- The Magic of Sleep: A Bedside Companion – Michael Acton Smith
Sleep is the most active time for our brains and the most important element to a calmer, happier life. Drawing on the success of the app Calm, Michael Acton Smith writes the ultimate handbook for healthy sleeping. Find the answers to everything you need to know about sleep but were too tired to ask.
- Beauty – Bri Lee
You were either fit and trim, or you weren’t working hard enough. Your body was how you conveyed wealth and status to your peers; it was a personality trait, a symbol of goodness and values: an ethical ideal. In recent decades, women have made momentous progress fighting the patriarchy, yet they are held to ever-stricter, more punishing physical standards. Self-worth still plummets, and eating disorders are more deadly for how easily they are dismissed. In Beauty, Bri Lee explores our obsession with thinness and asks how an intrinsically unattainable standard of physical ‘perfection’ has become so crucial to so many. What happens if you try to reach that impossible goal? Bri did try, and Beauty is what she learned from that battle: a gripping and intelligent rejection of an ideal that diminishes us all.
- Stillness Is The Key – Ryan Holiday
Throughout history, there’s been one indelible quality that great leaders, makers, artists and fighters have shared: the ability to be steady, focused and calm. This quality, valued by every major school of thought from Buddha to Seneca, John Stuart Mill to Nietzsche, is urgently necessary today. And, Holiday shows, it is entirely attainable. Stillness is the Key shows how to cultivate this quality in your own life. Because stillness is not merely inactivity, but the doorway to the self-mastery, discipline and focus necessary to succeed in this competitive, noisy world.
