Struggling with Serendipity tells the true story of a mom's crisis, a daughter's paralysis, and extraordinary travels that carried them from a small town in Ohio to Seattle, Harvard, Capitol Hill, and around the world. After an accident, a heartsick mom battles depression and guilt, while a shy but determined teenager fights the harsh physical challenges of quadriplegia. Fourteen-year-old Beth believes everything will be okay. Cindy is certain that nothing will ever be okay again. Struggling with Serendipity explores the power of hope while navigating unknown waters of disability. Cindy confronts her altered identity and mental health. Beth sets impossible goals as she tries to swim with legs that don't work and hands that can't cup the water. Together they find a new normal, with serendipity in the most unlikely of moments. Waves of adventure follow, including Beth's invitation to join the Harvard Women's Swimming and Diving team--the first with a visible disability. Struggling with Serendipity takes us on an incredible journey to the end of an era that leaves Cindy and Beth transformed. Everything really is okay. And if you never give up? Hope wins.

One chance meeting can change everything. Serendipity Tsang never suspected the kind, sweet guy she once met would become famous. Aiden Andale—Australia’s newest hotshot tennis player. And to think she accidentally hit him on the head with a tennis ball! As years pass by, she's busy juggling her family's beloved Chinese bakery, her future career, and navigating relationships. Then she starts seeing Aiden again—in magazines, on TV, in tennis tournaments. He's everywhere she turns. Looking happy with his life. Unlike her. But reality isn't always straightforward. What happens when serendipity finds them both again in the most unlikely of ways? Perfect for fans of tennis and baking, Chances for Serendipity is a standalone contemporary romance that spans over several years with a happily ever after.

For Daphne, the glass is always half full, a situation is better managed with a dab of lip gloss, and the boy of her dreams—the one she's read about in all of her novels—is waiting for her just around the corner. For Gabby, nothing ever works out positively; wearing any form of makeup is a waste of study time, and boys will only leave you heartbroken. Her best friend, Mule, is the only one who has been there for her every step of the way. But when the richest boy in town befriends Gabby, and Daphne starts to hang out more and more with her best and only friend, Mule, Gabby is forced to confront the emotional barriers she has put up to stop the hurting. And for once, her sassiness may fall prey to her definition of stupidity.

Innovation. The word might make you think of Silicon Valley. But innovation isn’t the sole province of start-ups. They didn’t invent it, and they’re not always the ones from which we can best learn. As Matt Kingdon argues in The Science of Serendipity, it’s corporate innovators battling within large, established organisations who are the field’s real heroes. Tapping into 20 years of experience on the front lines of innovation—bringing new products and services to market and helping organisations become more creative—Kingdon dissects the ways in which corporations are continually reborn. He looks at the anatomy of innovation, asking: How do time-pressed executives go about taking risks? How do they prepare to see—and seize—opportunity? And how do you place humans, with all of their fears and foibles, at the heart of commercial success? In a conversational, jargon-free style built on a practitioner’s observations and anecdotes, The Science of Serendipity traces the dilemmas that executives in a wide variety of firms face. It details the steps taken to overcome the issues and get great ideas across the finish line. If you’re looking for a guide in your fight against the corporate machine, this is the business book for you. Matt Kingdon is the Co-founder, Chairman, and Chief Enthusiast of What If! Innovation Partners. For 20 years, What If! has partnered with the world’s most successful, forward-looking companies—businesses such as Barclays, Four Seasons, Google, PepsiCo, Pfizer, and Virgin—to galvanise innovation and deliver impact. Its 250 inventors work across the Americas, Europe, and Asia.

***THIS STANDALONE TABOO LOVE TRIANGLE, IS BEST ENJOYED WHEN YOU DON'T READ ANY REVIEWS OR SPOILERS BEFOREHAND. GOING IN WITH AN OPEN MIND IS BEST.*** "Believe. Sometimes the unreal is more powerful than the real." My Past: She was my wife until death did us part. My Present: I don't believe in ghosts. But eyes that have haunted me before, now full of secrets, have me questioning fate, just once. My Future: I'll do whatever it takes to prove to her she's mine. Even if she belongs to another. Note: Please be aware this book deals with sensitive topics..

If you're reading this, you either have a chronic condition or know someone who does. Opiate overdoses, depression, loss of productivity, suicide: The consequences of a chronic condition touch us all. How is that we can have so many procedures and surgeries and medications and still feel miserable? How do we find even a moment of happiness when the pain is killing us? In this inspirational, wise, and accessible book, Bruce F. Singer provides a daily dose of hope to address the underlying thoughts and feelings that magnify chronic pain and suffering. "This book is incredible. It is a wealth of information and a needed and friendly companion for anyone dealing with chronic illness. It is the perfect accompaniment for self-care as it is a daily practice of compassion, acknowledgment, and growth. This is a must-have for anyone living with pain!" -Nicole Hemmenway, U.S. Pain Foundation and the INvisible Project

