Susan Bordo

Leslie Heywood

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

California

Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body

In this Tenth Anniversary Edition, Susan Bordo examines how women's fantasies of transcending their material existence have led to narcissistic efforts to reinvent themselves. Infatuated with youth, surrounded by homogenous representations of beauty, they surrender themselves to plastic surgeons in ever greater numbers for larger breasts, smaller noses, collagen-plumped lips and wrinkle-free faces. The author's preface brings the book up to date in 2003 and Leslie Heywood's foreword places Susan Bordo's work in the front ranks of the research on women and their bodies.

Unbearable Weight

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Casey Cep

Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee

This "superbly written true-crime story" (Michael Lewis, The New York Times Book Review) masterfully brings together the tales of a serial killer in 1970s Alabama and of Harper Lee, the beloved author of To Kill a Mockingbird, who tried to write his story. Reverend Willie Maxwell was a rural preacher accused of murdering five of his family members, but with the help of a savvy lawyer, he escaped justice for years until a relative assassinated him at the funeral of his last victim. Despite hundreds of witnesses, Maxwell's murderer was acquitted--thanks to the same attorney who had previously defended the reverend himself. Sitting in the audience during the vigilante's trial was Harper Lee, who spent a year in town reporting on the Maxwell case and many more trying to finish the book she called The Reverend. Cep brings this remarkable story to life, from the horrifying murders to the courtroom drama to the racial politics of the Deep South, while offering a deeply moving portrait of one of our most revered writers.

Furious Hours

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J. Reuben Appelman

The Hunt for Answers in the Murders of Four College Students

The author of the acclaimed true-crime memoir, The Kill Jar, tells the inside story of the "University of Idaho Murders," offering a memorable, thoughtful dive into our societal fascination with true crime, the media's seeming blood-frenzy, and the future of homicide investigations, while cultivating an intimate look into the minds and hearts of the victims and their suspected killer alike. Just after 4:00 am on November 13, 2022, four University of Idaho students were viciously stabbed to death in an off-campus house. The killings would shake the small blue-collar college town of Moscow, Idaho, dominate mainstream news coverage, and become a social media obsession, drawing millions of clicks and views. While a reticent Moscow Police Department, the FBI, and the Idaho State Police searched for the killer, unending conjecture and countless theories blazed online, in chatrooms and platforms from Reddit and YouTube to Facebook and TikTok. For more than a month, the clash of armchair investigators and law enforcement professionals raged, until a suspect--a 28-year-old Ph.D. candidate studying criminology--was arrested at his family home 2,500 miles away in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania on the day before New Year's Eve. While Idaho Slept is a thought-provoking, literary chronicle of a small-town murder investigation blistering beneath the unceasing light of international interest, as traditional investigators, citizen sleuths, and the true-crime media acted--sometimes together, often in conflict--to uncover the truth. As J. Reuben Appelman brings this terrible crime into focus, he humanizes the four victims, examining the richness of their lives, dissects the mind and motivations of their presumed killer, and explores the world of northern Idaho, a rugged, deeply conservative stronghold steeped in Christian values and American patriotism. Going deep inside the case, Appelman addresses a crucial question: With so many millions of citizens armed by access and hungry to take part in a true crime hunt of their own, has the nature of homicide investigations permanently changed? Rising above the sensational, While Idaho Slept illuminates the intrinsic connection between today's media, citizen sleuths, our societal mania for murder tales, and an impatient public's insatiable appetite for spectacle as never before. Running beneath, the pulse of the story is a heartbreaking narrative of the people we love, the dreams we all share, and the uncertain time left for sharing them.

While Idaho Slept

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Shai Tubali

Discover the Energetic Forces That Shape Your Life, Your Relationships, and Your Place in the World (Chakra Healing)

Chakras are energy centers in our bodies through which we experience life. Each one holds a different energy, purpose, and meaning and examining these qualities can help us use the chakras as a tool for understanding ourselves and coping with change.

