by Michael Gates Gill (2008)
In his fifties, Michael Gates Gill had it all: a big house, a loving family, and a six-figure salary. By sixty, he had lost everything: downsized at work, divorced at home, and diagnosed with a slow-growing brain tumor, Gill had no money, no insurance, and no prospects. He took a job at Starbucks, and for the first time in his life, he was a minority--the only older white guy working with a team of young African-Americans. He was forced to acknowledge his prejudices and admit that his new job was hard. And his younger coworkers, despite half the education and twice the personal difficulties, were running circles around him. Crossing over the Starbucks bar was the beginning of a transformation that cracked his world wide open. When all of his defenses and the armor of entitlement had been stripped away, a humbler, happier and gentler man remained.--From publisher description.
Barbara Delinsky
Emily Aulenbach is thirty, a lawyer married to a lawyer, working in Manhattan. An idealist, she had once dreamed of representing victims of corporate abuse, but she spends her days in a cubicle talking with victims of tainted bottled water--and she's on the bottler's side.
Heather Swain
Its not often you see an elf in the middle of Brooklyn, let alone a tall, blond, gorgeous elf in the middle of one of the most prestigious performing arts high schools in the country. And yet, thats just where Zephyr Addler finds herself: smack dab in the middle of a bustling New York City school, worlds away from the secluded woodland community she knows so well. But Zephyr knows that she has to figure out how to live in the world. And dress in the world. Thanks to a little friendly advice from her new friend Mercedes, Zephyr starts to get the hang of Brooklyn. That is, until Zephyr snags a role in a commercial, beating out the most popular girl in school, Bella Dartagnan. Now with Bella and her friends out to get her, can Zephyr out-maneuver the mean girls (and catch the eye of a certain cute boy) without losing herself?
Hortense Calisher
One afternoon in the early seventies Carol is sent out for Chinese food, and, while she is away, the explosive device which her revolutionary student friends are busy constructing, accidentally goes off, causing enormous damage. Her friends get away - she is incarcerated. Twenty years later, she has a small, unfurnished flat in New York, a fridge stocked only with the pills supplied by her social worker and an irresistible urge to slip away and live somewhere unencumbered by memories, names and all of her other false possessions. When she finally discovers that even her social worker is taking pills in an attempt to cope with life, Carol gathers a few essential belongings into her backpack and sets off to sleep rough on the city's streets again. Turning away from her dependence on drugs, Carol finds that memories, histories and responsibilities slowly return to her. In the Slammer with Carol Smith is a tough, hip novel by one of America's most outstanding living authors. It has the steady rhythms of the street as well as the haltings and hesitations experienced by the strong yet vulnerable Carol as she rediscovers herself. In fits and starts, the wild terrain of a life spent wandering under distant, unknown stars is mapped out. Carol's journey is both a rediscovery of emotional hiding-places and a search for the path that leads back into a world of normality without illusions and of sanity devoid of compromise.
Gretchen Rubin
In the spirit of her blockbuster #1 New York Times bestseller The Happiness Project, Gretchen Rubin embarks on a new project to make home a happier place. One Sunday afternoon, as she unloaded the dishwasher, Gretchen Rubin felt hit by a wave of homesickness. Homesick—why? She was standing right in her own kitchen. She felt homesick, she realized, with love for home itself. “Of all the elements of a happy life,” she thought, “my home is the most important.” In a flash, she decided to undertake a new happiness project, and this time, to focus on home. And what did she want from her home? A place that calmed her, and energized her. A place that, by making her feel safe, would free her to take risks. Also, while Rubin wanted to be happier at home, she wanted to appreciate how much happiness was there already. So, starting in September (the new January), Rubin dedicated a school year—September through May—to making her home a place of greater simplicity, comfort, and love. In The Happiness Project, she worked out general theories of happiness. Here she goes deeper on factors that matter for home, such as possessions, marriage, time, and parenthood. How can she control the cubicle in her pocket? How might she spotlight her family’s treasured possessions? And it really was time to replace that dud toaster. Each month, Rubin tackles a different theme as she experiments with concrete, manageable resolutions—and this time, she coaxes her family to try some resolutions, as well. With her signature blend of memoir, science, philosophy, and experimentation, Rubin’s passion for her subject jumps off the page, and reading just a few chapters of this book will inspire readers to find more happiness in their own lives.