best books to read for beginners Audiobooks

Have you ever spent 10 minutes looking for your reading glasses, and they were on the top of your head? Or, have you walked into a room and forgotten why you went there? Where are your car keys? What’s normal aging? When should you be concerned? Is there anything you can do to maintain your brain health as you age? This book provides useful, achievable actions you can take, accurate information about identifying problems, and real solutions. Our team offers anecdotes and scientifically validated information -- important tools in separating myth from reality. Our book is different from others on the market because our information and recommendations are based on scientifically validated, peer-reviewed studies published in reputable journals by world-renowned researchers in the neuroscience field, including our authors. We separate fact from fiction to ensure that our recommendations are practical, useful, achievable, and measurable. Our authors are recognized experts in the field of aging, cognition, and brain health. Most of the competition is not. Written by a world-renowned cognitive specialist, an extraordinary housecall physician, and an award-winning author on eldercare issues – all of whom specialize in caring for those with cognitive impairment -- this book is based on our expertise, practical experience, and peer-reviewed research. In addition to providing scientifically validated information and practical advice, our book separates myth from reality. Brain health, cognitive impairment, and mood disorders are serious issues. With the Baby Boomer market growing older and growing concerned about their and their parents’ brain health, the marketplace has attracted frauds, charlatans, and some well-meaning but poorly informed people who offer unproven and often dangerous products. Our authors are recognized experts, our practical experience is solid, and our science is peer-reviewed and validated.

There's more to meditation than just rhythmically chanting "Om" in a seated position - inner calm can be achieved through the simplest of actions, such as mindfully drinking a cup of tea. This guide shows you how to harness the power of meditation in your daily life with a variety of meditation techniques that you can learn and carry out in just a few minutes. From breathing exercises that can help you quickly calm down in a stressful situation to mantras that can help you state your intentions for the day, every page offers powerful techniques, showing you effective ways to boost your mood, manage worries, and get a good night's sleep. Featuring more than 50 easy-to-follow guided meditations, Meditation Made Easy helps lead you toward peace, tranquility, and a more relaxed life.

Today more than ever, everyone must be her or his own healer, and this is especially true in the management of anxiety and depression. In the first major conceptual leap in mental health care in forty years, Mind Easing's Three-Layered Healing Plan harmonizes wellness approaches, therapy, and, when needed, medicine into a safe and effective plan tailored to the needs and wishes of the individual. Written by noted psychiatrist Bick Wanck, MD, one of the founders of the American Academy of Addiction Psychiatry and an experienced clinician, writer, and educator, Mind Easing shows how to relieve and often resolve anxiety and depression by assisting the mind's natural ability to heal. Along with non-medicinal healing methods, Mind Easing shows how to use psychiatric medicine (if needed) safely and effectively as part of a mindfully constructed healing plan. Because some psychiatric medicines can blunt feelings and dull thinking, they can impede the flow of healing and interfere with the pleasures of living. Mind Easing suggests when and how psychiatric medicines may be stopped when they are counterproductive to healing. Mind Easing presents a comprehensive Three-Layered Healing Plan for anxiety and depression. Some readers will find all they need in Layer One: Enhancement of Healing without needing the help of a professional. Others will benefit from Layer Two: Guidance which describes how psychotherapy, body and energy work, and spiritual guidance may be used to assist healing. Those readers who experience severe anxiety and depression will find helpful information in Layer Three: Restoration of Healing. where Dr. Wanck explains the concepts of "soft" and "hard" anxiety and depression. Soft anxiety and depression are generally caused by stressful current life events or past genetically inherited conditions or by physiologic hardening of symptoms resulting from persistent or severe adversity or trauma.

