Tales of Life
Steve Jobs was a visionary entrepreneur who contributed immeasurably to information technology, changing not only the way we do business but also the way we communicate and share information. His company, Apple, founded in 1976 with Steve Wozniak, eventually launched the Macintosh computer in 1984, with a graphical user interface that competed with the early versions of Microsoft Windows.
This reference biography sheds light on Jobs's departure from Apple in 1985, his extraordinary comeback in 1997, and his innovations in the meantime, which included the founding of the computer animation company Pixar. Jobs and Apple went on to launch the iPod, iTunes, the iPhone, and the iPad. Author Michael Becraft has distilled the vast literature on Jobs into a concise but vivid portrait of the man, his vision, the controversies that have swirled around him, and his lasting impact on business, culture, and society.
Arranged chronologically, the book includes extensive primary sources and is written to be accessible to a wide range of readers. Additionally, it incorporates images that heighten reader engagement, provides a timeline for referencing Jobs's achievements across his lifetime, and supplies an extensive bibliography for those seeking original source documents.
Essential reading for the 50th anniversary of Springsteen’s seminal album Born to Run, the long-awaited release of Nebraska ’82, and a companion to the acclaimed film Deliver Me from Nowhere, starring Jeremy Allen White and Jeremy Strong, about the writing and recording of Springsteen’s classic Nebraska record.
Following his 2009 Super Bowl halftime performance, Bruce Springsteen privately devoted himself to writing the story of his life. The result is “an utterly unique, endlessly exhilarating, last-chance-power-drive of a memoir” (Rolling Stone) that offers the same honesty, humor, and originality found in his songs.
He describes growing up Catholic in Freehold, New Jersey, amid the poetry, danger, and darkness that fueled his imagination, leading up to the moment he refers to as “The Big Bang”: seeing Elvis Presley’s debut on The Ed Sullivan Show. He vividly recounts his relentless drive to become a musician, his early days as a bar band king in Asbury Park, and the rise of the E Street Band. With disarming candor, he also tells for the first time the story of the personal struggles that inspired his best work.
Rarely has a performer told his own story with such force and sweep. Like many of his songs (“Thunder Road,” “Badlands,” “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” “The River” “Born in the USA,” “The Rising,” and “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” to name just a few), Bruce Springsteen’s autobiography is written with the lyricism of a singular songwriter and the wisdom of a man who has thought deeply about his experiences.
“Both an entertaining account of Springsteen’s marathon race to the top and a reminder that the one thing you can’t run away from is yourself” (Entertainment Weekly), Born to Run is much more than a legendary rock star’s memoir. This book is a “a virtuoso performance, the 508-page equivalent to one of Springsteen and the E Street Band’s famous four-hour concerts: Nothing is left onstage, and diehard fans and first-timers alike depart for home sated and yet somehow already aching for more” (NPR).
A New York Times Bestseller
In the spirit of Steve Jobs and Moneyball, Elon Musk is both an illuminating and authorized look at the extraordinary life of one of Silicon Valley’s most exciting, unpredictable, and ambitious entrepreneurs—a real-life Tony Stark—and a fascinating exploration of the renewal of American invention and its new “makers.”
Elon Musk spotlights the technology and vision of Elon Musk, the renowned entrepreneur and innovator behind SpaceX, Tesla, and SolarCity, who sold one of his Internet companies, PayPal, for $1.5 billion. Ashlee Vance captures the full spectacle and arc of the genius’s life and work, from his tumultuous upbringing in South Africa and flight to the United States to his dramatic technical innovations and entrepreneurial pursuits.
Vance uses Musk’s story to explore one of the pressing questions of our age: can the nation of inventors and creators who led the modern world for a century still compete in an age of fierce global competition? He argues that Musk—one of the most unusual and striking figures in American business history—is a contemporary, visionary amalgam of legendary inventors and industrialists including Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Howard Hughes, and Steve Jobs. More than any other entrepreneur today, Musk has dedicated his energies and his own vast fortune to inventing a future that is as rich and far-reaching as the visionaries of the golden age of science-fiction fantasy.