This book presents a system for classifying people into seven personality types based on the wisdom of the chakras. Each of us has one chakra that is more dominant for us than the others as well as a second and a third chakra that influence the way we experience life and define our strengths and weaknesses. This unique combination of one major chakra, one secondary chakra, and one supporting chakra forms the chakra personality type.

Are you a grounded, first-chakra type (Builder) or a highly ambitious third-chakra type (Achiever)? Are you an adventurous second-chakra type (Artist) or an observational sixth-chakra type (Thinker)?

Understanding our chakra type can help us better understand our own unique structure and reveal why we have certain tendencies and are attracted to specific things. We can use this information to help us make the right decisions in our careers, lifestyle, and relationships and to fulfill our greatest potential in life.

The Seven Chakra Personality Types

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Jay Shetty

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

How to Find It, Keep It, and Let It Go

The author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Think Like a Monk offers a revelatory guide to every stage of romance, drawing on ancient wisdom and new science.

Nobody sits us down and teaches us how to love. So we're often thrown into relationships with nothing but romance movies and pop culture to help us muddle through. Until now.

Instead of presenting love as an ethereal concept or a collection of cliches, Jay Shetty lays out specific, actionable steps to help you develop the skills to practice and nurture love better than ever before. He shares insights on how to win or lose together, how to define love, and why you don't break in a break-up. Inspired by Vedic wisdom and modern science, he tackles the entire relationship cycle, from first dates to moving in together to breaking up and starting over. And he shows us how to avoid falling for false promises and unfulfilling partners.

By living Jay Shetty's eight rules, we can all love ourselves, our partner, and the world better than we ever thought possible.

8 Rules of Love

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Don Miguel Ruiz

Toltec Wisdom for the Modern World

This is a book that picks up where The Four Agreements left off. Building on the principles found in his father's bestselling book, Ruiz, Jr. explores the ways in which we attach ourselves inappropriately to beliefs and the world. Ruiz explores the five levels of attachment that cause suffering in our lives. The levels are: Authentic SelfPreferenceIdentificationInternalizationFanaticism Accessible and practical, Ruiz's exploration invites us to look at our own lives and see how an unhealthy level of attachment can keep us trapped in a psychological and spiritual fog. He then invites us to reclaim our true freedom by cultivating awareness, detaching, and discovering our true selves.

The Five Levels of Attachment

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Lauren Leto

Ben Bator

All the Texts No One Remembers Sending

In the tradition of The Truth About Chuck Norris, PostSecret, and I Can Has Cheezburger?, Texts from Last Night celebrates the funniest and most outrageous text messages from the instantly popular website

There are few forms of communication that are more entertaining, appalling, and laugh-out-loud hilarious than the text message-especially when it's received in the wee hours of the morning from a friend who has had one too many shots of tequila. Texts from Last Night is a celebration of the best, worst, and weirdest text messages that have ever been sent, such as:

*Before i could say "i'm not the kind of girl," i was

*I got us kicked out of the bar because the waitress found me in the kitchen trying to make spaghetti

*The ticket read "found nude in a tree"

Texts from Last Night is chock full of LOL and WTF moments and will make any thumb-typer :) in recognition.

Read Ben Bator and Lauren Leto's post on the Penguin Blog.

Texts from Last Night

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Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

The Psychology of Optimal Experience

Flow

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Jonathan Haidt

Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

Presents a groundbreaking investigation into the origins of morality at the core of religion and politics, offering scholarly insight into the motivations behind cultural clashes that are polarizing America.

The Righteous Mind

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Scott Erickson

Discover the Surprising Life Beyond the Death of a Dream





Say Yes gives you the mental and spiritual practices you need to enjoy your life again--and bring greater fullness than you could imagine before.

"My life doesn't look anything like I wanted it to. How do I even keep going" When the dreams for our life die, our vision of who we hoped to become often dies too. That's when The Voice of Giving Up appears.

Visual artist and spiritual director Scott Erickson has had long midnight conversations with The Voice of Giving Up, and he knows how anxiety and depression make The Voice especially loud. But he's discovered that our darkest moments are sometimes doorways to a deeper, more joy-filled journey of recovering who we are, why we're here, and why the future bursts with possibilities if we are willing to say yes to life's brightest gifts.

