Bryn Mawr Alum

Artist Linda Hoffman saved an orchard and reshaped her life at Old Frog Pond Farm in Harvard, Massachusetts. When she moved to the farm she didn't know anything about apple-growing. More than twenty years later, the farm is one of the few organic pick-your-own orchards in New England, as well as a hub for a thriving community of visual artists, writers, and spiritual seekers. Hoffman, the mother of three children, a Zen practitioner, and a breast cancer survivor, has now written about her extraordinary journey in The Artist and the Orchard: A Memoir.

Lead smarter. A handbook for your brain at work.

High pressure. High conflict. High stress. Today, too many leaders believe that these states are not just natural, but inevitable. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Using his skills as a medical doctor and his knowledge from many years in executive positions in the biotech pharmaceutical industry, in Five Brain Leadership, executive coach Carlos Davidovich walks you through the latest breakthroughs in the burgeoning fields of neuroscience, epigenetics, and cognitive behavior to help you better understand your multilayered, magical mind, and how to work with it instead of against it in leading your team and building relationships.

Neuromanagement is at the intersection of neuroscience and daily life in the business world. It is leadership that is based on a full understanding of all five of our interlocking brains-our reptilian, emotional, rational, and, yes, even our heart and gut "brains." Through practical tools and exercises, you'll learn how to build your capacity in each of these control centers, and to recognize all the ways they are at play in how humans operate, interrelate, and react to change.

Five-Brain Leadership is your pathway toward turning good leadership into great leadership, and reaching new levels of success in all of life's domains.

Talented and ambitious, Monica Potts and her best friend, Darci, were both determined to make something of themselves. How did their lives turn out so different?

"The Forgotten Girls is much more than a memoir; it's the unflinching story of rural women trying to live in the most rugged, ultra-religious, and left-behind places in America."--Beth Macy, author of Dopesick

Growing up gifted and working-class poor in the foothills of the Ozarks, Monica and Darci became fast friends. The girls bonded over a shared love of reading and learning, even as they navigated the challenges of their tumultuous family lives and declining town--broken marriages, alcohol abuse, and shuttered stores and factories. They pored over the giant map in their middle-school classroom, tracing their fingers over the world that awaited them, vowing to escape. In the end, Monica left Clinton for college and fulfilled her dreams, but Darci, along with many in their circle of friends, did not.

Years later, working as a journalist covering poverty, Potts discovered what she already intuitively knew about the women in Arkansas: Their life expectancy had dropped steeply--the sharpest such fall in a century. This decline has been attributed to "deaths of despair"--suicide, alcoholism, and drug overdoses--but Potts knew their causes were too complex to identify in a sociological study. She had grown up with these women, and when she saw Darci again, she found that her childhood friend--addicted to drugs, often homeless, a single mother--was now on track to becoming a statistic.

In this gripping narrative, Potts deftly pinpoints the choices that sent her and Darci on such different paths and then widens the lens to explain why those choices are so limited. The Forgotten Girls is a profound, compassionate look at a population in trouble, and a uniquely personal account of the way larger forces, such as inheritance, education, religion, and politics, shape individual lives.

Habitual drug use in the United States is at least as old as the nation itself. Habit Forming traces the history of unregulated drug use and dependency before 1914, when the Harrison Narcotic Tax Act limited sales of opiates and cocaine under US law. Many Americans used opiates and other drugs medically and became addicted. Some tried Hasheesh Candy, injected morphine, or visited opium dens, but neither use nor addiction was linked to crime, due to the dearth of restrictive laws. After the Civil War, American presses published extensively about domestic addiction. Later in the nineteenth century, many used cocaine and heroin as medicine. As addiction became a major public health issue, commentators typically sympathized with white, middle-class drug users, while criticizing such use by poor or working-class people and people of color. When habituation was associated with middle-class morphine users, few advocated for restricted drug access. By the 1910s, as use was increasingly
associated with poor young men, support for regulations increased. In outlawing users' access to habit-forming drugs at the national level, a public health problem became a larger legal and social problem, one with an enduring influence on American drug laws and their enforcement.