Short Stuff: James Dean's Car

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 Last Lecture by Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, is a distillation of his life lessons and experiences. Written with reporter Jeffrey Zaslow, the best-selling book is an expanded version of a “Last Lecture” Pausch gave in 2007, after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

The “Last Lecture” series was a tradition in which professors presented their philosophy of life, as if it were their last chance to share what was important to them. It truly was a last chance for Pausch, who had only months to live. His book and lecture, which went viral and has been viewed by millions, are about living your dreams.

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.

Educated: A Memoir is Tara Westover’s autobiography. In it, she shows us her transformation from being the daughter of survivalist, fundamentalist, anti-science, anti-medicine, and anti-education parents, to becoming a Cambridge-educated historian. Westover gains the strength to break free from the ideological chains of her youth and discovers the agency to make her own choices about how she sees and experiences the world.

While it is about one individual’s journey, Educated speaks to universal themes of self-liberation, the power of education, the perils of extreme ideology, and the trauma of domestic abuse.

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.

Published in 1969, Business Adventures is a collection of essays about the unpredictability of corporations and Wall Street—and the people behind them. Longtime New Yorker contributor John Brooks explores how businesses and economies can rise and fall based on people’s behavior, which is often driven by emotions, habits of thinking, and human tendencies. Brooks’s essays are so insightful and engaging that Microsoft’s Bill Gates has called Business Adventures the “best business book ever.”

In this guide, you’ll find out how human nature led to corporate scandals, stock market setbacks, and major events that shaped the financial world as we know it. As the book was published half a century ago, we also include updates and commentary about the lasting impact of these case studies and connect them to contemporary events and issues.

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 Last Lecture by Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, is a distillation of his life lessons and experiences. Written with reporter Jeffrey Zaslow, the best-selling book is an expanded version of a “Last Lecture” Pausch gave in 2007, after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

The “Last Lecture” series was a tradition in which professors presented their philosophy of life, as if it were their last chance to share what was important to them. It truly was a last chance for Pausch, who had only months to live. His book and lecture, which went viral and has been viewed by millions, are about living your dreams.

When his wife announces that she’s become a believer in Christ, former Chicago Tribune legal affairs reporter (and avowed atheist) Lee Strobel embarks on a quest to investigate the truth of Jesus. Using his skills as a law-school graduate and long-time journalist, Strobel interviews—and occasionally interrogates—an array of scholars specializing in Christianity and the New Testament. He discovers that the evidence for Jesus Christ—His existence, His divinity, His resurrection—is overwhelming. By the end of his journey, Strobel realizes his atheism simply doesn’t hold up against the evidence, and he takes the natural next step: he becomes a believer.