Everything you need to know about love, life, relationships, sex, men, and being a badass Advice from girl bosses of all kinds: Women are, far and away, the Oral Sex. Women’s Studies scholar Becca Anderson has gathered the wisdom from a chorus of fabulous femmes for this one-of-a-kind advice book. From housewives to Hollywood starlets, from standup comedians to startup entrepreneurs, these badass women offer unvarnished and unabashed opinions and share their frank and forthright thinking on the wild world of relationships. A sassy collection of woman wisdom: This delightfully dishy gathering of gal pals is like having a heart-to-heart with 200 of your closest friends. Garrulous girls and loquacious ladies from every walk of life unleash their wicked wit in this humorous and enlightening compilation and tell it like it is. Topics include What the World Needs Now, Love Hurts, Lost Love, and Are Men Really Necessary. Learn and laugh at the real stories of the amazing women you love: true tales about wild women of yore that entertain as much as they enlighten. From Anais Nin, Lily Tomlin, Amy Bloom, Dorothy Allison, Drew Barrymore, Chrissy Teigan and beyond, there's no shortage of sass, sarcasm, or sizzle and a few shocks along the way! In Badass Women Give the Best Advice , readers will find: Wisdom about sex, dating, break ups, weddings, the prerequisites for the perfect kiss, and more! Quotes and true stories from famous women and girl bosses Quizzes, love and sex bucket lists and topics like “Size Really Does Matter,” and “Cry Me a River, The Weepiest Romantic Movies Ever” that will spice up your sex and love life Be enlightened with these no nonsense takes on dating, love life, sex, self-love, and more!

The first authoritative and comprehensive guide to "aging in place"--a burgeoning movement for those who don't want to rely on assisted living or nursing home care--which allows seniors to spend their later years living comfortably, independently, and in their own home or community. For millions of Americans, living in a nursing home or assisted living facility is not how they’d prefer to spend their retirement years. This is why more and more people are choosing to “age in place.” In this empowering and indispensable book, clinical psychologists and aging specialists Mary Languirand and Robert Bornstein teach readers how, with planning and foresight, they can age with dignity and comfort in the place of their own choosing. How to Age in Place offers useful, actionable advice on financial planning; making your home physically safe; getting around; obtaining necessary services; keeping a healthy mind, body, and spirit; and post-retirement employment. A necessary resource for seniors, their adult children, and eldercare professionals, How to Age in Place is both a practical roadmap and inspirational guide for the millions of seniors who want to make their own decisions and age well.

“It’s like the meanest, wildest monkey running around my head, constantly looking for ways to bite me.” That was how Kirsten Pagacz described her OCD to her therapist on their first session when she was well into her 30s she’d been following orders from this mean taskmaster for 20 years, without understanding why. Initially the tapping and counting and cleaning and ordering brought her comfort and structure, two things lacking in her family life. But it never lasted; the loathsome self-talk only intensified, and the rituals she had to perform got more bizarre. By high school she was anorexic and a substance abuser, common "shadow syndromes" of OCD. By adulthood, she could barely hide her problems and held on to jobs and friends through sheer grit. Help finally came in the form of a miraculously well-timed public service announcement on NPR about OCD -- at last her illness had an identity. Leaving the OCD Circus reveals the story of Pagacz’s traumatic childhood and the escalation of her disorder demonstrating how OCD works to misshape a life from a very young age and explains the various tools she used for healing including meditation, cognitive behavioral therapy, yoga, exposure therapy, and medication.

He’s a killer for hire and the best in the business. But he’ll do the job only if the target is a truly bad guy. And now Billy wants out. But first there is one last hit. Billy is among the best snipers in the world, a decorated Iraq war vet, a Houdini when it comes to vanishing after the job is done. So what could possibly go wrong?

Prior to 1990, fewer than five percent of domestic infant adoptions were open. In 2012, ninety percent or more of adoption agencies are recommending open adoption. Yet these agencies do not often or adequately prepare either adopting parents or birth parents for the road ahead of them! The adult parties in open adoptions are left floundering. There are many resources on why to do open adoption, but what about how? Open adoption isn't just something parents do when they exchange photos, send emails, share a visit. It's a lifestyle that may feel intrusive at times, be difficult or inconvenient at other times. Tensions can arise even in the best of circumstances. But knowing how to handle these situations and how to continue to make arrangements work for the child involved is paramount. This book offers readers the tools and the insight to do just that. It covers common open-adoption situations and how real families have navigated typical issues successfully. Like all useful parenting books, it provides parents with the tools to come to answers on their own, and answers questions that might not yet have come up. Through their own stories and those of other families of open adoption, Lori and Crystal review the secrets to success, the pitfalls and challenges, the joys and triumphs. By putting the adopted child at the center, families can come to enjoy the benefits of open adoption and mitigate the challenges that may arise. More than a how-to, this book shares a mindset, a heartset, that can be learned and internalized, so parents can choose to act out of love and honesty throughout their child’s growing up years, helping that child to grow up whole.

