Who helped you become the person you are today? And, have you ever thanked them? Approaching a milestone birthday, Kho decided to send thank-you letters to the many people who had influenced her, helped her, and inspired her over the years: family, friends, mentors, teachers, co-workers, even exes. Her recipients always seemed genuinely pleased to read the letters, but Kho never expected the profound and positive effect the process would have on her. Here she shows how to appreciate the formative people in your life, past and present– and perhaps create a lasting increase in your happiness levels. — adapted from back cover.
Adult
Acting on Faith: stories of courage, activism, and hope across religions
Different faiths, shared hopes. Are we more alike than we know? In 30 first-person stories from eight different faith traditions, hear from people whose faith inspires acts of justice and love amidst our world’s violence and divisions. Gain a deeper understanding of the diverse beliefs practiced by your neighbors and our shared hopes for building a better world. Reflection questions with each chapter make this book perfect for small group study or read as a private devotional. Acting on Faith inspires hope and encourages personal action through concrete examples of faithfulness, justice, and love from those on the front lines of activism and advocacy.
The Power Worshippers: inside the dangerous rise of religious nationalism
For too long the Religious Right has masqueraded as a social movement preoccupied with a number of cultural issues, such as abortion and same-sex marriage. In her deeply reported investigation, Katherine Stewart reveals a disturbing truth: this is a political movement that seeks to gain power and to impose its vision on all of society. America’s religious nationalists aren’t just fighting a culture war, they are waging a political war on the norms and institutions of American democracy. Stewart pulls back the curtain on the inner workings and leading personalities of a movement that has turned religion into a tool for domination. She exposes a dense network of think tanks, advocacy groups, and pastoral organizations embedded in a rapidly expanding community of international alliances and united not by any central command but by a shared, anti-democratic vision and a common will to power. She follows the money that fuels this movement, tracing much of it to a cadre of super-wealthy, ultraconservative donors and family foundations. She shows that today’s Christian nationalism is the fruit of a longstanding antidemocratic, reactionary strain of American thought that draws on some of the most troubling episodes in America’s past. It forms common cause with a globe-spanning movement that seeks to destroy liberal democracy and replace it with nationalist, theocratic and autocratic forms of government around the world. Religious nationalism is far more organized and better funded than most people realize. It seeks to control all aspects of government and society. Its successes have been stunning, and its influence now extends to every aspect of American life, from the White House to state capitols, from our schools to our hospitals.
The Sum of the People: how the census has shaped nations, from the ancient world to the modern age
In April 2020, the United States will embark on what has been called “the largest peacetime mobilization in American history”: the decennial population census. It is part of a long, if uneven, tradition of counting people that extends back at least three millennia. Tracing the remarkable history of the census from ancient China, through the Roman Empire, revolutionary America, and Nazi-occupied Europe, right up to today’s Supreme Court battles, The Sum of the People shows how the impulse to count ourselves is universal, how the census has evolved with time, and how it has always profoundly shaped the societies we have built.
As data scientist Andrew Whitby reveals, the earliest censuses in ancient China and the Fertile Crescent had purely extractive aims: taxation and conscription. Later, as Enlightenment-era governments began to answer to citizens, the census was reinvented to support political representation and to delimit the boundaries of new nation-states. As the role of government grew through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, censuses became more complex and scientific. Census bureaus spun out dozens of other surveys, which formed the statistical foundation of modern, technocratic, data-driven government. For the first time, counting every person on the planet became a real possibility-and debates about who was counted, who was not, and what questions they were asked became the subject of intense political controversy in places from Australia to South Africa to the United States. The census at its best is a marvel of democracy, but it has at times been an instrument of exclusion, and, as in the case of Nazi Germany, a tool of tyranny and genocide.
Today, governments and businesses alike now routinely collect “big data” that would have been unimaginable just a few decades ago, prompting fears similar to those the census once provoked and leading to some to suggest that traditional censuses will soon be obsolete. The Sum of the People closes by making the case that, for all its past faults, the census can be an alternative and an antidote to a future of constant, invasive surveillance.
See You on Sunday: a cookbook for family & friends
From the New York Times food editor and former restaurant critic Sam Sifton comes a cookbook to help us rediscover the art of Sunday supper and the joy of gathering with friends and family. It is a guide to preparing meals for groups larger than the average American family (though everything here can be scaled down, or up). The 200 recipes are mostly simple and inexpensive, and they derive from decades spent cooking for family and groups ranging from six to sixty.
Dead Presidents: an American adventure into the strange deaths and surprising afterlives of our nation’s leaders
An exploration of the death stories of American presidents, and the wild ways that have been chosen to memorialize them, shares the surprising origins of landmark monuments and what they reveal about American history and culture.