The Second Mountain

NO.1 BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE SOCIAL ANIMAL Are you on your first or second mountain? Is life about you - or others? About success - or something deeper? The world tells us that we should pursue our self-interest: career wins, high status, nice things. These are the goals of our first mountain. But at some point in our lives we might find that we're not interested in what other people tell us to want. We want the things that are truly worth wanting. This is the second mountain. What does it mean to look beyond yourself and find a moral cause? To forget about independence and discover dependence - to be utterly enmeshed in a web of warm relationships? What does it mean to value intimacy, devotion, responsibility and commitment above individual freedom? In The Second Mountain David Brooks explores the meaning and possibilities that scaling a second mountain offer us and the four commitments that most commonly move us there: family, vocation, philosophy and community. Inspiring, personal and full of joy, this book will help you discover why you were really put on this earth.

The author of the acclaimed bestseller Bobos in Paradise, which hilariously described the upscale American culture, takes a witty look at how being American shapes us, and how America's suburban civilization will shape the world's future. Take a look at Americans in their natural habitat. You see suburban guys at Home Depot doing that special manly, waddling walk that American men do in the presence of large amounts of lumber; super-efficient ubermoms who chair school auctions, organize the PTA, and weigh less than their children; workaholic corporate types boarding airplanes while talking on their cell phones in a sort of panic because they know that when the door closes they have to turn their precious phone off and it will be like somebody stepped on their trachea. Looking at all this, you might come to the conclusion that we Americans are not the most profound people on earth. Indeed, there are millions around the world who regard us as the great bimbos of the globe: hardworking and fun, but also materialistic and spiritually shallow. They've got a point. As you drive through the sprawling suburbs or eat in the suburban chain restaurants (which if they merged would be called Chili's Olive Garden Hard Rock Outback Cantina), questions do occur. Are we really as shallow as we look? Is there anything that unites us across the divides of politics, race, class, and geography? What does it mean to be American? Well, mentality matters, and sometimes mentality is all that matters. As diverse as we are, as complacent as we sometimes seem, Americans are united by a common mentality, which we have inherited from our ancestors and pass on, sometimes unreflectingly, to our kids. We are united by future-mindedness. We see the present from the vantage point of the future. We are tantalized, at every second of every day, by the awareness of grand possibilities ahead of us, by the bounty we can realize just over the next ridge. This mentality leads us to work feverishly hard, move more than any other people on earth, switch jobs, switch religions. It makes us anxious and optimistic, manic and discombobulating. Even in the superficiality of modern suburban life, there is some deeper impulse still throbbing in the heart of average Americans. That impulse is the subject of this book.

A Time Magazine 100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time selection!​ A Reader’s Digest Best Children’s Book of All Time​! This stunning fantasy inspired by Chinese folklore is a companion novel to Starry River of the Sky and the New York Times bestselling and National Book Award finalist When the Sea Turned to Silver In the valley of Fruitless mountain, a young girl named Minli lives in a ramshackle hut with her parents. In the evenings, her father regales her with old folktales of the Jade Dragon and the Old Man on the Moon, who knows the answers to all of life's questions. Inspired by these stories, Minli sets off on an extraordinary journey to find the Old Man on the Moon to ask him how she can change her family's fortune. She encounters an assorted cast of characters and magical creatures along the way, including a dragon who accompanies her on her quest for the ultimate answer. Grace Lin, author of the beloved Year of the Dog and Year of the Rat returns with a wondrous story of adventure, faith, and friendship. A fantasy crossed with Chinese folklore, Where the Mountain Meets the Moon is a timeless story reminiscent of The Wizard of Oz and Kelly Barnhill's The Girl Who Drank the Moon. Her beautiful illustrations, printed in full-color, accompany the text throughout. Once again, she has created a charming, engaging book for young readers.

"Should appeal to all rugged individualists who dream of escape to the forest."—The New York Times Book Review Sam Gribley is terribly unhappy living in New York City with his family, so he runs away to the Catskill Mountains to live in the woods—all by himself. With only a penknife, a ball of cord, forty dollars, and some flint and steel, he intends to survive on his own. Sam learns about courage, danger, and independence during his year in the wilderness, a year that changes his life forever. “An extraordinary book . . . It will be read year after year.” —The Horn Book

