Author: Steven Pinker Publisher: Penguin Books ISBN: 0143122010 Category : Psychology Languages : en Pages : 834
Book Description
Faced with the ceaseless stream of news about war, crime, and terrorism, one could easily think this is the most violent age ever seen. Yet as bestselling author Pinker shows in this startling and engaging new work, just the opposite is true.
Author: Jonathan Reckford Publisher: St. Martin's Essentials ISBN: 1250239257 Category : Self-Help Languages : en Pages : 256
Book Description
Inspiring and insightful, Our Better Angels: Seven Simple Virtues That Will Change Your Life and the World celebrates the shared principles that unite and enable us to overcome life’s challenges together. “When the waters rise, so do our better angels.”—President Jimmy Carter Jonathan Reckford, the CEO of Habitat for Humanity, has seen time and again the powerful benefits that arise when people from all walks of life work together to help one another. In this uplifting book, he shares true stories of people involved with Habitat as volunteers and future homeowners who embody seven timeless virtues—kindness, community, empowerment, joy, respect, generosity, and service—and shows how we can all practice these to improve the quality of our own lives as well as those around us. A Vietnam veteran finds peace where he was once engaged in war. An impoverished single mother offers her family’s time and energy to enrich their neighbors’ lives. A Zambian family of nine living in a makeshift tent makes room to shelter even more. A teenager grieving for his mother honors her love and memory by ensuring other people have a place to call home. A former president of the United States leads by example with a determined work ethic that motivates everyone around him to be the best version of themselves. These stories, and many others, illustrate how virtues become values, how cooperation becomes connection, and how even the smallest act of compassion can encourage actions that transform the world around us. Here are tales that will make readers laugh and cry and embrace with passion the calling of our better angels to change the way we take care of ourselves, our families, our communities, and the world.
Author: Robert C. Plumb Publisher: U of Nebraska Press ISBN: 1640123288 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 272
Book Description
Harriet Tubman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Clara Barton, Julia Ward Howe, and Sarah Josepha Hale came from backgrounds that ranged from abject enslavement to New York City’s elite. Surmounting social and political obstacles, they emerged before and during the worst crisis in American history, the Civil War. Their actions became strands in a tapestry of courage, truth, and patriotism that influenced the lives of millions—and illuminated a new way forward for the nation. In this collective biography, Robert C. Plumb traces these five remarkable women’s awakenings to analyze how their experiences shaped their responses to the challenges, disappointments, and joys they encountered on their missions. Here is Tubman, fearless conductor on the Underground Railroad, alongside Stowe, the author who awakened the nation to the evils of slavery. Barton led an effort to provide medical supplies for field hospitals, and Union soldiers sang Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic” on the march. And, amid national catastrophe, Hale’s campaign to make Thanksgiving a national holiday moved North and South toward reconciliation.
Author: Sadie Keller Publisher: Gavia Books ISBN: 9780997880854 Category : HEALTH & FITNESS Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
"How can you take the worst thing that ever happened to you ... and use it to make thousands of children happy? Sadie Keller did just that. Told in her own words, this girl's inspiring story will stir the soul of anyone who wants to find hope in humanity. Diagnosed with cancer at age seven, Sadie sneaked into her mother's closet and filmed an instructional video to help kids like her. It became a viral sensation. Worried about whether Santa could deliver toys to all the kids in her hospital, she started a toy drive. It became a movement that turned into a foundation and a national year-round program that has collected tens of thousands of toys for kids battling cancer. Along the way Sadie met hundreds of cancer kids ... and ended up having to say goodbye to some of her closest friends. To help save other children, Sadie teamed up with Congressman Michael McCaul. She became a star lobbyist, helping get a law passed that directed billions of dollars of research aimed at sparking next-level cures for childhood cancer. And she did it all by finding angels--friends, family, strangers, and some of the most powerful people in the world. Better Angels is a heartbreaking yet heartwarming tale of what it's like to face the possibility of death at a young age and how to turn it into a life-giving opportunity. It can serve as a user's manual for anyone who wants to change the world ... by seeking and sparking love from the countless people who can help make it happen."--Amazon.com
Author: Jon Meacham Publisher: Random House ISBN: 039958983X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 417
Book Description
