Alizah Holstein writes about the complex echelons of academia in 'My Roman History'

Elizabeth Gilbert’s life imploded after she filed for divorce from her husband when she was 30 years old. She was still reeling from their contentious separation when she fell in love with someone else. But when this love ended, she fell into a deep depression. She knew something drastic needed to happen to save her life. She decided to embark on a year-long journey to Italy, India, and Indonesia to find pleasure, spiritual guidance, and harmony in her soul. Eat Pray Love depicts Gilbert’s journey of survival and transformation. It is the story of her learning to move out of the darkness and into the light.

In A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway tells the story of his interactions with some of the most famous artists of his generation while living in Paris between 1921 and 1926. Amid vivid descriptions of going hungry and walking the streets of a city in flux during the interwar period, Hemingway describes literary greats like Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce, as well as famous places like bookstore Shakespeare and Company and its proprietor Sylvia Beach, all of whom influenced his development as a writer.

What can our relationships with other animals teach us? That’s the question naturalist Sy Montgomery addresses in her memoir, How to Be a Good Creature. She explores the lessons about life and love she learned from various animals who touched her life, from a tiny pinktoe tarantula in French Guiana to a beloved 750-pound pet pig named Christopher.

In our guide, we’ll examine how the wisdom and companionship of animals helped Montgomery find her calling as a traveler and nature writer, appreciate animals and people in new ways, and cultivate love and community. These animals taught her how to be more curious, compassionate, friendly, loving, and much more—in other words, they taught her how to be a good creature. We’ll also discuss some of the science and history behind our relationships with other animals, along with ways you can apply the lessons Montgomery learned to your life.

Lean In, by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, explores the professional, personal and societal hurdles holding women back from leadership positions in the workforce. The hurdles include discrimination, family-unfriendly policies, and a lack of help at home. To get more women into leadership positions and make true changes, Sandberg urges women to “lean in” to their careers, taking risks and being ambitious in their professional goals, while demanding more help at home. To do this, women must fight a lack of self-confidence and internalized gender stereotypes to forge fulfilling and rewarding personal and professional lives.

Many women feel barred from advancing their careers but can’t identify the barriers holding them back. In How Women Rise, Sally Helgesen and Marshall Goldsmith argue that these barriers seem invisible because they’re the result of women’s overly self-critical mindset—the product of their desire to meet the rigid gender expectations placed on them by society and to avoid the backlash that occurs when they don’t. This mindset causes most women to develop at least one of 12 common habits that limit their professional success. To break free of these self-inflicted limitations, women must recognize and deconstruct their detrimental thoughts and behaviors.

In this guide, we’ve reorganized Helgesen and Goldsmith’s 12 limiting habits into four main thought patterns. The guide will explain these patterns, the detrimental behaviors they cause, and how to overcome them. In our commentary, we’ll share advice and perspectives from other sources on women’s success, such as Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg and The Confidence Code by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman.

When Breath Becomes Air is the beautiful and heart-wrenching memoir of Dr. Paul Kalanithi, a neurosurgical resident diagnosed with lung cancer in the last year of his training. When the life Paul and his wife Lucy imagined for their futures ceases in the face of his diagnosis, he works to understand what his new life will look like and how long it will be. Through various treatments, his struggle to return to work, and the birth of his first and only child, Paul details his personal journey of discovering the meaning of life, death, and the thin line separating them. He explores what it means to save a life---not only his patients’, but his own, as well.

Lean In, by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, explores the professional, personal and societal hurdles holding women back from leadership positions in the workforce. The hurdles include discrimination, family-unfriendly policies, and a lack of help at home. To get more women into leadership positions and make true changes, Sandberg urges women to “lean in” to their careers, taking risks and being ambitious in their professional goals, while demanding more help at home. To do this, women must fight a lack of self-confidence and internalized gender stereotypes to forge fulfilling and rewarding personal and professional lives.

In Ego Is the Enemy, bestselling author and marketer Ryan Holiday defines ego as an unhealthy belief in one’s own importance. He notes that many successful people are famously egotistical, and he contends that as a result, society tends to think that ego is an important ingredient in success, as if ego leads to accomplishment. However, Holiday argues that ego leads far more often to failure, and that people find success only when they’re able to control their egotistical impulses.

To make his arguments, Holiday draws on the philosophies of Stoic thinkers, advising us to resist the urges of our emotions in order to maintain clarity of thinking. In our guide to his book, we’ll examine his theories through the lens of Stoicism, and we’ll compare them to other management theories that similarly aim to help you find success.