What happens when you’ve done all you know how to do, the paved paths end, and you still feel like you’re missing something? The Second Half of the Mountain offers a practical and magical approach to recognizing and working with the deeper and often-confusing inner processes that happen after awakening. In this guidebook, McCall Erickson combines bits of personal story with the timeless building blocks of alchemy to outline the journey for the awakened traveler through the dark nights of the soul and beyond, not as “the way,” but as a guide to help you make your own way where it sometimes feels there is no way.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER With unequaled insight and brio, New York Times columnist David Brooks has long explored and explained the way we live. Now Brooks turns to the building blocks of human flourishing in a multilayered, profoundly illuminating work grounded in everyday life. This is the story of how success happens, told through the lives of one composite American couple, Harold and Erica. Drawing on a wealth of current research from numerous disciplines, Brooks takes Harold and Erica from infancy to old age, illustrating a fundamental new understanding of human nature along the way: The unconscious mind, it turns out, is not a dark, vestigial place, but a creative one, where most of the brain’s work gets done. This is the realm where character is formed and where our most important life decisions are made—the natural habitat of The Social Animal. Brooks reveals the deeply social aspect of our minds and exposes the bias in modern culture that overemphasizes rationalism, individualism, and IQ. He demolishes conventional definitions of success and looks toward a culture based on trust and humility. The Social Animal is a moving intellectual adventure, a story of achievement and a defense of progress. It is an essential book for our time—one that will have broad social impact and will change the way we see ourselves and the world.

“Shakil is a rare jewel in the work of what it means to heal, repair, and take responsibility... This book is required reading for anyone interested in building a loving, just and diverse world.” —Sensei Koshin Paley Ellison, Zen teacher & author of Wholehearted: Slow Down, Help Out, Wake Up Racial justice without shame or blame. Road-tested tools to start making a difference today. In Deep Diversity, award-winning racial justice educator Shakil Choudhury explores the emotionally loaded topic of racism using a compassionate, scientific approach that everyone can understand—whether you are Black, Indigenous, a person of color (BIPOC), or white. With clear language and engaging stories that will appeal to readers of Brené Brown and Malcom Gladwell, Choudhury explains how and why well-intentioned people can perpetuate systems of oppression, often unconsciously. Using a trauma-informed approach that removes shame or blame, he offers us the tools to recognize, take authentic responsibility, and enact deep change. In easy-to-absorb chapters, Choudhury interweaves research into the brain and studies on human behavior with hard-won lessons from his career of helping organizations and CEOs create more inclusive environments. He models vulnerability and mistake-making, sharing examples of his own bias-missteps so readers are encouraged into their own racial justice journey without judgment. Readers will come away from the book with practical tools and an understanding of: How to becomes a systems thinker by developing “racial pattern recognition” skills in order to challenge racism and other forms of systemic discrimination when we encounter them, while minimizing the tendency to shame or blame ourselves or others. How to recognize when the unconscious influence of bias, identity, emotions, or power contradict our beliefs about equality, and how to realign our thoughts/words/actions. How to break the racial “prejudice habits” we have all been socialized into since birth, using research-based strategies. How the rise in authoritarianism and income inequality (among other factors) contribute to a rise in hate crimes and racial discrimination, and what to do about it. Traditional approaches to anti-racism overly rely on analyzing history to explain systemic discrimination, which only tells us a part of the story. What’s missing, Choudhury argues, is to understand why humans do what we do, the evolutionary impulses underlying our group-ish nature and our struggles with power, bias, and social dominance. This is why psychology and neuroscience perspectives are critical to integrate into anti-racist work, as is practicing compassion for ourselves and for others. Deep Diversity is a unique, evidence-based approach to racial justice that seeks to overcome feelings of shame that so often block our progress and prevent deep change at individual and systemic levels. Deep Diversity meets you where you’re at, regardless of your identity, class, ability, or belief system, and invites you to come along on a journey of self-discovery, social awareness, and lifelong learning. It’s only just begun. “Choudhury draws on heart-touching stories, research on the brain, and hard-won lessons from real-world interventions to offer useful strategies to know ourselves, and others better.”—New York Times-bestselling author of Buddha’s Brain, Rick Hanson

The second novel in the thrilling and epic new fantasy series from the international bestselling author of Red Sister and Prince of Thorns. On the planet Abeth there is only the ice. And the Black Rock. For generations the priests of the Black Rock have reached out from their mountain to steer the fate of the ice tribes. With their Hidden God, their magic and their iron, the priests’ rule has never been questioned. But when ice triber Yaz challenged their authority, she was torn away from the only life she had ever known, and forced to find a new path for herself. Yaz has lost her friends and found her enemies. She has a mountain to climb, and even if she can break the Hidden God’s power, her dream of a green world lies impossibly far to the south, across a vast emptiness of ice. Before the journey can even start, she has to find out what happened to the ones she loves and save those that can be saved. Abeth holds its secrets close, but the stars shine brighter for Yaz and she means to unlock the truth.