Essay Essays

Parents obsess over their children's playdates, kindergarten curriculum, and every bump and bruise, but their toys, classrooms, and playgrounds are just as important. These objects and spaces encode decades—even centuries—of ideas about good child-rearing versus bad. What is the Good Toy? Is it wooden, plastic, or even digital? What do youngsters lose when seesaws are deemed too dangerous and slides are designed primarily for safety? How can our built environment help children cultivate self-reliance? In these debates, parents, educators, and kids themselves are often caught in the middle.

Step onto the gridiron with the greatest legends from Miami Dolphins football - newly updated! This unique and humorous look at life with the Dolphins brings fans onto the field and into the locker room through the eyes of Garo Yepremian, one of Miami’s most recognizable figures. From kicking in his first professional football game to being named “Kicker of the Decade”, Yepremian relives the Dolphins epic 1972 season and so much more.

In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville, a young French aristocrat and civil servant, made a nine-month journey through the eastern United States. The result was Democracy in America, a monumental study of the strengths and weaknesses of the nation’s evolving politics. His insightful work has become one of the most influential political texts ever written on America.

In Sisters Loved and Treasured: Stories of Unbreakable Bonds, award-winning ABC News journalist and New York Times best-selling author Deborah Roberts curates a giftable collection of conversations, meditations, and anecdotes from her own sisters, celebrity friends, and everyday people alike who share deeply personal accounts of how their relationships as sisters shaped their lives.

With essays on "cosmic consciousness" (including Alan Watts' account of his own ventures into this inward realm); the paradoxes of self-consciousness; LSD and consciousness; and the false opposition of spirit and matter, This Is It: And Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience is a truly mind-opening audiobook collection.

Doctor, angler, and raconteur Donald Thomas takes fishermen on a rollicking road trip through Alaska, Costa Rica, Australia, the Galapagos, and more. Fishing in oceans along the way, he enjoys the kind of adventures most people can only dream of. Each chapter includes a sidebar that gives Thomas an opportunity to riff entertainingly on a particular game fish, as well as an “At a Glance” section with both the current IGFA All-Tackle and Fly-Rod world records for that species.

Famous games and players have been the hallmark of the New York Rangers from their NHL debut in 1926 to the present day. From Frank Boucher and the original Blueshirts to Jaromir Jagr, the Rangers have thrilled their fans with some of the most memorable performances in hockey history. In Game of My Life: New York Rangers, John Halligan and John Kreiser share the recollections of 24 of the most famous names in Rangers history as they discuss the most memorable games in their careers.

The Burden, edited by award-winning Detroit newspaper columnist Rochelle Riley, is a powerful collection of essays that create a chorus of evidence that the burden is real. The Burden expresses the voices of well-known Americans, such as actor/director Tim Reid who compares slavery to a cancer diagnosis, and former Detroit News columnist Betty DeRamus who recounts the discrimination she encountered as a young Black Detroiter in the south.

This virtual treasure trove of amusing anecdotes, profound insights, and recollections of fly fishing and camping moments too marvelous (and sometimes too frustrating) to forget resurfaces for its fortieth anniversary. Sparse Grey Hackle’s classic is a mixture of sentiment and hilarity. This fortieth anniversary edition - complete with a new introduction by the author’s longtime friend, editor, and fellow fisherman, Nick Lyons - is sure to be a favorite of the next generation of fly fishermen and women.

The Fishing Life is an entertaining anthology of fishing anecdotes and well-researched articles from across Paul Schullery’s research and fishing career. The author offers up stories, essays, farces, daydreams, and ruminations that will engage listeners of all kinds. Of course, being a fisherman and living the fishing life goes beyond just those days spent with rod and reel in hand. It is something that occupies your mind and your heart, not just your hands.

Ohio coaching legend Paul Brown said he wanted to create "the New York Yankees of pro football" when he assembled the Cleveland Browns from scratch in 1946. Despite his ambition, not even the future Hall of Fame coach could have foreseen ten league championship appearances and seven titles in the team's first ten years.

Tom Kelly, the legendary signature voice of USC sports for nearly five decades, combines with co-author Tom Hoffarth of the Daily News of Los Angeles to take Trojan fans on a journey of memories and previously untold anecdotes from and about many of the great coaches, players, teams, and games in USC football history, as well as other sports. His story in Southern California starts with the recommendation of Jack Buck that he be hired as Chick Hearn’s color man on USC football and basketball games in 1961.

In Flight of the Wild Gander, renowned mythologist Joseph Campbell - in his first collection of essays, written between 1944 and 1968 - explores the individual and geographical origins of myth, outlining the full range of mythology from Grimm's fairy tales to American Indian legends. Originally published in 1969, this collection describes the symbolic content of stories: how they are linked to human experience and how they - along with our experiences - have changed over time.

This completely new edition of 50 Successful Harvard Application Essays gives listeners the most inspiring approaches, both conventional and creative, that won over admissions officers at Harvard University, the nation's top ranked college. From chronicling personal achievements to detailing unique talents, the topics covered in these essays open applicants up to new techniques to put their best foot forward.

Producer, editor, and writer behind the highly addictive, informative, and popular YouTube channel The Nerdwriter, Evan Puschak presents “a brilliant, wide-ranging essay collection that explores meaning and how we make it with the thoughtfulness and open-hearted generosity that have long been...

After Andrea Dworkin, the famous feminist philosopher and activist, passed away, her chief critic, Susie Bright, who many perceived as Dworkin's opposite, published a stirring obituary and series of essays in which she described the ways that Dworkin was a catalyst for the sex-positive movement in contemporary feminism.

Join Ursula K. Le Guin as she explores a broad array of subjects, ranging from Tolstoy, Twain, and Tolkien to women's shoes, beauty, and family life. With her customary wit, intelligence, and literary craftsmanship, she offers a diverse and highly engaging set of stories. The Wave in the Mind includes some of Le Guin's finest literary criticism, rare autobiographical writings, performance-art pieces, and most centrally, her reflections on the arts of writing and reading.

What is the truth about Mercury retrograde? Are you doomed if you have a planet “in detriment"? Why did Vincent Van Gogh’s chart still work long after he was dead and gone? Steven writes, “I picture this book like an astrology friend.... Maybe you get together for coffee every few months and talk about charts.” As you listen, magic happens: You find yourself escaping the pigeon-holing attitudes of conventional astrology, replacing them with the fresh air of freedom, choice, and imagination.

One-of-a-kind cultural critic and New York Times bestselling author Chuck Klosterman “offers up great facts, interesting cultural insights, and thought-provoking moral calculations in this look at our love affair with the anti-hero” (New York magazine). Chuck Klosterman, “The Ethicist”...

A blazingly intelligent first book of essays from the award-winning author of Open City and Every Day Is for the Thief NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Time The Guardian Harper's Bazaar San Francisco Chronicle The Atlantic Financial Times Kirkus Finalist for...