One of today’s Kindle Daily Deals is Inspiring Reads for the New Year, $2.99 or Less Each today only. The sale collection includes such titles as:
Happy This Year: The Secret To Getting Happy Once And For All (4/5 stars, currently priced at $1.99)
A practical, yet inspirational work that proposes it’s the inner world of our psyches that determines happiness, not outside forces. We have control over our own happiness and this powerful book offers concrete advice on how to tap into it and nourish it all year round.
The author focuses explicitly on the positive ways we can establish a higher set-point in our thoughts, speech, and actions, resulting in greater sustainable levels of happiness. Regardless of what the year and your life may bring, we can become measurably and sustainably happier.
Younger Next Year: Live Strong, Fit, and Sexy—Until You’re 80 and Beyond (4.5/5 stars, currently priced at $1.99)
Turn back your biological clock. A breakthrough book for men–as much fun to read as it is persuasive–Younger Next Year draws on the very latest science of aging to show how men 50 or older can become functionally younger every year for the next five to ten years, and continue to live like fifty-year-olds until well into their eighties. To enjoy life and be stronger, healthier, and more alert. To stave off 70% of the normal decay associated with aging (weakness, sore joints, apathy), and to eliminate over 50% of all illness and potential injuries. This is the real thing, a program that will work for anyone who decides to apply himself to “Harry’s Rules.”
Harry is Henry S. Lodge, M.D., a specialist in internal medicine and preventive healthcare. Chris Crowley is Harry’s 70-year-old patient who’s stronger today (and skiing better) than when he was 40. Together, in alternating chapters that are lively, sometimes outspoken, and always utterly convincing, they spell out Harry’s Rules and the science behind them. The rules are deceptively simple: Exercise Six Days a Week. Eat What You Know You Should. Connect to Other People and Commit to Feeling Passionate About Something. The science, simplified and demystified, ranges from the molecular biology of growth and decay to how our bodies and minds evolved (and why they fare so poorly in our sedentary, all-feast no-famine culture). The result is nothing less than a paradigm shift in our view of aging.
Welcome to the next third of your life–train for it, and you’ll have a ball.
The Cow in the Parking Lot: A Zen Approach to Overcoming Anger (4.5/5 stars, currently priced at $1.99)
Road rage. Domestic violence. Professionally angry TV and radio commentators. We’re a society that is swimming in anger, always about to snap. Leonard Scheff, a trial attorney, once used anger to fuel his court persona, until he came to realize just how poisonous anger is. That and his intense study of Buddhism and meditation changed him. His transformation can be summarized in a simple parable: Imagine you are circling a crowded parking lot when, just as you spot a space, another driver races ahead and takes it. Easy to imagine the rage. But now imagine that instead of another driver, a cow has lumbered into that parking space and settled down. The anger dissolves into bemusement. What really changed? You—your perspective.
Using simple Buddhist principles and applying them in a way that is easy for non-Buddhists to understand and put into practice, Scheff and Edmiston have created an interactive book that helps readers change perspective, step by step, so that they can replace the anger in their lives with a newfound happiness. Based on the successful anger management program Scheff created, The Cow in the Parking Lot shows how anger is based on unmet demands, and introduces the four most common types—Important and Reasonable (you want love from your partner); Reasonable but Unimportant (you didn’t get that seat in the restaurant window); Irrational (you want respect from a stranger); and the Impossible (you want someone to fix everything wrong in your life).
Scheff and Edmiston show how, once we identify our real unmet demands we can dissolve the anger; how, once we understand our “buttons,” we can change what happens when they’re pushed. He shows how to laugh at ourselves—a powerful early step in changing angry behavior. By the end, as the reader continues to observe and fill in the exercises honestly, it won’t matter who takes that parking space—only you can make yourself angry.