OBD Staff Picks September

"The Courage to Be Disliked, already an enormous bestseller in Asia with more than 3.5 million copies sold, demonstrates how to unlock the power within yourself to be the person you truly want to be. Using the theories of Alfred Adler, one of the three giants of twentieth century psychology, The Courage to Be Disliked follows an illuminating conversation between a philosopher and a young man. The philosopher explains to his pupil how each of us is...

A young bride is brought by her new husband to his manor house in England. There she finds that the memory of her husband's first wife haunts her, and she tries to discover the secret of that mysterious woman's death. Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again... Working as a lady's companion, the orphaned heroine of Rebecca learns her place. Life begins to look very bleak until, on a trip to the South of France, she meets Maxim de Winter, a handsome...

The author argues that American society is leaning toward despotism and totalitarianism and looks back at the 20th century for examples of how totalitarianism has taken over before. "Timothy Snyder's New York Times bestseller On Tyranny uses the darkest moments in twentieth-century history, from Nazism to Communism, to teach twenty lessons on resisting modern-day authoritarianism. Among the twenty include a warning to be aware of how symbols used...

"Musical lover Riley has big aspirations to become a director on Broadway ... but when Riley takes her mom's car without permission, she's grounded and stuck with the worst punishment: spending her after-school hours working at her dad's game shop. Riley can't waste her time working ... so she convinces Nathan--a nerdy teen employee--to cover her shifts and, in exchange, she'll flirt with him to make his gamer-girl crush jealous ... Soon, Riley starts...

"As Indigenous scientist and author of Braiding Sweetgrass Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests serviceberries alongside the birds, she considers the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy. How, she asks, can we learn from Indigenous wisdom and the plant world to reimagine what we value most? Our economy is rooted in scarcity, competition, and the hoarding of resources, and we have surrendered our values to a system that actively...