Archives par étiquette : The Gernert Company

IMAGINABLE de Jane McGonigal

A dynamic, optimistic, science-driven work by a New York Times bestselling writer and designer of alternate reality games that trains us to see the future as a futurist does―and prepares us to thrive in that future when it arrives (sooner than we think).

IMAGINABLE:
How to Pick Ourselves Up, Heal from the Pandemic, and Prepare for a Decade of Unthinkable Change
by Jane McGonigal
Spiegel & Grau, March 2022
(via The Gernert Company)

After living through the massive global shock and trauma of Covid-19, one of the most disruptive events in human history, we need to find a way to face the future with optimism. But how can we plan for a better future when it feels impossible to predict what the world will be like next week, let alone next year or in the next decade? What we need are new tools to help us recover our confidence, creativity, and hope in the face of an uncertain future. In Imaginable, world-renowned future forecaster and game designer Jane McGonigal draws on the latest scientific research in psychology and neuroscience to show us how to train our brains to think the unthinkable and imagine the unimaginable. Using gaming strategies and fun, thought-provoking challenges that she designed specifically for this book, she helps us build our collective imagination to dive into the future before we live it and envision, in surprising detail, what our lives will look like ten years out.
In IMAGINABLE, McGonigal teaches us to identify the challenges that lie ahead in the next decade―big and small, personal and global; shape a better future that solves for those challenges; and access “urgent optimism,” an unstoppable motivational force that inspires us to be fearless, resilient, and bold in realizing a world we can only imagine.

Jane McGonigal, PhD, is a senior researcher at the Institute for the Future and the author of The New York Times bestseller Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. Her work has been featured in The Economist, Wired, and The New York Times and on MTV, CNN, and NPR. Her TED talks on games have been viewed more than ten million times.

THE URGE de Carl Erik Fisher

An authoritative, illuminating, and deeply humane history of addiction—a phenomenon that remains baffling and deeply misunderstood despite having touched countless lives—by an addiction psychiatrist striving to understand his own family and himself.

THE URGE: Our History of Addiction
by Carl Erik Fisher
Penguin Press, January 2022
(via The Gernert Company)

Even after a decades-long opioid overdose crisis, intense controversy still rages over the fundamental nature of addiction and the best way to treat it. With uncommon empathy and erudition, Carl Erik Fisher draws on his own experience as a clinician, researcher, and alcoholic in recovery as he traces the history of a phenomenon that, centuries on, we hardly appear closer to understanding—let alone addressing effectively.
As a psychiatrist-in-training fresh from medical school, Fisher was soon face-to-face with his own addiction crisis, one that nearly cost him everything. Desperate to make sense of the condition that had plagued his family for generations, he turned to the history of addiction, learning that the current quagmire is only the latest iteration of a centuries-old story: humans have struggled to define, treat, and control addictive behavior for most of recorded history, including well before the advent of modern science and medicine.
A rich, sweeping history that probes not only medicine and science but also literature, religion, philosophy, and sociology, THE URGE illuminates the extent to which the story of addiction has persistently reflected broader questions of what it means to be human and care for one another. Fisher introduces us to the people who have endeavored to address this complex condition through the ages: physicians and politicians, activists and artists, researchers and writers, and of course the legions of people who have struggled with their own addictions. He also examines the treatments and strategies that have produced hope and relief for many people with addiction, himself included. Only by reckoning with our history of addiction, he argues—our successes and our failures—can we light the way forward for those whose lives remain threatened by its hold.
THE URGE is at once an eye-opening history of ideas, a riveting personal story of addiction and recovery, and a clinician’s urgent call for a more expansive, nuanced, and compassionate view of one of society’s most intractable challenges.

Carl Erik Fisher is an addiction physician and bioethicist. He is an assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University, where he works in the Division of Law, Ethics, and Psychiatry. He also maintains a private psychiatry practice focusing on complementary and integrative approaches to treating addiction. His writing has appeared in Nautilus, Slate, and Scientific American MIND, among other outlets. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his partner and son.

OCEAN STATE de Stewart O’Nan

Set in a working-class town on the Rhode Island coast, O’Nan’s latest is a crushing, beautifully written, and profoundly compelling novel about sisters, mothers, and daughters, and the terrible things love makes us do.

OCEAN STATE
by Stewart O’Nan
Grove Press, March 2022
(via The Gernert Company)

In the first line of OCEAN STATE, we learn that a high school student was murdered, and we find out who did it. The story that unfolds from there with incredible momentum is thus one of the build-up to and fall-out from the murder, told through the alternating perspectives of the four women at its heart. Angel, the murderer, Carol, her mother, and Birdy, the victim, all come alive on the page as they converge in a climax both tragic and inevitable. Watching over it all is the retrospective testimony of Angel’s younger sister Marie, who reflects on that doomed autumn of 2009 with all the wisdom of hindsight.
Angel and Birdy love the same teenage boy, frantically and single mindedly, and are compelled by the intensity of their feelings to extremes neither could have anticipated. O’Nan’s expert hand paints a fully realized portrait of these women, but also weaves a compelling and heartbreaking story of working-class life in Ashaway, Rhode Island. Propulsive, moving, and deeply rendered, OCEAN STATE is a masterful novel by one of our greatest storytellers.