In Say Yes, Scott helps you learn how to reawaken your deepest desires, disempower your greatest fears, and identify the destructive narratives holding you back. Combined with Scott's beautiful, thought-provoking illustrations, this is a profound exploration of beginning again after:

 * Disappointment at how life is turning out
 * Suspecting we are not prepared or smart enough
 * Losing hope that change is possible and that pain can have a purpose

Take the first step to gain the gentle yet powerful tools you need, and say yes to what lies ahead today.

Say Yes

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Rebecca Wells

Don't miss Little Altars Everywhere, the New York Times bestselling companion novel that introduces the Ya-Yas and is also a basis for the film.

Little Altars Everywhere

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T. S. Eliot

Edward Gorey

A collection of T. S. Eliot's poems which concern cats including Mr. Mistoffelees, and Skimbleshanks: The Railway Cat

Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, Illustrated Edition

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Nicholas Sparks

See me just as I see you . . . Colin Hancock is giving his second chance his best shot. With a history of violence and bad decisions behind him and the threat of prison dogging his every step, he's determined to walk a straight line. To Colin, that means applying himself single-mindedly toward his teaching degree and avoiding everything that proved destructive in his earlier life. Reminding himself daily of his hard-earned lessons, the last thing he is looking for is a serious relationship. Maria Sanchez, the hardworking daughter of Mexican immigrants, is the picture of conventional success. With a degree from Duke Law School and a job at a prestigious firm in Wilmington, she is a dark-haired beauty with a seemingly flawless professional track record. And yet Maria has a traumatic history of her own, one that compelled her to return to her hometown and left her questioning so much of what she once believed. A chance encounter on a rain-swept road will alter the course of both Colin and Maria's lives, challenging deeply held assumptions about each other and ultimately, themselves. As love unexpectedly takes hold between them, they dare to envision what a future together could possibly look like . . . until menacing reminders of events in Maria's past begin to surface. Rich in emotion and fueled with suspense, SEE ME reminds us that love is sometimes forged in the crises that threaten to shatter us . . . and that those who see us for who we truly are may not always be the ones easiest to recognize.

See Me

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Stephen Nachmanovitch

Improvisation in Life and Art

Free Play is about the inner sources of spontaneous creation. It is about where art in the widest sense comes from. It is about why we create and what we learn when we do. It is about the flow of unhindered creative energy: the joy of making art in all its varied forms.

Free Play is directed toward people in any field who want to contact, honor, and strengthen their own creative powers. It integrates material from a wide variety of sources among the arts, sciences, and spiritual traditions of humanity. Filled with unusual quotes, amusing and illuminating anecdotes, and original metaphors, it reveals how inspiration arises within us, how that inspiration may be blocked, derailed or obscured by certain unavoidable facts of life, and how finally it can be liberated - how we can be liberated - to speak or sing, write or paint, dance or play, with our own authentic voice.

The whole enterprise of improvisation in life and art, of recovering free play and awakening creativity, is about being true to ourselves and our visions. It brings us into direct, active contact with boundless creative energies that we may not even know we had.

Free Play

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Charlotte Kasl

A Handbook for Finding Love on a Spiritual Path

Zen and the art of falling in love . . . At once practical, playful, and spiritually sound, this book is about creating a new love story in your life. Drawing from Christian, Buddhist, Sufi and other spiritual traditions, If the Buddha Dated shows how to find a partner without losing yourself. Kasl, a practicing psychotherapist, workshop leader, and Reiki healer for thirty years, offers practical wisdom on using the path to love as a means of awakening. If the Buddha Dated teaches that when you stay loyal to your spiritual journey, you will bring curiosity, fascination, and a light heart to the dating process.

If the Buddha Dated

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Paul Holes

Robin Gaby Fisher

My Life Solving America's Cold Cases

From the detective who found the Golden State Killer, a memoir of investigating America's toughest cold cases and the rewards-and toll-of a life solving crime.