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Pulitzer Prize–winning author Jon Meacham helps us understand the present moment in American politics and life by looking back at critical times in our history when hope overcame division and fear. ONE OF OPRAH’S “BOOKS THAT HELP ME THROUGH” • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR • The Christian Science Monitor • Southern Living Our current climate of partisan fury is not new, and in The Soul of America Meacham shows us how what Abraham Lincoln called the “better angels of our nature” have repeatedly won the day. Painting surprising portraits of Lincoln and other presidents, including Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and Lyndon B. Johnson, and illuminating the courage of such influential citizen activists as Martin Luther King, Jr., early suffragettes Alice Paul and Carrie Chapman Catt, civil rights pioneers Rosa Parks and John Lewis, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and Army-McCarthy hearings lawyer Joseph N. Welch, Meacham brings vividly to life turning points in American history. He writes about the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the birth of the Lost Cause; the backlash against immigrants in the First World War and the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s; the fight for women’s rights; the demagoguery of Huey Long and Father Coughlin and the isolationist work of America First in the years before World War II; the anti-Communist witch-hunts led by Senator Joseph McCarthy; and Lyndon Johnson’s crusade against Jim Crow. Each of these dramatic hours in our national life have been shaped by the contest to lead the country to look forward rather than back, to assert hope over fear—a struggle that continues even now. While the American story has not always—or even often—been heroic, we have been sustained by a belief in progress even in the gloomiest of times. In this inspiring book, Meacham reassures us, “The good news is that we have come through such darkness before”—as, time and again, Lincoln’s better angels have found a way to prevail. Praise for The Soul of America “Brilliant, fascinating, timely . . . With compelling narratives of past eras of strife and disenchantment, Meacham offers wisdom for our own time.”—Walter Isaacson “Gripping and inspiring, The Soul of America is Jon Meacham’s declaration of his faith in America.”—Newsday “Meacham gives readers a long-term perspective on American history and a reason to believe the soul of America is ultimately one of kindness and caring, not rancor and paranoia.”—USA Today
Author: Hank Davis Publisher: Prometheus Books ISBN: 1615928820 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 298
Book Description
Davis laments a modern world in which more people believe in ESP, ghosts, and angels than in evolution. Superstition and religion get particularly critical treatment, although Davis argues that religion, itself, is not the problem.
Author: Bette Bono Publisher: All Things That Matter Press ISBN: 9781733444859 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 280
Book Description
Aggie May, newly and unhappily retired from teaching, fears dementia when she begins to see visions from the past, like a 1950s-era Super Constellation at JFK airport and World War II soldiers at Grand Central Terminal. Then she gets a recruitment visit from Abe Irving of the American Association of Remarkable Persons ("the other AARP") who explains she has developed the ability to travel through time. Soon Aggie joins other "Remarkables" on a mission to nineteenth-century New York City in an effort to locate a missing photographic portrait of Abraham Lincoln created by the Civil War photographer Mathew Brady. While learning the rules and limits of time travel, Aggie faces the possibility that she may have both extraordinary power and extraordinary vulnerability. Aggie and Abe, two stubborn and independent people, must struggle to come to an understanding over how and when to take risks, including emotional risks.
Author: Michael A. Halleran Publisher: University of Alabama Press ISBN: 0817316957 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 247
Book Description
The first in-depth study of the Freemasons during the Civil War From first-person accounts culled from regimental histories, diaries, and letters, Michael A. Halleran has constructed an overview of 19th-century American freemasonry. The author examines carefully the major Masonic stories from the Civil War, in particular the myth that Confederate Lewis A. Armistead made the Masonic sign of distress as he lay dying at the high-water mark of Pickett's charge at Gettysburg.
Author: Philip F. Gura Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 0674978145 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 328
Book Description
Banks failed, inequality grew, people were out of work, and slavery threatened to rend the nation in two. The Panic of 1837 drew forth reformers who, animated by self-reliance, became prophets of a new moral order that would make America great again. Philip Gura captures a Romantic moment that was soon overtaken by civil war and postwar pragmatism.
Author: Steven Pinker
Author: Jonathan Reckford
Author: Robert C. Plumb
Author: Sadie Keller
Author: Jon Meacham
Author: Hank Davis
Author: Bette Bono
Author: Michael A. Halleran
Author: Greg Stolze
Author: Philip F. Gura