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Next Play by Alan Stein Jr. Improve Team Performance, Productivity, and Fulfillment

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What's it about? Next Play (2025) introduces a simple mindset shift for personal and professional growth: what just happened matters less than what you’re doing right now. It presents practical strategies across seven key areas – from building self-awareness and developing an abundance mindset to mastering basics and strengthening relationships. Rather than chasing external achievements, it shows how fulfillment comes from making intentional daily choices. As a basketball performance coach, Alan Stein has worked with some of the world’s top athletes. Along the way, he discovered a simple philosophy that changed everything: the Next Play mindset. In short, what you’ve just done isn’t nearly as important as what you’re doing right now. The most important moment is always the next one. Stein first witnessed this in action at DeMatha Catholic High School. When star player Quinn Cook transferred unexpectedly, everyone expected disaster. Instead, coach Mike Jones focused on the next p...
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Authoritarianism by James Loxton A Very Short Introduction

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What's it about? Authoritarianism (2024) is your guide to non-democratic regimes, whether military, single-party, or personalist political systems. It draws on global examples from Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East. You’ll discover how such regimes emerge through coups or democratic breakdown, how they stay in power, and under what conditions they give way to democracy. When Karl Marx wrote in 1848 that “a spectre is haunting Europe,” he was announcing communism’s arrival as a revolutionary force threatening the old order. Today, a different spectre haunts the globe: authoritarianism. The warning signs are everywhere. Donald Trump’s 2016 election and the January 6th, 2021 storming of the U. S. Capitol suggested American democracy might be sliding toward authoritarian rule. Meanwhile, in Hungary, Viktor Orbán has systematically dismantled judicial independence and press freedom, transforming a post-communist democracy into what he calls an “illiberal state. ...
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The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World by Edward Shepherd Creasy From Marathon to Waterloo

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What's it about? The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World (1851) takes us from ancient Athens to the Napoleonic Era, explaining how a handful of conflicts shaped history and set the stage for the modern world. It offers a strong, understandable narrative for European development and the military strategy that changed its trajectory over the years. What makes a battle decisive? In this lesson of a classic book from the nineteenth century, a decisive battle is one that changed the course of history. There was the narrative before the battle, and then the new narrative that came afterward. These were the military conflicts that caused empires to crumble, nations to be born, and inspired people to forge a new identity. That’s what you call a decisive battle. By focusing on fifteen different battles, we’re going to chart the history of Europe, from Athens to Waterloo, and follow a narrative that goes from ancient empires to the start of a more peaceful coexistence among neighbors. It...
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The Balancing Act by Nedra Glover Tawwab Creating Healthy Dependency and Connection Without Losing Yourself

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What's it about? The Balancing Act (2026) blends psychological insight with practical guidance to help readers understand and cultivate healthy dependency and connection without losing their sense of self. It explores how to navigate relationship dynamics –⁠ specifically codependency and counter-dependency –⁠ in order to build more authentic, balanced connections and foster both closeness and independence. Every morning, a small voice calls out: “Mom, I need help!” For the author, Nedra Glover Tawwab, these words from her daughter represent something profound: the healthy ability to ask for support. It’s a skill many of us never learned. Perhaps you pride yourself on handling everything alone. Or maybe you lean so heavily on others that you’ve lost touch with your own inner compass. Either way, you’re caught in a dependency crisis that’s silently eroding your relationships and well-being. In this lesson, you’ll discover why both extremes –⁠ doing everything yourself and relyin...
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Well Endowed by Vivian Tu The Secrets to Strategic Spending, Building a Financial Foundation for You and Your Family, and Creating Lasting Generational Wealth

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What's it about? Well Endowed (2026) offers a practical road map to successfully navigating all of life’s financial challenges. Uncovering how everyday spending choices impact long-term stability, and how much insurance or retirement savings you really need, it offers down-to-earth advice for everyone looking to keep their financial house in order for a lifetime and beyond. The idea of creating sustainable, generational wealth right now might seem like a pipe dream for anyone not already sitting in the top one percent. But real wealth, the kind that comes from having what you need and doing what you love, isn’t a dream: it is achievable no matter where you are right now in your financial journey. And whether you take home millions or minimum wage, you can still make choices that increase your financial security in the long term, and even help the next generation on their road to success. This lesson doesn’t promise to make you a millionaire overnight, but it will walk you through ...
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The Only Cure by Mark Solms Freud and the Neuroscience of Mental Healing

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What's it about? The Only Cure (2026), reexamines one of the most controversial figures in the history of science and finds that the case against him was aimed at the wrong target. It argues that while Sigmund Freud's theories were flawed and of their time, the method he built around them remains uniquely equipped to address the kind of suffering that conventional psychiatry fails to cure. For more than half a century, one of medicine's most powerful ideas has been dismissed as unscientific. Since the latter-half of the Twentieth-Century, the work of pioneering psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud was abandoned as unverifiable in clinical settings. What replaced it as a treatment for mental disorders is faster, cheaper, and measurable. It is also, for a significant class of human suffering, not helpful. Some patients find their lives and health unraveling despite seeking medication and cognitive-behavioral therapies. They may develop chronic pain conditions, autoimmunity, heart ...
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