Bryn Mawr Alum

A young adult novel of loss, travel, healing and adventure

Twelve year-old Dot is spunky and full of zest for life, but after her mother's sudden and senseless death, she finds herself dancing on the edge...of everything. With all familiar anchors swept away, Dot is propelled with her offbeat aunt on an international voyage of curiosity...and maybe even time travel.

With a little help from Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, and other trailblazing ladies of literature, Dot's trip to England becomes anything but predictable. Pack your bags for a memorable, powerful journey into life in the wake of profound loss, as our young heroine discovers the meaning of her past, and of her mother's greatest gift to her.

"A wonderful and endearing story about the power of books and travel to heal us. ...A perfect mother-daughter book."

--Jim Lynch, author of national bestseller The Highest Tide

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.

"[A] clear-eyed and tender debut . . . This book is as much the author's story as a piece of reportage."--The Wall Street Journal

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.

This book establishes the profound significance of MGM's 1940 film The Mortal Storm, the first major Hollywood production to depict the plight of Jews in Germany before the Holocaust.

Based on Phyllis Bottome's best seller, also titled The Mortal Storm, the film was made amidst the bitter debate that occurred between 1938 and 1941 over whether the United States should involve itself in another European war or remain an isolationist country, as Charles Lindbergh among others urged.

In 1941, the film triggered the first hostile Congressional investigation of Hollywood where the studios were accused of allegedly propagandizing for war. Lindbergh had secretly urged the Hollywood hearings, inspired by his own growing antisemitism, as his unpublished diary reveals. Hollywood studios, in turn, regarded the growing European crisis with ambivalence. They feared being accused in a film like The Mortal Storm of using the movies to represent the fate of Europe's imperiled Jews. Louis B. Mayer, the head of MGM, insisted the word "Jew" be removed from the film and "non-Aryan" be used instead, hoping to confuse American audiences about the film's real intent.

Jimmy Stewart, who starred in the film, took it on the road to urge American aid to Britain, while Lindbergh prepared his own campaign to denounce American Jews for luring the country into war. The book reveals how closely Hollywood and politics were entwined on the eve of war. It also reveals how closely the plight of Europe's Jews and American antisemitism were entwined at the same time.