How We Walk

Captivating and heart-wrenching from start to finish When Emily was a little girl, all she wanted to be when she grew up was a Full-Time Pioneer; in her Jehovah’s Witness family, the only imaginable future is a life of knocking on doors and handing out Watchtower magazines. But Emily starts to challenge her upbringing. She becomes closer to her closeted uncle, Tyler, as her older sister, Lenora, hangs out with boys, wears makeup, and gets a startling new haircut. After Lenora disappears, everything changes for Emily, and as she deals with her mental devastation she is forced to consider a different future. Alternating between Emily’s life as a child and her adult life in the city, Watch How We Walk offers a haunting, cutting exploration of “disfellowshipping,” proselytization, and cultural abstinence, as well as the Jehovah’s Witness attitude towards the “worldlings” outside of their faith. Sparse, vivid, suspenseful, and darkly humorous, Jennifer LoveGrove’s debut novel is an emotional and visceral look inside an isolationist religion through the eyes of the unforgettable Emily.

A moving story of father-son reconciliation told by a charismatic aboriginal star When his father was given a diagnosis of terminal cancer, Winnipeg broadcaster and musician Wab Kinew decided to spend a year reconnecting with the accomplished but distant aboriginal man who’d raised him. The Reason You Walk spans that 2012 year, chronicling painful moments in the past and celebrating renewed hopes and dreams for the future. As Kinew revisits his own childhood in Winnipeg and on a reserve in Northern Ontario, he learns more about his father's traumatic childhood at residential school. An intriguing doubleness marks The Reason You Walk, itself a reference to an Anishinaabe ceremonial song. Born to an Anishinaabe father and a non-native mother, he has a foot in both cultures. He is a Sundancer, an academic, a former rapper, a hereditary chief and an urban activist. His father, Tobasonakwut, was both a beloved traditional chief and a respected elected leader who engaged directly with Ottawa. Internally divided, his father embraced both traditional native religion and Catholicism, the religion that was inculcated into him at the residential school where he was physically and sexually abused. In a grand gesture of reconciliation, Kinew's father invited the Roman Catholic bishop of Winnipeg to a Sundance ceremony in which he adopted him as his brother. Kinew writes affectingly of his own struggles in his twenties to find the right path, eventually giving up a self-destructive lifestyle to passionately pursue music and martial arts. From his unique vantage point, he offers an inside view of what it means to be an educated aboriginal living in a country that is just beginning to wake up to its aboriginal history and living presence. Invoking hope, healing and forgiveness, The Reason You Walk is a poignant story of a towering but damaged father and his son as they embark on a journey to repair their family bond. By turns lighthearted and solemn, Kinew gives us an inspiring vision for family and cross-cultural reconciliation, and for a wider conversation about the future of aboriginal peoples.

The first book in the Mindfulness Essentials Series by Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, How to Sit offers clear, simple directions and inspiration for anyone wanting to explore mindfulness meditation. In short, single-paragraph chapters, Nhat Hanh shares detailed instructions, guided breathing exercises and visualizations, as well as his own personal stories and insights. This pocket-sized book is perfect for those brand new to sitting meditation as well as for those looking to deepen their spiritual practice. With sumi ink drawings by Jason DeAntonis.

"In this fascinating and wide-ranging book, Beaumont reminds us that walking is far from a neutral activity. With the help of Frantz Fanon, Beaumont locates freedom at the level of the body; free from the systems of oppression, exploitation, and harassment." –Lauren Elkin, author of Flâneuse How race, class, and politics influence the way we move You can tell a lot about people by how they walk. Matthew Beaumont argues that our standing, walking body holds the social traumas of history and its racialized inequalities. Our posture and gait reflect our social and political experiences as we navigate the city under capitalism. Through a series of dialogues with thinkers and walkers, his book explores the relationship between freedom and the human body How We Walk foregrounds the work of Frantz Fanon, psychiatrist and leading thinker of liberation, who was one of the first people to think about the politics of ‘walking while black’. It also introduces us to the renegade psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, who wrote that one could discern the truth about a person through their posture and gait. For Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch, the ability to walk upright and with ease is a sign of personal and social freedom. Through these excursions, Beaumont reimagines the canonical literature on walking and presents a new interpretation of the impact of class and race on our physical and political mobility, raising important questions about the politics of the body.

