The Dark Watchers

A little girl growing up alone in the lush marshes of the North Carolina coast. A young woman who falls in love and experiences the anguish of a broken heart. A promise of marriage. A betrayal that leads to death. In Where the Crawdads Sing, Delia Owens reveals these moments along Kya Clark’s journey to survive after her family abandons her as a child. Owens’s prose is as lush as the environment she describes, making you feel you are with Kya every step of the way. As Kya deals with discrimination and torment by the local townspeople, she must also navigate matters of the heart and decide if opening her heart is worth the risk when all she’s known is loss.

The Glass Castle is the harrowing tale of Jeannette Wall’s life growing up in poverty with wayward parents. Jeannette and her siblings were often left to fend for themselves as their parents engaged in alcoholic binges or flights of fancy. The siblings ultimately resented their parents’ neglect and became independent, moving far away.

Following the Walls family through the desert to the coal-mining region of West Virginia to the fast-paced life of New York City, this memoir explores the nature of family, loyalty, and tragedy and what it takes to survive together and apart.

In the heartfelt podcast "REAL ONES with Jon Bernthal," actor Jon Bernthal invites Zach Skow of Marley's Mutts to discuss the inspiring initiative known as the Positive Change Program. This innovative collaboration, featured on the episode, brings together rescue dogs facing euthanasia with inmates yearning for a fresh start. It's a story of mutual redemption, reflecting the program's healing vision for both man and animal through shared rehabilitation journeys.

Listeners are guided through Skow's personal narrative, where his canine companion, Marley, was a pivotal force in overcoming addiction and loneliness, and how this bond stimulated the creation of an organization destined to enact social and emotional recuperation. The podcast eloquently unfolds the program's success since its inception at California City Correctional Facility, highlighting the profound changes in the lives of inmates and their four-legged trainees, as well as the overarching societal benefits—from reducing recidivism to saving dogs from untimely fates. Join Bernthal and Skow as they explore the powerful interplay of canine and human companionship within the walls of incarceration, revealing lessons of hope, purpose, and the unyielding potential for second chances.

Matthew McConaughey’s Greenlights is not a conventional memoir. As he neared age 50, the Oscar-winning actor revisited the journal that he had kept for the previous 35 years to see what he could learn from it. The result is this book, which combines hard-earned insights about the art of living with vivid accounts of McConaughey’s upbringing in rural Texas, his adventures in the movie business, his global travels, and his lifelong search for love and fatherhood. Part autobiography and part life-guide, Greenlights both explains and illustrates McConaughey’s philosophy of “catching greenlights”—recognizing and even creating those moments when life says “yes” and you cruise into success as you pursue your destiny. It’s valuable reading for anyone in search of an entertaining manual on finding your way in the world.

You have a unique talent you were born to master, but knowing how to reach your creative and professional goals is not always easy. In The 5 AM Club, Robin Sharma explains how to discover your inner genius and maximize your abilities by adopting an early morning routine that activates your creative and productive potential. Your daily “Victory Hour” will enable you to narrow down your goals and reach them like a master. With this powerful tool you can become influential in your field and create a lasting impact on the world.

All the alarming statistics about child abuse and neglect—millions of cases reported each year, killing nearly five children each day—don’t begin to illustrate how victims experience abuse. In A Child Called 'It', author Dave Pelzer provides a rare and grisly glimpse into his experience of severe physical and psychological abuse at his mother’s hands.

In one of the worst child abuse cases reported in California’s history at the time, Pelzer was starved, burned on the stove, regularly locked in the bathroom with a noxious mixture of ammonia and Clorox, and forbidden from speaking to or looking at any of his family members. Through it all, Pelzer maintained an indomitable will to survive that’s a testament to the strength of the human spirit even under the bleakest circumstances.