Thorough and insightful, Elon Musk brings to life a technology industry that is rapidly and dramatically changing by examining the life of one of its most powerful and influential titans.
This inspiring, exquisitely observed memoir finds hope and beauty in the face of insurmountable odds as an idealistic young neurosurgeon attempts to answer the question, What makes a life worth living?
“Unmissable . . . Finishing this book and then forgetting about it is simply not an option.”—Janet Maslin, The New York Times
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, People, NPR, The Washington Post, Slate, Harper’s Bazaar, Time Out New York, Publishers Weekly, BookPage
An Oprah Daily Best Nonfiction Book of the Past Two Decades • A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Century
At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a naïve medical student “possessed,” as he wrote, “by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life” into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, the most critical place for human identity, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality.
What makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when the future, no longer a ladder toward your goals in life, flattens out into a perpetual present? What does it mean to have a child, to nurture a new life as another fades away? These are some of the questions Kalanithi wrestles with in this profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir.
Paul Kalanithi died in March 2015, while working on this book, yet his words live on as a guide and a gift to us all. “I began to realize that coming face to face with my own mortality, in a sense, had changed nothing and everything,” he wrote. “Seven words from Samuel Beckett began to repeat in my head: ‘I can’t go on. I’ll go on.’” When Breath Becomes Air is an unforgettable, life-affirming reflection on the challenge of facing death and on the relationship between doctor and patient, from a brilliant writer who became both.
Finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction and the Books for a Better Life Award in Inspirational Memoir
In Jeff Bezos's own words, the core principles and philosophy that have guided him in creating, building, and leading Amazon and Blue Origin.
In this collection of Jeff Bezos's writings—his unique and strikingly original annual shareholder letters, plus numerous speeches and interviews that provide insight into his background, his work, and the evolution of his ideas—you'll gain an insider's view of the why and how of his success. Spanning a range of topics across business and public policy, from innovation and customer obsession to climate change and outer space, this book provides a rare glimpse into how Bezos thinks about the world and where the future might take us.
Written in a direct, down-to-earth style, Invent and Wander offers readers a master class in business values, strategy, and execution:
- The importance of a Day 1 mindset
- Why "it's all about the long term"
- What it really means to be customer obsessed
- How to start new businesses and create significant organic growth in an already successful company
- Why culture is an imperative
- How a willingness to fail is closely connected to innovation
- What the Covid-19 pandemic has taught us
Each insight offers new ways of thinking through today's challenges—and more importantly, tomorrow's—and the never-ending urgency of striving ahead, never resting on one's laurels. Everyone from CEOs of the Fortune 100 to entrepreneurs just setting up shop to the millions who use Amazon's products and services in their homes or businesses will come to understand the principles that have driven the success of one of the most important innovators of our time.
Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos is co-published by PublicAffairs, an imprint of Perseus Books, and Harvard Business Review Press.
Based on thousands of pages from Leonardo’s astonishing notebooks and new discoveries about his life and work, Walter Isaacson weaves a narrative that connects his art to his science. He shows how Leonardo’s genius was based on skills we can improve in ourselves, such as passionate curiosity, careful observation, and an imagination so playful that it flirted with fantasy.
He produced the two most famous paintings in history, The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa. But in his own mind, he was just as much a man of science and technology. With a passion that sometimes became obsessive, he pursued innovative studies of anatomy, fossils, birds, the heart, flying machines, botany, geology, and weaponry. His ability to stand at the crossroads of the humanities and the sciences, made iconic by his drawing of Vitruvian Man, made him history’s most creative genius.
His creativity, like that of other great innovators, came from having wide-ranging passions. He peeled flesh off the faces of cadavers, drew the muscles that move the lips, and then painted history’s most memorable smile. He explored the math of optics, showed how light rays strike the cornea, and produced illusions of changing perspectives in The Last Supper. Isaacson also describes how Leonardo’s lifelong enthusiasm for staging theatrical productions informed his paintings and inventions.
