Bookmark the Blog


ON THE OUTSIDE LOOKING INDIAN

Rupinder Gill was raised under the strict rules of her parents’ Indian upbringing. While her friends were practicing their pliés, having slumber parties, and spending their summers at camp, Rupinder was cleaning, babysitting her siblings, and watching hours on end of American television. But at age 30, Rupinder realized how much she regretted her lack of childhood adventure.

Stepping away from an orderly life of tradition, Rupinder set put to finally experience the things she missed out on. From learning to swim and taking dance lessons, to going to Disney World, her growing to-do list soon became the ultimate trip down non-memory lane.

read more

THE ART OF GROWING OLD

A groundbreaking approach to aging from one of France’s best- known clinical psychologists.

How should we accept growing old? It’s an inevitable progression and yet in Western society the very subject of aging is often taboo and shrouded in anxiety and shame. Not anymore, says Marie de Hennezel, an internationally renowned clinical psychologist and bestselling author. Now that our lives are longer and richer than ever before, it’s imperative to demystify our greatest fear and cultivate a positive awareness of aging.

In this timely and essential book, de Hennezel offers a fresh perspective on the art of growing old.

read more

NO BIKING IN THE HOUSE WITHOUT A HELMET

When the two-time National Book Award finalist Melissa Fay Greene confided to friends that she and her husband planned to adopt a four-year-old boy from Bulgaria to add to their four children at home, the news threatened to place her, she writes, “among the greats: the Kennedys, the McCaughey septuplets, the von Trapp family singers, and perhaps even Mrs. Feodor Vassilyev, who, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, gave birth to sixty-nine children in eighteenth-century Russia.”

Greene is best known for her books on the civil rights movement and the African HIV/AIDS pandemic.

read more

THIS LIFE IS IN YOUR HANDS

In the fall of 1968, Melissa Coleman’s parents pack their VW truck and set out to forge a new existence on a rugged coastal homestead. Inspired by Helen and Scott Nearing, authors of the homesteading bible Living the Good Life, Eliot and Sue build their own home by hand, live off the crops they grow, and establish a happy family with Melissa and her two sisters. They also attract national media and become icons of the back-to-the-land farming movement, but the pursuit of a purer, simpler life comes at a price. In the wake of a tragic accident,

read more

LULU IN THE SKY

Concluding the trilogy that started with the bestselling memoir First They Killed My Father, Loung Ung describes her college experience and her first steps into adulthood, revealing her struggle to reconcile with her past while moving forward towards happiness. After the violence of the Khmer Rouge and the difficult assimilation experience of a refugee, Loung’s daily struggle to keep darkness, anger, and depression at bay will finally find two unexpected allies: the empowering call of activism, and the redemptive power of love. Lulu in the Sky is the story of Loung’s journey to a Cambodian village to reconnect with her mother’s spirit;

read more

THE ANTI-ROMANTIC CHILD

Priscilla Gilman, a teacher of romantic poetry who embraced Wordsworth’s vision of childhood’s spontaneous wonder, eagerly anticipated the birth of her first child, certain that he would come “trailing clouds of glory.” But as Benjamin grew, his remarkable precocity was associated with a developmental disorder that would dramatically alter the course of Priscilla’s dreams.

In The Anti-Romantic Child, a memoir full of lyricism and light, Gilman explores our hopes and expectations for our children, our families, and ourselves—and the ways in which experience may lead us to re-imagine them. Using literature as a touchstone, Gilman reveals her journey through crisis to joy,

read more