Wellness entrepreneur and cofounder of Tone It Up Karena Dawn opens shares her experience growing up with a paranoid schizophrenic mother and her personal mental health journey in her new memoir, The Big Silence: A Daughter's Memoir of Mental Illness and Healing. Hoping to empower others who are dealing with their own mental and emotional problems, Dawn reaches a depth of honesty, truth, power, and emotional gravity that's rarely achieved.

Wellness entrepreneur and cofounder of Tone It Up Karena Dawn opens shares her experience growing up with a paranoid schizophrenic mother and her personal mental health journey in her new memoir, The Big Silence: A Daughter's Memoir of Mental Illness and Healing. Hoping to empower others who are dealing with their own mental and emotional problems, Dawn reaches a depth of honesty, truth, power, and emotional gravity that's rarely achieved.

A personal and cultural exploration of silence and its value in our lives—“[an] artful book, mixing autobiography, travel writing, meditation, and essay” (Independent, UK). In her late forties, after a noisy upbringing as one of six children and adulthood as a vocal feminist and mother, Sara Maitland found herself living alone in the country and, to her surprise, falling in love with silence. In this fascinating, intelligent, and beautifully written book, Maitland describes how she began to explore this new love, spending periods of silence in the Sinai desert, the Scottish hills, and a remote cottage on the Isle of Skye. Maitland also delves deep into the rich cultural history of silence, exploring its significance in fairy tale and myth, its importance to the Western and Eastern religious traditions, and its use in psychoanalysis and artistic expression. Her story culminates in her building a hermitage on an isolated moor in Galloway. “Her book is probably unique in its subject, and timely, because good, healing silence is becoming hard to find, and we may not know we need it” (Guardian, UK).

This account of British life in the wake of World War I is “social history at its very best . . . insightful and utterly absorbing” (Minneapolis Star-Tribune). As the euphoria of Armistice Day in 1918 quickly subsided, there was no denying the carnage that the Great War had left in its wake. Grief and shock overwhelmed the psyche of the British people—but from their despair, new life would slowly emerge. For veterans with faces demolished in the trenches, surgeon Harold Gillies brings hope with his miraculous skin-grafting procedure. Women win the vote, skirt hems leap, and Brits forget their troubles at packed dance halls. And two years later, the remains of a nameless combatant would be laid to rest in the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Westminster Abbey, as “The Great Silence,” observed in memory of the countless dead, halted citizens in silent reverence. This history of two transformative years in the life of a nation features countless characters, from an aging butler to a pair of newlyweds, from the Prince of Wales to T. E. Lawrence, the real-life Lawrence of Arabia. The Great Silence depicts a nation fighting the forces that threaten to tear it apart and discovering the common bonds that hold it together. “A pearl of anecdotal history, The Great Silence is a satisfying companion to major studies of World War I and its aftermath . . . as Nicolson proceeds through the familiar stages of grief—denial, anger and acceptance—she gives you a deeper understanding of not only this brief period, but also how war’s sacrifices don’t end after the fighting stops.” —The Seattle Times “It may make you cry.” —The Boston Globe

Dale Horth climbed to the top of the logging industry—and just as fast, it was all taken away. In his silent battle against depression, he drank, did drugs, and slept whole days away. The hyper-masculine culture of his industry meant that he was hardwired against anything spiritual. Rehab and therapy were ‘hippie shit,’ and only the weak needed help. It took great strength for Dale to break out of that cycle, but he found the courage to seek recovery and rebuild his life. So many men are taught not to reach out, not to seek help. Why Men Suffer in Silence: A Story of Hope and Recovery is the true story of one man’s journey through PTSD, anxiety, and depression. Full of real tips and techniques for overcoming and prevailing against mental health challenges, it shows the reader that there is hope for us all.

The Great Silence explores the multifaceted problem named after the great Italian physicist Enrico Fermi and his legendary 1950 lunchtime question "Where is everybody?" In many respects, Fermi's paradox is the richest and the most challenging problem for the entire field of astrobiology and the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (SETI) studies. This book shows how Fermi's paradox is intricately connected with many fields of learning, technology, arts, and even everyday life. It aims to establish the strongest possible version of the problem, to dispel many related confusions, obfuscations, and prejudices, as well as to offer a novel point of entry to the many solutions proposed in existing literature. Milan Cirkovic argues that any evolutionary worldview cannot avoid resolving the Great Silence problem in one guise or another.

Have faith. End hunger. Ending hunger is a moral imperative that does not stand alone. Hunger thrives on the racial, social, and economic inequalities that are eating away at the soul of our nation and pulling us apart. But ending hunger could now become the cause that brings us together across partisan lines to make our economy include everyone and work for everybody. The goal of ending hunger nationwide is not only noble but easily within reach. Taking up this goal could give us a corrective lens, a lens of hope for seeing ourselves and our country in a new way. It could also give us better vision for helping the world overcome extreme hunger and poverty. Our failure to speak and write to members of Congress about hunger consigns millions of people here and abroad to diminished lives and premature death, so it is a silence that kills. We can break that silence by urging the nation’s leaders to help end hunger and humanize our economy. This book addresses all people of goodwill, including agnostics and atheists, but with a special word of concern for religious people—Christians in particular—who help through charity, but neglect to use the power of their citizenship against hunger.

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: San Francisco Chronicle, The Christian Science Monitor, Kansas City Star. A profoundly moving and deeply personal memoir by the co-host of National Public Radio’s flagship program All Things Considered. While exploring the hidden conversation on race unfolding throughout America in the wake of President Obama’s election, Michele Norris discovered that there were painful secrets within her own family that had been willfully withheld. These revelations—from her father’s shooting by a Birmingham police officer to her maternal grandmother’s job as an itinerant Aunt Jemima in the Midwest—inspired a bracing journey into her family’s past, from her childhood home in Minneapolis to her ancestral roots in the Deep South. The result is a rich and extraordinary family memoir—filled with stories that elegantly explore the power of silence and secrets—that boldly examines racial legacy and what it means to be an American.

Liza Long, the author of “I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother"—as seen in the documentaries American Tragedy and HBO®'s A Dangerous Son—speaks out about mental illness. Like most of the nation, Liza Long spent December 14, 2012, mourning the victims of the Newtown shooting. As the mother of a child with a mental illness, however, she also wondered: “What if my son does that someday?” The emotional response she posted on her blog went viral, putting Long at the center of a passionate controversy. Now, she takes the next step. Powerful and shocking, The Price of Silence looks at how society stigmatizes mental illness—including in children—and the devastating societal cost. In the wake of repeated acts of mass violence, Long points the way forward.

"An exploration of the failures of reason in human life and the enduring role of myth in science, politics, and morality"--