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Soft by Ferdinand Mount A History of Sentimentality

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What's it about? Soft (2025) traces how feelings have shaped Western civilization across a thousand years, from medieval poetry to contemporary reforms on divorce, gay marriage and abortion. Through vivid historical analysis, this exploration shows how sentimentality in art and culture, despite being dismissed as weak or manipulative, has quietly driven social and political progress. History is made of facts, not feelings – or so we’re told.But what if our sentimentality is more than soppy nonsense? This eye-opening lesson reveals how feelings have been the hidden force behind every major political revolution, from the abolition of slavery to civil rights movements.Spanning a thousand years of Western culture, it takes you from medieval troubadours all the way through to Twitter outrage, showing how each era’s emotional conventions have profoundly influenced everything from art and literature to law and social reform. You’ll discover how troubadours invented love, how tear-jer...
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52 Weeks of Wellbeing by Ryan Hopkins A No-Nonsense Guide to a Fulfilling Work Life

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What's it about? 52 Weeks of Wellbeing (2024) explores how to build a healthier, more fulfilling work life through 52 small, practical changes spread across a year. It focuses on simple, research-backed ideas – like improving boundaries, rest, movement and digital habits – that help people protect their mental health and thrive in modern, high-pressure workplaces. If you feel like life is happening at double speed while your energy runs on half charge, you’re not the only one.Long hours, constant notifications and blurred lines between work and home make it easy to ignore wellbeing until something breaks.Big promises to overhaul everything rarely last, because they demand willpower you simply don’t have at the end of another packed day.So why not try something smaller and more realistic? Instead of one big overhaul, you can treat a series of simple ideas as experiments, giving each one some focused attention for roughly a week, and seeing what happens.Some weeks you tweak your ro...
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Awakening Joy by James Baraz 10 Steps to True Happiness

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What's it about? Awakening Joy (2012) is a guide to training your mind to recognize and cultivate genuine well-being. It offers simple but powerful practices that help you shift out of autopilot and tap into a natural sense of aliveness that already exists within you. The approach blends practical guidance with insights from Buddhist meditation to show how joy becomes more stable when you nurture it from the inside out. Modern life pulls attention in every direction. Mornings blur into a rush of alarms, emails, and misplaced keys, and by lunchtime you may already feel worn thin. Even small joys, like warm sunlight through a window or a friend’s quick message, barely register because your mind is already leaning into whatever is next. It’s easy to assume that lasting joy requires dramatic change, but the real turning point usually begins much closer to home. What’s surprising is that your mind already knows how to make life feel brighter. You can sense it when you slow down enoug...
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The Breath of the Gods by Simon Winchester The History and Future of the Wind

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What's it about? The Breath of the Gods (2025) explores wind as a force that shapes both planetary history and daily human life, from travel and exploration to disasters like hurricanes, wildfires, and storms. It investigates how shifting global wind patterns are intensifying under climate change and examines the tension between wind as a destructive power and as a potential climate savior through renewable energy. Stand outside on what feels like a still day and it’s easy to forget that you live at the bottom of an ocean of air.A dandelion clock shreds in a child’s hand, smoke leans from a chimney, a plastic bag lifts and skims along the pavement – and in each of those small movements, invisible forces are quietly at work.The air around you is a restless medium that connects farms to cities, mountains to oceans, and yesterday’s weather to tomorrow’s headlines.The same moving air that cools your skin, carries the smell of rain, and nudges leaves on a tree can also strip soil from...
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Alpha Girls by Julian Guthrie The Women Upstarts Who Took On Silicon Valley’s Male Culture

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What's it about? Alpha Girls (2019) tells the story of four pioneering women venture capitalists – Magdalena Yesil, Mary Jane Elmore, Theresia Gouw, and Sonja Hoel Perkins – who helped build foundational Silicon Valley companies like Salesforce, Facebook, and McAfee while navigating an industry culture defined by sexism, unequal treatment, and the challenge of being the only women in rooms full of men. These “alpha girls” not only survived but ultimately rewrote the rules of venture capital, creating networks and investment models that opened doors for the next generation of women in tech. Silicon Valley, the 1980s. Among the men making their fortune were four women who would go on to shape the venture capital game. Magdalena Yesil fled Turkey with $43 and became the first investor in Salesforce, inventing the annual contract model that saved the company from bankruptcy during the dot-com crash. Mary Jane Elmore became one of the first female venture capital partners, only to fin...
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The Developing Mind by Daniel J. Siegel How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are

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What's it about? The Developing Mind (1999) provides a comprehensive exploration of how the mind emerges from the intricate interplay of brain, body, and relationships. Weaving together research from several disciplines, it shows how consciousness and identity develop through ongoing neural processes and interpersonal connections, ultimately presenting the mind as both profoundly embodied and relational. Life presents us with endless opportunities to reflect on who we are, why we react the way we do, and how our relationships influence our inner world – yet most of this seems beyond our comprehension.We sense emotions rising and falling, habits pulling us toward default responses, and moments of connection lifting or deflating us, but the underlying mechanisms often remain mysterious.Having a framework to better understand the mind can foster a profound sense of empowerment, and interpersonal neurobiology is one such means. What makes the interpersonal neurobiology perspective ...
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Relationship Currency by Ravi Rajani Five Communication Habits For Limitless Influence and Success

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What's it about? Relationship Currency (2025) presents five communication habits designed to help leaders, salespeople, and entrepreneurs develop meaningful business connections. It provides practical techniques for asking intentional questions, listening deeply, cultivating authentic charisma, and telling compelling stories that inspire action while building trust. Through frameworks grounded in psychology and real-world business experience, it offers a guide for creating lasting professional relationships that drive influence and business success. We’ve been taught that influence is a performance – master the pitch, perfect the handshake, optimize the follow-up cadence.But if you’ve ever walked away from a conversation feeling like something was off, even when the other person said all the right things, you already know the truth.People sense when connection is being manufactured.They might not be able to articulate it, but they feel it. There’s an ingredient missing, and that ...
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