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Staff Picks, Popular, Recommended
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Wake Up to Your Life by Ken McLeodThe key to becoming fully alive and joyful is to develop our natural capacity for attention and to be fully present here and now. In this informative guidebook to practical Buddhism you discover: How to live life with equanimity, loving-kindness, compassion, and joy How to cut through obsessions with the external world, relationships, harmful emotions, pleasure and power, and self Tried-and-true methods for cultivating active attention with your body and mind. |
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Water for Elephants by Sara GruenJacob Jankowski says: "I am ninety. Or ninety-three. One or the other." At the beginning of Water for Elephants, he is living out his days in a nursing home, hating every second of it. His life wasn't always like this, however, because Jacob ran away and joined the circus when he was twenty-one. It wasn't a romantic, carefree decision, to be sure. His parents were killed in an auto accident one week before he was to sit for his veterinary medicine exams at Cornell. He buried his parents, learned that they left him nothing because they had mortgaged everything to pay his tuition, returned to school, went to the exams, and didn't write a single word. He walked out without completing the test and wound up on a circus train. The circus he joins, in Depression-era America, is second-rate at best. With Ringling Brothers as the standard, Benzini Brothers is far down the scale and pale by comparison. Water for Elephants is the story of Jacob's life with this circus. Sara Gruen spares no detail in chronicling the squalid, filthy, brutish circumstances in which he finds himself. The animals are mangy, underfed or fed rotten food, and abused. Jacob, once it becomes known that he has veterinary skills, is put in charge of the "menagerie" and all its ills. Uncle Al, the circus impresario, is a self-serving, venal creep who slaps people around because he can. August, the animal trainer, is a certified paranoid schizophrenic whose occasional flights into madness and brutality often have Jacob as their object. Jacob is the only person in the book who has a handle on a moral compass and as his reward he spends most of the novel beaten, broken, concussed, bleeding, swollen and hungover. He is the self-appointed Protector of the Downtrodden, and... he falls in love with Marlena, crazy August's wife. Not his best idea. |
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You: Staying Young by Michael Roizen, M.D. and Mehmet Oz, M.D.The body is the most fascinating machine ever created, and nobody talks about it in ways that are as illuminating and compelling as Dr. Michael Roizen and Dr. Mehmet Oz. Most people think of the aging of our bodies the same way we think of the aging of our cars: the older we get, the more inevitable it is that we're going to break down. Most of us believe that at age 40 or so, we begin the slow and steady decline of our minds, our eyes, our ears, our joints, our arteries, our libido, and every other system that affects the quality of life (and how long we live it). But according to Dr. Roizen and Dr. Oz, that's a mistake. Aging isn't a decline in our systems. It's actually very purposeful. The very systems and biological processes that age us are designed to help us when we're a little bit younger. So what's our role as part of the aging population? To learn how those systems work so we can reprogram them to work the way they did when we were younger. Your goal should be: die young at any age. That means you live a high quality of life (with everything from working joints to working genitals) until the day you die. At the core of this landmark book are the Major Agers--14 biological processes that control your rate of aging. Some you've heard of, some you haven't, and some you never knew contributed to the aging process. Some speed decline, others inhibit your repair mechanisms. These Major Agers are everything from short telomeres and inefficient mitochondria to stem cells and wacky hormones. The doctors explain the principles of longevity and many of the causes of aging and how to fight the effects. The climax of the book is a 14-day plan to help you along your path to staying young. The doctors want you to be able to integrate important processes into your daily life in order to make staying young routine, but first you'll need to measure your real age and health right now. Staying young encompasses your emotions and mental health as well as your exercise habits, eating habits, personal hygiene, and genes, among other things. Wouldn't you like to know how to prevent your body from aging badly? The original YOU book showed how bodies work in general, and YOU: On a Diet explained how bodies lose weight and stay fit. Now in YOU: Staying Young, Drs. Michael Roizen and Mehmet Oz illuminate the mysterious mechanisms with a lively metaphor -- the modern city. What differentiates a vibrant and thriving city that ages gracefully from one that is worn down and rusted out? Despite genetic differences, which are like the geography upon which the city is built, cities age differently because of the way residents treat their education system (stem cells), power plants (mitochondria), electrical grids (brains), transportation routes (blood vessels), and landfills (fat). You -- as mayor, resident, and street cleaner -- have the power to balance your biological budget to ensure a life that's both long and strong. Thankfully, just as cities can invest in renewal and improving their repair processes, so can you. YOU: Staying Young is filled with signature YOU Tools, including YOU Tests, YOU Tips, and visual and verbal metaphors to bring the science to life. |