Carolyn Jourdan, an attorney on Capitol Hill, thought she had it made. But when her mother has a heart attack, she returns home—to the Tennessee mountains, where her father is a country doctor and her mother works as his receptionist. Jourdan offers to fill in for her mother until she gets better. But days turn into weeks as she trades her suits for scrubs. Most important, though, she comes to understand what her caring and patient father means to her close-knit community. With great humor and great tenderness, Heart in the Right Place shows that some of our biggest heroes are the ones living right beside us.
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In Live Boldly, Mary Anne Radmacher identifies an assortment of qualities for our life’s journey and defines each as it relates to laughing loudly, loving truly, playing often, working smart, and sharing your heart. Each definition is followed by a quote, a poem, an aphorism that explores the quality. Stories culled from Mary Anne’s own life and teaching practice followed by an invitation to the reader to listen more closely to their lives, to give themselves what they need and to step back into their daily lives, knowing they can choose, in that moment, to live boldly by their own definition.
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Topping the best-seller charts in Britain and published to much acclaim in the United States, The Perfect Summer chronicles a glorious English summer a century ago when the world was on the cusp of irrevocable change. That summer of 1911 a new king was crowned and the aristocracy was at play, bounding from one house party to the next. To a charity ball where the other girls came dressed as virginal white swans, the striking debutante Lady Diana Manners made a late appearance as a black swan. The Ballets Russes arrived in London for the first time and people swarmed to Covent Garden to see Nijinsky’s gravity-defying leaps.
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For Kelly Corrigan, family is everything.
At thirty-six, she had a marriage that worked, a couple of funny, active kids, and a weekly newspaper column. But even as a thriving adult, Kelly still saw herself as George Corrigan’s daughter. A garrulous Irish-American charmer from Baltimore, George was the center of the ebullient, raucous Corrigan clan. He greeted every day by opening his bedroom window and shouting, “Hello, World!” Suffice it to say, Kelly’s was a colorful childhood, just the sort a girl could get attached to.
Kelly lives deep within what she calls the Middle Place—”that sliver of time when parenthood and childhood overlap”—comfortably wedged between her adult duties and her parents’
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With the same trademark compassion and erudition he brought to The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks explores the place music occupies in the brain and how it affects the human condition. In Musicophilia, he shows us a variety of what he calls “musical misalignments.” Among them: a man struck by lightning who suddenly desires to become a pianist at the age of forty-two; an entire group of children with Williams syndrome, who are hypermusical from birth; people with “amusia,” to whom a symphony sounds like the clattering of pots and pans;
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Author of the number one bestseller The World Is Flat and one of America’s most respected columnists, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Thomas L. Friedman has transformed the way we see the world, and he has transformed the way we talk about the most important issues of our time. With Hot, Flat, and Crowded, Friedman is poised to spark his most powerful conversations yet, taking on the interlinked woes of skyrocketing fuel costs, diminishing natural resources, and a planet that seems unable to sustain us in the future. But Friedman is no naysayer. On the contrary: he is optimistic that the twenty-first century can become a time of extraordi nary achievement—from tackling the energy crisis to lifting scores of the earth’s inhabitants from poverty.
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