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List: 2025 Staff Favorites: Adult Nonfiction
The Book of Alchemy
From the time she was young, Suleika Jaouad has kept a journal. She's used it to mark life's biggest occasions and to weather its most ferocious storms. Journaling has buoyed her through illness, heartbreak, and the deepest uncertainty. And she is not alone: For so many people, keeping a journal is an essential tool for navigating both the personal peaks and valleys and the collective challenges of modern life. More than ever, we need a space for puzzling through. In [this book], Jaouad explores the art of journaling and shares everything she's learned about how this life-altering practice can help us tap into that mystical, seemingly divine trait that exists in every human: creativity. She has gathered wisdom from one hundred writers, artists, and thinkers, including Hanif Abdurraqib, Jon Batiste, Elizabeth Gilbert, Salman Rushdie, Gloria Steinem, George Saunders, and Jia Tolentino. Their insights invite us to inhabit a more inspired life ... Whether you're a lifelong journaler or new to the practice, this book gives you the tools, direction, and encouragement to engage with discomfort, ask questions, peel back the layers, dream daringly, uncover your truest self, and, in doing so, learn to hold the unbearably brutal and astonishingly beautiful facts of life in the same palm.
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Careless People
An insider account charting one woman's career at the heart of one of the most influential companies on the planet, Careless People gives you a front-row seat to Facebook, the decisions that have shaped world events in recent decades, and the people who made them.
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The CIA Book Club
Recounts a covert Cold War operation led by George Minden to smuggle banned literature into Eastern Europe, focusing on the cultural and psychological battle against Soviet censorship and the role underground reading networks played in weakening totalitarian control, especially in Poland.
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Cults Like Us
An author and culture journalist argues that doomsday beliefs, deeply rooted in American history, have shaped the nation's culture, from its fascination with heroism and consumerism to its susceptibility to cult-like thinking and strongman leaders.
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Everything is Tuberculosis
Tuberculosis has been entwined with humanity for millennia. Once romanticized as a malady of poets, today tuberculosis is seen as a disease of poverty that walks the trails of injustice and inequity we blazed for it. In 2019, author John Green met Henry Reider, a young tuberculosis patient at Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone. John became fast friends with Henry, a boy with spindly legs and a big, goofy smile. In the years since that first visit to Lakka, Green has become a vocal advocate for increased access to treatment and wider awareness of the healthcare inequities that allow this curable, preventable infectious disease to also be the deadliest, killing over a million people every year. In Everything is Tuberculosis, John tells Henry's story, woven through with the scientific and social histories of how tuberculosis has shaped our world--and how our choices will shape the future of tuberculosis.
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Godstruck
In recent decades, Americans have become less likely to identify with any organized religion. Yet 70 percent of U.S. adults describe themselves as spiritual in some way or say that spirituality is very important in their lives. In an era marked by atomization, polarization, and rapid change, the enduring questions of how to find community and purpose and live a meaningful life haven't gone away-they've become more urgent and crucial. In Godstruck, Kelsey Osgood profiles seven young women from various backgrounds-some raised firmly atheist, others agnostic or religious-charting independent paths into organized religion in adulthood and wrestling with the complexities of their choices. From Angela, a data-driven writer and journalist who finds herself undeniably drawn to Quaker meetings, to Hana, whose conversion to Islam leads her halfway around the world, to Christina, whose Amish faith transforms her relationship to modernity, these women's unexpected revelations introduce them to new and sometimes radically different ways of living. Along the way, Osgood charts a fascinating course through a wide range of cultural, historical, and psychological references-from Saint Augustine, Simone Weil, and Tolstoy to desert hermits, Alcoholics Anonymous, and contemporary feminism-to explore some of our various attempts to understand and cope with the human condition. Driven by a profound curiosity and anchored by intimate reporting and Osgood's own transformative conversion experience, Godstruck is a provocative, insightful, and refreshingly nuanced exploration of both the joys and the challenges of faith that reveals what these seekers can teach us about modern life and our own search for meaning.
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A Marriage at Sea
The electrifying true story of a young couple shipwrecked at sea: a mind-blowing tale of obsession, survival, and partnership stretched to its limits. Maurice and Maralyn make an odd couple. He's a loner, awkward and obsessive; she's charismatic and ambitious. But they share a horror of wasting their lives. And they dream--as we all dream--of running away from it all. What if they quit their jobs, sold their house, bought a boat, and sailed away? Most of us begin and end with the daydream. But Maurice began to study nautical navigation. Maralyn made detailed lists of provisions. And in June 1972, they set sail. For nearly a year all went well, until deep in the Pacific, a breaching whale knocked a hole in their boat and it sank beneath the waves. What ensues is a jaw-dropping fight to survive on the wild ocean, with little hope of rescue. Alone together for months in a tiny rubber raft, starving and exhausted, Maurice and Maralyn have to find not only ways to stay alive but ways to get along, as their inner demons emerge and their marriage is put to the greatest of tests. Although they could run away from the world, they can't run away from themselves.
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The Mind Electric
A feminist view of the intimate stranger that is the brain, and an overdue reckoning with the misogyny and racism within neuroscience.
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Mornings Without Mii
A beloved Japanese modern classic that chronicles the author's twenty-year bond with her cat, meditating on solitude, independence, and the writing life.
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This American Woman
Award-winning comedian Zarna Garg turns her astonishing life story into a hilarious memoir-from narrowly escaping an arranged marriage and homelessness in India to carving her own path in America and launching a dazzling second act in midlife.
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