Here are 100 books that First Date Stories fans have personally recommended if you like
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Marcia Naomi Berger's passion is to help people create lasting, fulfilling marriages. An experienced clinical social worker, psychotherapist, and medical school clinical faculty member, Berger has held senior-level positions in child welfare, alcoholism treatment, and psychiatry. She says, "I stayed single for a long time because of my parent's divorce. Now happily married for over thirty-four years, I fill my books with the hard-earned wisdom I've gained professionally and personally."
I especially like this reader-friendly book because of its thoroughness, honesty, and wise advice. The authors are a married couple and social workers who draw from decades of experience counseling couples, leading workshops and seminars, and their marriage. I mention honesty because I'm impressed with the authors' openness, integrity, and conversational style.
Whether you're already married or hope to soon or someday, you'll probably benefit from how Linda and Charlie freely share knowledge gained from their successes and some embarrassing mistakes they've survived and corrected during their fifty-year, fulfilling marriage. Their commitment to growing as individuals and as a couple can be contagious, so check out this book and be prepared to stretch!
What if you could learn important relationship lessons now, rather than after you make the mistakes that most couples make? You can, and this best-selling book will point the way! Linda and Charlie Bloom were in their early 20's when they met and fell in love. At twenty five they married and their first-born came eighteen months later.
According to Charlie, "We were young and we made a lot of mistakes; enough to fill a book." Fast forward about twenty years.
Charlie's little sister Claire was about to get married and she invited him to read something inspirational at her…
Marcia Naomi Berger's passion is to help people create lasting, fulfilling marriages. An experienced clinical social worker, psychotherapist, and medical school clinical faculty member, Berger has held senior-level positions in child welfare, alcoholism treatment, and psychiatry. She says, "I stayed single for a long time because of my parent's divorce. Now happily married for over thirty-four years, I fill my books with the hard-earned wisdom I've gained professionally and personally."
I like how author Susan Page gets to the heart of why terrific women who say they want marriage continue to stay single and what they can do about it. Hidden ambivalence is a powerful internal conflict. The author explains how unconscious marriage fears can prevent us from moving forward.
For a long time, I acted out my unconscious ambivalence by finding "warts" or shortcomings in men who wanted a serious relationship. So I can relate to hidden ambivalence as a reason many marriage-minded women stay single.
Susan Page gives many examples of ways people express their ambivalence. I agree with her that living together with no plan to marry is one example, and I admire this author for stating this now that this lifestyle has become so common. Awareness is the first step toward change. This book fosters self-awareness and empowers us to move past what's getting in our…
If I'm so wonderful, why am I still single? Relationship expert Susan Page asks - and answers - this puzzling question in her classic book. She helps singles sweep aside popular excuses for not finding a mate and helps identify the real reasons love may seem so hard to find. Using revealing anecdotes, case studies and quizzes, Susan reveals ten essential steps to help you define your own plan of action and change your approach to dating and love forever. Are you stuck with a dead-end lover? Learn how to say no to B.T.N (Better Than Nothing) relationships. Are you…
Marcia Naomi Berger's passion is to help people create lasting, fulfilling marriages. An experienced clinical social worker, psychotherapist, and medical school clinical faculty member, Berger has held senior-level positions in child welfare, alcoholism treatment, and psychiatry. She says, "I stayed single for a long time because of my parent's divorce. Now happily married for over thirty-four years, I fill my books with the hard-earned wisdom I've gained professionally and personally."
This book can help many communication-challenged couples. It offers specific guidance on how to talk about topics for partners to address to foster long-term happiness. Couples who are dating and not yet committed will learn if deal-breakers exist by having conversations about whether they want children, what fidelity means to them, whether they're likely to support each other's goals and dreams, and more.
I strongly agree with the authors' ideas about addressing conflict with the goal of understanding rather than winning, making your relationship your top priority to succeed in marriage, and having fun together.
Many happily married people implement the ideas naturally without following the Eight Dates formula. However, as a couples therapist, I know that many will benefit from having the kinds of conversations the authors prescribe. I'm recommending this book to couples in my practice.
Happily Ever After is not by chance - it's By Choice.
John and Julie Gottman are cofounders of the Gottman Institute, bestselling authors, and award-winning researchers. Together, they have a deep understanding of what makes relationships work. Now, they bring that lifetime's worth of knowledge, research, and wisdom to bear in Eight Dates, a program of how, why, and when to have eight basic conversations with your partner that can result in a lifetime of love. Eight Dates is written for any serious couple, and its dates are structured around the concepts of trust, dealing with conflict, sex and intimacy,…
Marcia Naomi Berger's passion is to help people create lasting, fulfilling marriages. An experienced clinical social worker, psychotherapist, and medical school clinical faculty member, Berger has held senior-level positions in child welfare, alcoholism treatment, and psychiatry. She says, "I stayed single for a long time because of my parent's divorce. Now happily married for over thirty-four years, I fill my books with the hard-earned wisdom I've gained professionally and personally."