52 Ways to Walk is a short, user-friendly guide to attaining the full range of benefits that walking has to offer--physical, spiritual, and emotional--backed by the latest scientific research to inspire readers to develop a fulfilling walking lifestyle. We think we know how to walk. After all, walking is one of the very first skills we learn. But many of us are stuck in our walking routines, forever walking in the same place, in the same way, for the same time, with the same people. With its thought-provoking and evidence-backed weekly walk routine, 52 Ways to Walk will encourage everyone to improve how they walk, while also encouraging them to seek out new locations (many on their own doorsteps), new walking companions (our brains age better when we mix up our fellow walkers), new times of the day and night, and new skills to acquire while walking. Inspirational, backed by science, illuminated with human anecdote, and bolstered with how-to tips, 52 Ways to Walk will inspire, challenge, support, and encourage everyone to become more ambitious with their walking practice, revealing how walking may be the best-kept secret of the supremely healthy and happy, the creative and well-slept--those with the best posture and sharpest memories. Just about everything, it appears, can be improved and enhanced by clever and judicious walking. It turns out you actually can get more from life, one step at a time.

The 1950s queer-life groundbreaker by “a literary pioneer . . . [who] forever changed perceptions of same-sex love and desire” (Advocate.com). Ann Aldrich flung a provocative assertion at her readers in 1955 when she opened her landmark account of lesbian life in New York City by saying this book was the “result of fifteen years of participation in society as a female homosexual.” After the release of We Walk Alone, Aldrich became both a heroine and a scapegoat in some of the period’s most contentious public debates over what exactly “lesbian culture” was. Her non-fiction pulp literally transformed the landscape overnight, and “the effect on women was electric. From every corner of creation, they wrote wrenching letters of relief and gratitude” (Ann Bannon, author of The Beebo Brinker Chronicles). Part Kinsey-esque portraits of real people, part you-are-there reports on the scene in bars and offices and at clubs and house parties, We Walk Alone is revealing and compelling composite of an alienated yet amazingly self-aware community—one that Aldrich would revisit three years later in We, Too, Must Love. Today, “these essential cultural artifacts” (UTNE Magazine), as Stephanie Foote explains in her afterword, are “as rich and conflicted a look at the formation of lesbian urban culture as that of any contemporary queer historian.”

One morning in 2011, Libby DeLana stepped outside her New England home for a walk. She did the same thing the next day, and the next. It became a daily habit that has culminated in her walking over 25,000 miles - the equivalent of the earth's circumference. In Do Walk, Libby shares the transformative nature of this simple yet powerful practice. She reveals how walking each day provides the time and space to reconnect with the world around us; process thoughts; improve our physical wellbeing; and unlock creativity. It is the ultimate navigational tool that helps us to see who we are - beyond titles and labels, and where we want to go. With stunning photography, this inspiring and reflective guide is an invitation to step outside, and see where the path takes us.

A breathtaking, suspenseful story of one man’s obsessive search to find the truth of another man’s downfall, from the author of The King Is Always Above the People, which was longlisted for the 2017 National Book Award for Fiction. Nelson’s life is not turning out the way he hoped. His girlfriend is sleeping with another man, his brother has left their South American country, leaving Nelson to care for their widowed mother, and his acting career can’t seem to get off the ground. That is, until he lands a starring role in a touring revival of The Idiot President, a legendary play by Nelson’s hero, Henry Nunez, leader of the storied guerrilla theater troupe Diciembre. And that’s when the real trouble begins. The tour takes Nelson out of the shelter of the city and across a landscape he’s never seen, which still bears the scars of the civil war. With each performance, Nelson grows closer to his fellow actors, becoming hopelessly entangled in their complicated lives, until, during one memorable performance, a long-buried betrayal surfaces to force the troupe into chaos. Nelson’s fate is slowly revealed through the investigation of the narrator, a young man obsessed with Nelson’s story—and perhaps closer to it than he lets on. In sharp, vivid, and beautiful prose, Alarcón delivers a compulsively readable narrative and a provocative meditation on fate, identity, and the large consequences that can result from even our smallest choices.