Leonardo’s delight at combining diverse passions remains the ultimate recipe for creativity. So, too, does his ease at being a bit of a misfit: illegitimate, gay, vegetarian, left-handed, easily distracted, and at times heretical. His life should remind us of the importance of instilling, both in ourselves and our children, not just received knowledge but a willingness to question it—to be imaginative and, like talented misfits and rebels in any era, to think different.
Winner of 5 national awards, Recipes for a Sacred Life is now available in a new, expanded edition.
"Recipes for a Sacred Life left us moved—and changed. Wise, poignant, funny, and inspiring."—Redbook
ON A DARK WINTER NIGHT with little to do, Rivvy Neshama took a "Find Your Highest Purpose" quiz. And the funny thing was, she found it: to live a sacred life. Problem was, she didn't know how.
But she set out to learn. And in the weeks and months that followed, she began to remember and encounter all the people and experiences featured in this book-from her father's jokes to her mother's prayers, from Billie in Harlem to a stranger in Salzburg, and from warm tortillas to the humble oatmeal. Each became a story, like a recipe passed down, beginning with her mother and her simple toast to life.
NESHAMA'S TRUE TALES, a memoir of sorts, are filled with love, warmth, and timeless wisdom. They ground us, and they lift us up. They make us laugh, and they make us cry. And most of all, they connect us more deeply with the grace and meaning of our lives.
"Exquisite storytelling. Written in the spirit of Elizabeth Gilbert or Anne Lamott, Neshama's stories (and a few miracles) are uplifting, witty, and wise." —Publishers Weekly
"Rivvy's bite-sized stories will make you nod with deepest knowing. It's a magical companion."—HuffPost
"Wouldn't it be wonderful if there was a guide to happiness? Recipes for a Sacred Life is the closest thing I've found. Powerful. Inspiring. About adding love and joy to the everyday."—First for Women magazine
Why is Miami…Miami? What does the heartbreaking fate of the cheetah tell us about the way we raise our children? Why do Ivy League schools care so much about sports? What is the Magic Third, and what does it mean for racial harmony? In this provocative new work, Malcolm Gladwell returns for the first time in twenty-five years to the subject of social epidemics and tipping points, this time with the aim of explaining the dark side of contagious phenomena.
Through a series of riveting stories, Gladwell traces the rise of a new and troubling form of social engineering. He takes us to the streets of Los Angeles to meet the world’s most successful bank robbers, rediscovers a forgotten television show from the 1970s that changed the world, visits the site of a historic experiment on a tiny cul-de-sac in northern California, and offers an alternate history of two of the biggest epidemics of our day: COVID and the opioid crisis. Revenge of the Tipping Point is Gladwell’s most personal book yet. With his characteristic mix of storytelling and social science, he offers a guide to making sense of the contagions of modern world. It’s time we took tipping points seriously.
Most Anticipated in:
AARP| Associated Press| Time Magazine | Oprah Daily | Chicago Tribune | Literary Hub |
Publishers Weekly | Publishers Lunch
THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER AND SUNDAY TIMES, OBSERVER AND BBC HISTORY BOOK OF THE YEAR
FINALIST FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL WRITING 2022
'Pacey and potentially revolutionary' Sunday Times
'Iconoclastic and irreverent ... an exhilarating read' The Guardian
For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike - either free and equal, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a reaction to indigenous critiques of European society, and why they are wrong. In doing so, they overturn our view of human history, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery and civilization itself.
Drawing on path-breaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we begin to see what's really there. If humans did not spend 95 per cent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful possibilities than we tend to assume.
The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision and faith in the power of direct action.
'This is not a book. This is an intellectual feast' Nassim Nicholas Taleb
'The most profound and exciting book I've read in thirty years' Robin D. G. Kelley
The greatest immigrant success story of our time. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s story is unique—and uniquely entertaining—and he tells it brilliantly in these pages.
