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Self-Help from the Middle Ages by Peter Jones What the Seven Deadly Sins Can Teach Us about Living

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What's it about? Self-Help from the Middle Ages (2026) explores how medieval ideas about sin, confession, and moral struggle can illuminate modern problems such as anxiety, envy, burnout, and self-control. Using the seven deadly sins as a framework, it connects historical beliefs about the mind and soul with practical reflections on temptation, guilt, desire, and change. Most of us think of the seven deadly sins as relics of medieval religion – maybe a little dramatic, maybe even a little comic. But for medieval thinkers, they were something far more practical: a map of the mind. Pride, envy, anger, sloth, avarice, gluttony, and lust were ways of naming the habits that pull you away from other people, from reality, and from yourself. What makes this old system surprisingly useful is that it doesn’t treat human weakness as strange or shameful. It assumes that everyone struggles with thoughts and feelings that aren’t always constructive. The goal is to notice what’s happening insid...
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Stop Letting Everything Affect You by Daniel Chidiac How to Break Free from Overthinking, Emotional Chaos, and Self-Sabotage

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What's it about? Stop Letting Everything Affect You (2025) is for anyone exhausted by overthinking and emotional chaos. It reveals why small situations trigger overwhelming reactions and provides practical tools to defend your inner calm. By learning emotional detachment, setting firm boundaries, and practicing daily gratitude, it shows you how to finally take back control. One moment you’re convinced you’ve finally got it together. The next? Everything feels like it’s collapsing. You mentally return to conversations you’d like to rewrite. You brace for stress that hasn’t arrived. You carry burdens not meant for you. The smallest change in circumstance derails you. Deep down, you know the real problem has nothing to do with other people. It's not those who’ve harmed you, disappointed you, or withheld appreciation. The truth is more unsettling: you’ve allowed every circumstance and every person access to your inner calm. It’s the relentless self-judgment that has become the ...
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Make Your Brain Work by Amy Brann Perform at a Higher Level

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What's it about? Make Your Brain Work (2013) is a practical guide to understanding the brain's key systems and how they shape focus, habits, and decision-making. Grounded in neuroscience, it shows how working with your brain's natural architecture rather than against it can transform productivity, emotional regulation, and goal achievement. Modern life is full of distractions. There’s the twenty-four-hour news cycle, endless social media feeds, overflowing inboxes, and meetings that probably should have been emails. Add in the unpredictable demands of work, family, and everyday life, and it’s no wonder focus can feel impossible and chaos often seems like the default. So how do you build the career, habits, and life you want amid all that daily noise? The answer lies in your brain. Far from working against you, your brain is an incredibly sophisticated system designed to help you adapt, learn, and thrive. When you understand how its networks and processes operate, you can...
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Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis Timeless reflections in defense of Christianity

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What's it about? Mere Christianity (1952) is one of the most famous and influential apologetics for the Christian faith ever written. Compiled from C.S. Lewis’s legendary World War II radio broadcasts, it brings together a series of timeless reflections designed to explain and defend Christianity. Mere Christianity outlines Lewis’s arguments for the truth of the Christian doctrine. It also explores what Christian life involves and why Lewis thinks we’re all better off as Christians. When C.S. Lewis first presented these reflections to the British public over the radio in 1942, Britain was at war. It was an uncertain moment in the history of the nation. The country had been living under the threat of invasion for over two years. And British citizens had just witnessed the horror of the blitz. It was under these trying circumstances, when public morale was at its absolute lowest, that Lewis delivered these broadcasts on faith and morality. It might have seemed strange, in the mids...
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Positively Energizing Leadership by Kim Cameron Virtuous Actions and Relationships That Create High Performance

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What's it about? Positively Energizing Leadership (2022) offers organization leaders and workers a practical guide to understanding and harnessing the power of positively energizing characteristics and interpersonal approaches. With empirical data and how-to advice, it aims to boost innovation, profits, and compassion in the workplace and at home. We live in serious times. Society is riddled by fear, mistrust, racial injustice, climate disasters, and the shadow of the Covid-19 pandemic – all of which have sowed a climate of violence, outrage, and conflict. As a result of this culture of despair, the power of positive thinking has mushroomed as an industry. There are thousands of books out there promising to guide you to happiness, and each year more and more are published. But the problem with what Kim Cameron calls “happiology” is that it encourages us to put a smile on our faces while inside, our teeth are gritted and our jaws are clenched. The thing is, all lives are comple...
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Starry Messenger by Neil deGrasse Tyson Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization

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What's it about? Starry Messenger (2022) is about a way of looking at the world called the cosmic perspective. It’s the view that opens up when we think about human life in its largest possible context – that of the universe itself. This isn’t an exercise in making our worldly affairs seem small and trivial, though. It’s about unlocking insights that can help us live more happily and meaningfully on the cosmic anomaly we call Earth. People are fed up with experts. That was the recent verdict of the British politician Michael Gove. What people want, he implied, is more feeling. Less weighing of the evidence and more gut instinct. As a recipe for politics, that statement met with lots of opposition. As a description of what’s actually happening, though, it hit the nail on the head. We live in an age of hyperpartisanship and culture wars. Reasoned debate is out; emotive shouting matches are in. The backlash against experts has generated its own backlash: a pro-expert faction tha...
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