I order another bourbon, neat. This is the drink that will flip the switch. I don't even know how I got here, to this place, to this point. Something is happening to me lately. I'm drinking too much. My sheets are soaking wet when I wake up from nightmares of decaying corpses. I order another drink and swig it, trying to forget about the latest case I can't shake.

Crime solving for me is more complex than the challenge of the hunt, or the process of piecing together a scientific puzzle. The thought of good people suffering drives me, for better or worse, to the point of obsession. People always ask how I am able to detach from the horrors of my work. Part of it is an innate capacity to compartmentalize; the rest is experience and exposure, and I've had plenty of both. But I have always taken pride in the fact that I can keep my feelings locked up to get the job done. It's only been recently that it feels like all that suppressed darkness is beginning to seep out.

When I look back at my long career, there is a lot I am proud of. I have caught some of the most notorious killers of the twenty-first century and brought justice and closure for their victims and families. I want to tell you about a lifetime solving these cold cases, from Laci Peterson to Jaycee Dugard to the Pittsburg homicides to, yes, my twenty-year-long hunt for the Golden State Killer.

But a deeper question eats at me as I ask myself, at what cost? I have sacrificed relationships, joy--even fatherhood--because the pursuit of evil always came first. Did I make the right choice? It's something I grapple with every day. Yet as I stand in the spot where a young girl took her last breath, as I look into the eyes of her family, I know that, for me, there has never been a choice. "I don't know if I can solve your case," I whisper. "But I promise I will do my best."

It is a promise I know I can keep.

Unmasked

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Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Censorship and COVID: an Attack on Science and American Ideals

A leading Democrat challenges his party to return to liberal values and evidence-based science Democrats were the party of intellectual curiosity, critical thinking, and faith in scientific and liberal empiricism. They once took pride in understanding how to read science critically, exercising healthy skepticism toward notoriously corrupt entities like the drug companies that brought us the opioid crisis, and were outraged by the phenomenon of “agency capture” and the pervasive control of private interests over Congress, the media, and the scientific journals. During the COVID pandemic, these attitudes have taken a back seat to blind faith in government mandates and countermeasures driven by pharmaceutical companies and captive federal agencies, promoted by corporate media, and cynically exploiting the fears of the American people. A Letter to Liberals is Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s, challenge to “lockdown liberalism’s” embrace of policies that are an affront to once cherished precepts. Kennedy invites readers to look at the data in order to answer questions such as: Did COVID vaccines really save millions and end the pandemic? Why were the lowest COVID death rates in countries and states that relied on therapeutic drugs, and in countries with the lowest vaccination rates? Did vaccines prevent infection or transmission as officials promised? Why do COVID vaccines appear to show “negative efficacy”—making the vaccinated more susceptible to COVID. Why does the most reliable data suggest that COVID vaccines do not lower the risk of death and hospitalization. Should government technocrats be partnering with media and social media titans to censor and suppress the questioning of government policies? And why have so many liberals abandoned fundamental Constitutional principles in their headlong rush to embrace pandemic policies pushed by captured bureaucrats, feckless politicians, a compromised news media, and Big Pharma? In his November 2021 book The Real Anthony Fauci, which sold over 1,000,000 copies, Kennedy made predictions that have matured from “conspiracy theories” to proven facts. Among these: Masks Are Ineffective and Dangerous Social Distancing Was Not Science-Based School Closures Were Not Science-Based Lockdowns Were Counterproductive Vaccinating Children Causes More Harm and Death Than It Averts Officials Wrongly Used PCR Tests to Justify the Countermeasures COVID-19 May Have Come from Wuhan Lab Natural Immunity is Superior to Vaccine Immunity Kennedy throws down the gauntlet for the kind of vigorous scientific debate that liberals have long stood for and strives to ensure that unbiased honesty and well-researched thought is brought to bear on one of the most important and still unfolding chapters in human history.

A Letter to Liberals

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Lesley Omara

The cream of the cat stories -Zora, Herriot, Twain, Wodehouse and more. Every story has a happy ending. Illus., B&W.

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Susan Bordo; Leslie Heywood