With this knowledge, you let go of the unnecessary, thus simplifying your life and removing the complexity. Choices become easier, life has more flavor, and you begin to feel deeply satisfying true contentment. The cultivation of a unique simply luxurious life is an extraordinary daily journey that each of us can master, leading us to our fullest potential.




Fierce Love


Book Description

New York Times bestselling author Susan Scott guides couples through eight must-have conversations to create a fierce love that stands the test of time and grows stronger over the years. Often in our romantic relationships, we long for deep connection, but we don't know how to communicate well and sometimes withhold what we're really thinking and feeling. This can lead to fighting, resentment, or, worse, complacency--where you are just going through the motions, more like roommates than two people in love. As Susan writes, "It's as if we've pulled off our own wings." As couples, we don't stop to think how important our conversations are. And we certainly don't understand that what we talk about and how we talk about it determine whether our relationships will thrive, flatline, or fail. In Fierce Love, New York Times bestselling author Susan Scott guides couples through eight must-have conversations that lead to deep connection and lasting commitment. Through the use of true stories and hands-on exercises, Susan helps us understand that the conversation is the relationship; identify and dispel five relationship myths that mislead and derail us; learn eight conversations that are critical to enriching relationships; and stop fighting or ignoring issues and start connecting in a deep and meaningful way. After a season where many relationships were tested and tried, where some relationships thrived and others have exposed cracks couples didn't even realize were there, or realized but didn't acknowledge, now is the best time to learn to communicate well. By having honest, compelling conversations with our partners, we can foster true connection and a fierce love that will withstand the test of time and grow stronger over the years.




The Sun and Her Flowers


Book Description

Divided into five chapters and illustrated by kaur, the sun and her flowers is a journey of wilting, falling, rooting, rising, and blooming. A celebration of love in all its forms. this is the recipe of life said my mother as she held me in her arms as i wept think of those flowers you plant in the garden each year they will teach you that people too must wilt fall root rise in order to bloom