He was born in a year of famine in a small Austrian town, the son of an austere police chief. He dreamed of moving to America to become a bodybuilding champion and a movie star. By the age of twenty-one, he was living in Los Angeles and had been crowned Mr. Universe. Within five years, he had learned English and become the greatest bodybuilder in the world. Within ten years, he had earned his college degree and was a millionaire from his business enterprises in real estate, landscaping, and bodybuilding. He was also the winner of a Golden Globe Award for his debut as a dramatic actor in Stay Hungry. Within twenty years, he was the world’s biggest movie star, the husband of Maria Shriver, and an emerging Republican leader who was part of the Kennedy family. Thirty-six years after coming to America, the man once known by fellow bodybuilders as the Austrian Oak was elected governor of California.
Now, with raw honesty and insight, he tells the story of his life in his own voice. Here is Arnold, with total recall.
For ten months the ice-moored Endurance drifted northwest before it was finally crushed. But for Shackleton and his crew of twenty-seven men the ordeal had barely begun. It would end only after a near-miraculous journey by Shackleton and a skeleton crew through over 850 miles of the South Atlantic’s heaviest seas to the closest outpost of civilization.
This astonishing tale of survival by Shackleton and all twenty-seven of his men for over a year on the ice-bound Antarctic seas, as Time magazine put it, “defined heroism.” Alfred Lansing’s brilliantly narrated book has long been acknowledged as the definitive account of the Endurance’s fateful trip.
New York Times Bestseller
Like Bridget Jones’ Diary but all true— a wildly funny, occasionally heartbreaking coming-of-age memoir from the funny, sharp British journalist and podcast host, who Elizabeth Gilbert calls “a sparkling Roman candle of talent.”
“The older you get, the more baggage you carry. When you date at twenty-five, everyone walks into the bar with a very neat, light carry-on. When you date from thirty onwards, get ready to meet someone absolutely brimming with history, complications and demands.”
When it comes to the trials and triumphs of becoming an adult, writer Dolly Alderton has seen and tried it all. In her memoir, she vividly recounts falling in love, finding a job, getting drunk, getting dumped, and that absolutely no one can ever compare to her best girlfriends. Everything I Know About Love is about bad dates, good friends and—above all else— realizing that you are enough.
Glittering with wit and insight, heart and humor, Dolly Alderton’s unforgettable debut memoir about navigating your twenties weaves together personal stories, satirical observations, a series of lists, recipes, and other vignettes that will strike a chord of recognition with women of every age.
Perfect for fans of Nora Ephron and Caitlin Moran, this book is a hilarious and heartfelt look at the messiness of growing up:
- Female Friendship: A loving celebration of the ride-or-die girlfriends who get you through bad dates, terrible jobs, and the times you forget that you are enough.
- Relatable Humor: Dolly Alderton’s wildly funny and painfully honest stories of getting drunk, getting dumped, and figuring it all out will have you laughing with recognition.
- Dating Disasters: From MSN Messenger flirtations to disastrous first dates, a sharp and witty look at the trials and triumphs of looking for love in all the wrong places.
- Humorous Memoir: More than just stories, this debut includes satirical observations, lists, and even recipes for when your heart (or head) is aching.
The Defining Decade has changed the way millions of twentysomethings think about their twenties—and themselves. Revised and reissued for a new generation, let it change how you think about you and yours.
Our "thirty-is-the-new-twenty" culture tells us the twentysomething years don't matter. Some say they are an extended adolescence. Others call them an emerging adulthood. In The Defining Decade, Meg Jay argues that twentysomethings have been caught in a swirl of hype and misinformation, much of which has trivialized the most transformative time of our lives.
Drawing from more than two decades of work with thousands of clients and students, Jay weaves the latest science of the twentysomething years with behind-closed-doors stories from twentysomethings themselves. The result is a provocative read that provides the tools necessary to take the most of your twenties, and shows us how work, relationships, personality, identity and even the brain can change more during this decade than at any other time in adulthood—if we use the time well.
Also included in this updated edition:
- Up-to-date research on work, love, the brain, friendship, technology, and fertility
- What a decade of device use has taught us about looking at friends—and looking for love—online
- 29 conversations to have with your partner—or to keep in mind as you search for one
- A social experiment in which "digital natives" go without their phones
- A Reader's Guide for book clubs, classrooms, or further self-reflection