Lori

Our country is in a profound crisis: a crisis of decency, of civility, of character. And families today are experiencing a new set of realities. Our best instincts are undermined at every turn, and our families, to which we turn in crisis, are feeling the strain. Working parents are harried, tired, and overextended. Mary Pipher understands this. She's a good listener, perhaps the best listener in America. And what she has to say goes straight to the heart.Confronted with today's challenges, parents feel helpless to protect their children from the enemy within their homes: the innapropriate television their kids watch for hours, the computer and virtual reality games that keep them from playing outside, when they should be learning from and about the real world. Compounding this is the fact that our psychological theories don't work anymore. These theories were developed decades ago, when families were tightly knit, relatively monolithic institutions, and they're dated. Pipher argues that such theories are of little help in our violent, sexualized contemporary culture. And while diagnosing the problem is the first step in curing it, Pipher offers ideas for simple actions we can all take to help rebuild our families and strengthen our communities.

Dr. Pamela Peeke's New York Times best seller Body-for-Life for Women has helped thousands of women transform their bodies. Now, in Fit to Live, she shines light on our 21st-century lifestyle, with its fake food, desk jobs, clutter, and endless stress, and asks listeners, "If your life depended on it, could you run up four flights of stairs right now? Are you Fit to Live, not only to survive, but to enjoy life?" For most people, the answer is no and they don't know it.

In this frank and funny book, Courtney Rubin shares what she learned about dieting, and herself, in more than two years of chronicling her battle to keep food from consuming her life. As engaging as her famous column, The Weight-Loss Diaries is part memoir, part how-to, and always entertaining.