“Stewart O’Nan’s haunting and fleet Ocean State tunnels deeply into the heady, hard lives of the vivid young women at its center. Half-broken and full of longing, these women move us deeply. As the story hurtles toward an act of violence that feels both impossible and inexorable, we find ourselves wanting to stop and protect all of them.” —Megan Abbott

“One of Stewart O’Nan’s many gifts is a keen and unflinching eye lit with an abiding compassion for his characters, all of which is on display in his mesmerizing new novel, Ocean State. Set in the forgotten streets of post-industrial, blue collar Rhode Island, this timely and gritty tale takes us deeply into the lives of girls and women who must navigate the kind of loss that can either break or strengthen the ties that bind us all. Ocean State is a gem glittering in the darkness.” —Andre Dubus III

“Stewart O’Nan is out to break your heart in the most beautiful way. He is writing with his full power unleashed. This book is a classic.” —Luis Alberto Urrea

Stewart O’Nan is the author of numerous books, including Wish You Were Here, Everyday People, In the Walled City, The Speed Queen, and Emily, Alone. His 2007 novel, Last Night at the Lobster, was a national bestseller and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He was born and raised in Pittsburgh, where he lives with his family.

TOMORROWMIND de Gabriella Rosen Kellerman & Martin Seligman

How to adapt and thrive in the workplace in an uncertain future filled with change and automation? TOMORROWMIND offers readers—workers, managers, and executives alike—explicit, evidence-based guidance on positive psychology practices to offer a hopeful road map of how to tackle these challenges head on.

TOMORROWMIND:
Flourishing in the Future of Work
by Gabriella Rosen Kellerman & Martin Seligman
Atria, Fall 2022/Spring 2023

In recent years a vast literature, from reports from all the major global political and economic bodies to popular books like Martin Ford’s The Rise of the Robots and Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee’s The Second Machine Age, has emerged to document and foretell the unprecedented scale of change facing the global workforce as the Age of Automation dawns. The evidence is overwhelming—and, at first glance, frightening. Forty-two percent of the job skills we use today will be obsolete by 2022. Eighty percent of US workers will have their jobs replaced, or their wages reduced, by automation in the new decade. We can expect, within the next ten years, that we won’t be choosing our careers once in a lifetime, but continually, across a wide range of industries. Our average job tenure will be under two years. Our job skills will expire every 18 months. More and more of our work will be done remotely, alone, or with rotating teams. The scale of the shift dwarfs that of all other eras, including the Industrial Revolution, and it poses a unique set of challenges to human wellbeing. In TOMORROWMIND, Gabriella Kellerman and Martin Seligman ask the question other thinkers on the subject have so far avoided: if, today, we sit on the cusp of the most turbulent changes to work society has ever faced, how will that change us? How will we survive? And more importantly, how can most of us thrive?
Surviving in this new world of work means, first, understanding these challenges, and second, intentionally developing skills to overcome them. TOMORROWMIND will offer readers—workers, managers, and executives alike—explicit, evidence-based guidance on navigating through the worst of what the future holds. Calling on the tenets of positive psychology and prospective psychology, disciplines pioneered by Seligman, and supported by the vast data emerging from BetterUp Labs—the basic science arm of the global virtual coaching company BetterUp, where their collaborators include Adam Grant, Roy Baumeister, Sonja Lyubomirsky, and Rebecca Goldstein—they argue that automation and constant change don’t have to be cause for alarm or despair. On the contrary: the coming disruption presents remarkable opportunities for each of us to push the boundaries of our cognitive and emotional skills. TOMORROWMIND will paint a picture of human thriving, not despite these challenges, but because of them.

Prince Harry has agreed to be the « Chief Impact Officer » for BetterUp, which is intricately connected to TOMORROWMIND. It’s too early to say whether/how Prince Harry will be involved in the promotion but the news of his hiring has greatly increased the profile of BetterUp. Read more about this here.

Gabriella Rosen Kellerman, MD is the Chief Innovation Officer for the $700M behavior change company BetterUp, and the head of BetterUp Labs, where she leads strategic efforts to develop the next generation of offerings in behavior change technology.
Martin Seligman, PhD is the Zellerbach Family Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, director of the Positive Psychology Center, former president of the American Psychological Association, and a scientific advisory board member of BetterUp Labs. Called the “founder of Positive Psychology,” he is the author of over 30 books for both scholarly and trade audiences, including FLOURISH, AUTHENTIC HAPPINESS, and LEARNED OPTIMISM. His books have been translated into fifty languages and have sold millions of copies worldwide.

THE ANTI-BOOK de Raphael Simon

From the New York Times bestselling author of the Secret Series comes a darkly funny middle-grade novel about a boy who wants the world to disappear. This fantastical quest for comfort and belonging is perfect for fans of classics like The Phantom Tollbooth and Coraline.

THE ANTI-BOOK
by Raphael Simon
Dial Books, April 2021

Mickey is angry all the time: at his divorced parents, at his sister, and at his two new stepmoms, both named Charlie. And so he can’t resist the ad inside his pack of gum: « Do you ever wish everyone would go away? Buy The Anti-Book! Satisfaction guaranteed. » He orders the book, but when it arrives, it’s blank—except for one line of instruction: To erase it, write it. He fills the pages with all the things and people he dislikes . . . Next thing he knows, he’s wandering an anti-world, one in which everything and everyone familiar is gone. Or are they? His sister soon reappears—but she’s only four inches tall. A tiny talking house with wings looks strangely familiar, as does the mysterious half-invisible boy who seems to think that he and Mickey are best buds. The boy persuades Mickey to go find the Bubble Gum King—the king, who resides at the top of a mountain, is the only one who might be able help Mickey fix the mess he’s made.
Full of humor and surprise, and slyly meaningful, this is a Wizard of Oz for today’s generation—a fantastical quest for comfort and belonging that will resonate with many, many readers.

Raphael Simon is an author who lives in Pasadena, CA, with his husband and twin daughters. He is definitely not the alter ego of infamously anonymous author Pseudonymous Bosch, writer of the New York Times bestselling Secret Series and the Bad Books.