From Nazi Germany to a modern-day orphanage in the American South, three girls separated by decades and thousands of miles are about to give up when a single pair of shoes binds them all together. Dalya is the daughter of a cobbler in 1930s Berlin, and though she is only fifteen, she knows she will follow in her father’s footsteps. When she is forced into a concentration camp one violent November night, she must leave behind everything she knew and loved. Ray is a modern-day orphan, jagged around the edges in every possible way. She sees an impulsive escape to New York as her only chance at happiness; there, she knows she’ll be able to convert her sorrows into songs. Pinny is an unwavering optimist and Ray’s unintended travel companion on her passage to a new life. She inherited from her eccentric mother a fascination with shoes as a means of transformation and expression. A single pair of shoes entwines these lives. How these women connect across different times and places is an unforgettable story of strength, love, bravery, memory, and the serendipity that binds us all together.

From the bestselling author of Imperfection, a theory of uncertainty as the very core of the scientific method—and the essence of its wonder. How many times have we looked for something and found something else? A partner, a job, an object? The same thing often happens to scientists: they design an experiment and discover the unexpected, which usually turns out to be very important. This fascinating phenomenon is called serendipity, which takes its name from the mythical Serendip, a place from which, according to a Persian fable, three princes set off to explore the world, making chance discoveries along the way. In Serendipity, the award-winning author of Imperfection Telmo Pievani returns to weave a compelling story about the unexpected in science and its fascinating role in our understanding of the world. Going far beyond the usual examples of penicillin, X-rays, the microwave oven, and Christopher Columbus, Pievani shows that the most surprising stories of serendipity in the history of science reveal profound aspects of the logic of scientific discovery. In this book, he presents for the first time: an archaeology of the idea; a taxonomy of serendipitous discoveries; an “ecology of serendipity” (the surrounding conditions and factors that can promote it); and lastly, a theory of serendipity (why it occurs so frequently in so many sciences). From Zadig to Sherlock Holmes, Pievani shows that such great discoveries are not just the product of luck. Instead, serendipity comes from a mix of cunning, curiosity, sagacity, imagination, and accidents caught on the fly. Serendipity illuminates how much we don’t know and how much we don’t even know we don’t know. Above all, Pievani reminds us that the human brain is of a piece with the world it is investigating—a world so much bigger than our knowledge—and it has also evolved within that world, adapting as it has to.

"This comprehensive history of the U.S. Agency for International Development, the U.S. government’s official bilateral foreign aid agency, deserves to be read by all students of U.S. foreign policy." Foreign Affairs US Foreign aid is one of the most misunderstand functions of our federal government. Consuming less than 1% of the federal government budget, it has nonetheless played an outsized role in political debate. At the center of this controversy and misunderstanding has been the U.S. Agency for International Development, or AID, the government agency created during the Kennedy administration to administer America’s foreign assistance programs, an often-conflicted behemoth with a presence spanning the globe. In this book, journalist and foreign policy expert John Norris provides a compelling and rich story of AID, warts and all. There have been moments of enormous triumph: the eradication of smallpox, the Green Revolution, efforts to bring family planning to millions of women for the first time. There have also been florid, headline-grabbing failures in places like Vietnam and Iraq, missteps born out of ignorance and ethnocentrism, and money that flowed into the coffers of despots like President Mobutu in Zaire. In totality, the work of AID has touched millions and millions of lives in ways that have been truly profound, both good and bad. On the Eve of AID’s 60th anniversary, Norris shares history on an almost epic scale that remains largely untold.

"Many of the findings in the book . . . are classics of ecology. . . . A rare and delightful insight into timely science."—Jane Lubchenco, Nature "Estes's refreshing narrative deftly weaves rigorous science with personal reflection to create an absorbing and introspective read that is equal parts memoir, ecological textbook, and motivational guidebook for young ecologists."—Science To newly minted biologist James Estes, the sea otters he was studying in the leafy kelp forests off the coast of Alaska appeared to have an unbalanced relationship with their greater environment. Gorging themselves on the sea urchins that grazed among the kelp, these small charismatic mammals seemed to give little back in return. But as Estes dug deeper, he unearthed a far more complex relationship between the otter and its underwater environment, discovering that otters play a critical role in driving positive ecosystem dynamics. While teasing out the connective threads, he began to question our assumptions about ecological relationships. These questions would ultimately inspire a lifelong quest to better understand the surprising complexity of our natural world and the unexpected ways we discover it. Serendipity tells the story of James Estes’s life as a naturalist and the concepts that have driven his interest in researching the ecological role of top-level predators. Using the relationships between sea otters, kelp, and sea urchins as a touchstone, Estes retraces his investigations of numerous other species, ecosystems, and ecological processes in an attempt to discover why ecologists can learn so many details about the systems in which they work and yet understand so little about the broader processes that influence these systems. Part memoir, part natural history, and deeply inquisitive, Serendipity will entertain and inform readers as it raises thoughtful questions about our relationship with the natural world.