Longtime manuscript editor and Chicago Manual of Style guru Carol Fisher Saller has negotiated many a standoff between a writer and editor refusing to compromise on the “rights” and “wrongs” of prose styling. Saller realized that when these sides squared off, it was often the reader who lost. In her search for practical strategies for keeping the peace, The Subversive Copy Editor was born. Saller’s ideas struck a chord, and the little book with big advice quickly became a must-have reference for copy editors everywhere. In this second edition, Saller adds new chapters, on the dangers of allegiance to outdated grammar and style rules and on ways to stay current in language and technology. She expands her advice for writers on formatting manuscripts for publication, on self-editing, and on how not to be “difficult.” Saller’s own gaffes provide firsthand (and sometimes humorous) examples of exactly what not to do. The revised content reflects today’s publishing practices while retaining the self-deprecating tone and sharp humor that helped make the first edition so popular. Saller maintains that through carefulness, transparency, and flexibility, editors can build trust and cooperation with writers. The Subversive Copy Editor brings a refreshingly levelheaded approach to the classic battle between writers and editors. This sage advice will prove useful and entertaining to anyone charged with the sometimes perilous task of improving the writing of others.

Change The World By Changing Yourself Find answers: Today, it’s easy to get outraged by world events, frustrated by our own personal battles, and disenfranchised from government and leadership. Born of moral indignation, informed by decades of study, and seasoned by a life of devoted self-cultivation, Monk Yun Rou’s Mad Monk Manifesto has the answers we’re looking for, organically cohering personal prescriptions and calls to social and political action in one powerful document. Discover venerated wisdom: Based on ancient Chinese wisdom such as Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching , Mad Monk Manifesto is part tour guide to consciousness, part recipe for personal development, part prescription for environmental salvation, and part handbook for social change. In approximately 70,000 words, the book’s six chapters (framed by an introduction and afterward) follow the traditional Taoist prescription for changing the larger world by changing ourselves first. Improve yourself―and the world: In the same way ripples move away from a stone dropped into a pond, Mad Monk Manifesto begins with our personal lives, discussing topics such as diet, exercise, meditation, and mind/body practice, and spreads to our public environment, describing ideas such as what we can do to improve the community, the government, and the world. Full of everything from advice for a healthy, conscious lifestyle to suggested actions we can take to enhance the lives of friends, family, coworkers, and community members, Mad Monk Manifesto highlights spirituality and service, the goals of an awakened life. Learn something new: Each chapter of Mad Monk Manifesto is creative and fresh, offering proactive solutions in single-paragraph exhortations and prescriptions against a backdrop of lessons from Chinese history, the wisdom of ancient sages like Lao Tzu, and stories born of author Monk Yun Rou's journey from privileged Manhattanite to practicing Taoist monk. Inspirational and informative, exhortative and prescriptive, this modern Alan Watts creates a complete and immersive experience for everyone who picks up his Mad Monk Manifesto ―a portrayal of everything from the mundane to the sublime through the lens of the philosophy best known from George Lucas’ Star Wars saga, the Green Movement, and surf and hippie cultures. Emerge with a new way of seeing life, a series of concrete steps to take for personal transformation, and an action plan for working in the community to provoke change. Mad Monk Manifesto is precisely what the world needs at a time of unprecedented environmental disasters, international instability, and divisive and unreliable leadership. After reading this book, you will learn: How to relax, rectify, and rebalance life How to bolster the community and deepen culture How to effect positive change in commerce, government, power, and the environment For readers of Alan Watts, Ursula Le Guin, and Change Your Thoughts―Change Your Life by Dr. Wayne W. Dyer