I like this book because the author shares her story of transforming a heartbreaking broken engagement into enhanced self-understanding and a happy marriage. The book is easy to read. As the title suggests, if a woman loves herself before entering a relationship, she'll choose wisely instead of marrying someone who's not right for her to prove she deserves love.
I'm impressed by the author's affirmation of serendipity, willingness to be open to the unexpected. Christine used to think her future marriage partner should have traits like her ex-fiancé had: average height, a full head of hair, and professional occupation.
Before she felt ready for another serious relationship, Christine writes that she started dating a man who was bald, very tall, and seemed to lack ambition. She found him fun, comfortable, and with excellent character traits. Christine married him.
Full of sass, soul, and the type of empowering wisdom that no woman should live without, Choosing ME before WE is like a heart-to-heart with your closest girlfriend. And best of all, you’ll discover that your closest girlfriend is your own truest self, inside you, always ready to offer wise, loving advice about what is best for you.
Designed to challenge and guide women to create the relationships they want instead of the ones they often find themselves stuck in, this book is packed with stimulating questions to uncover what’s true for you, powerful techniques to change old habits that…
I’m secretly eight years old inside. I love fascinating animal and science stuff, especially cool, weird, and gross facts. Readers of my children’s books see this passion in action. My best-selling and award-winning nonfiction animal books have sold more than 3 million copies worldwide since 2000. I focus particularly on reaching reluctant, struggling, and English-language-learning readers by packing my books with lots of action and high-interest topics to keep them turning pages. I’m recommending these top-five narrative nonfiction animal books for adults because these authors have influenced my research and thinking—and because they’re terrific stories!
Are you ready to change the way you see the world forever? Reading Peter Wohlleben’s three-book Mysteries of Nature series will do just that.
This second volume focuses on animal emotions and making connections with human behavior. Until fairly recently, most serious scientists focused only on observable behavior and didn’t try to imagine or determine what animals’ actions tell us about their feelings.
However, all animal lovers can benefit, as I did, from questioning our assumptions, better understanding our similarities, and becoming more aware of how much there is to learn about the inner life of animals. Get ready for some surprises!
Can horses feel shame? Do deer grieve? Why do roosters deceive hens?
We tend to assume that we are the only living things able to experience feelings but have you ever wondered what's going on in an animal's head? From the leafy forest floor to the inside of a bee hive, The Inner Life of Animals opens up the animal kingdom like never before. We hear the stories of a grateful humpback whale, of a hedgehog who has nightmares, and of a magpie who commits adultery; we meet bees that plan for the future, pigs who learn their own names…
Graeme Brooker is a Professor and Head of Interior Design at the Royal College of Art London. He has written and published fifteen books on the histories and theories of inside spaces, many of which focus on the reuse of existing artefacts, buildings, and cities. Apart from teaching and writing, when he isn’t cycling, he is often staring intently at the sea in Brighton, where he currently lives.
This is a revelatory, timely book that details the afterlives of the numerous discarded and recycled objects from around the world. It gave me great insights into where stuff goes once we decide that these are things that we no longer need or want and who are the people and the places who find value in what we leave behind.
From the author of Junkyard Planet, "an anthem to decluttering, recycling, making better quality goods and living a simpler life with less stuff." -Associated Press
Downsizing. Decluttering. Discarding. Sooner or later, all of us are faced with things we no longer need or want. But when we drop our old clothes and other items off at a local donation center, where do they go? Sometimes across the country-or even halfway across the world-to people and places who find value in what we leave behind.
In Secondhand, journalist Adam Minter takes us on an unexpected adventure into the often-hidden, multibillion-dollar industry…
I study wolves. For the past three decades, much of that interest has focused on understanding the ecology of wolves who inhabit a wilderness island in Lake Superior, North America. I also work to improve the relationship between humans and wolves–knowing very well that wolves are a symbol to so many of all that we love and fear about nature. As a distinguished professor at Michigan Technological University, I teach classes in population ecology and environmental ethics. What ties my interests together is the desire to gain insights from the commingling of science and ethics.
This book is a scientist’s telling of his serious and quirky ambition to know what ravens know. When I got to the description of an experiment whose distinguishing feature was the author wearing a kimono, that’s when I realized I’d been learning as much about the mind of a raven biologist.
I love this book for showing how much more bird brains have in common with human brains–with respect to their capacity for emotion and intellect–than is commonly appreciated.
Heinrich involves us in his quest to get inside the mind of the raven. But as animals can only be spied on by getting quite close, Heinrich adopts ravens, thereby becoming a "raven father," as well as observing them in their natural habitat. He studies their daily routines, and in the process, paints a vivid picture of the ravens' world. At the heart of this book are Heinrich's love and respect for these complex and engaging creatures, and through his keen observation and analysis, we become their intimates too.
Heinrich's passion for ravens has led him around the world in…
I wondered, seven novels in, why I’d never written in the voice of a child, and it so happened that Our Picnics in the Sun, the eighth novel, required me to do just that. In doing my research I discovered an oddity. Writers of fiction assume the right to enter the head or consciousness or identity of their characters. The oddity is that you might expect a writer to write, without too much difficulty, from the point of view of a child: after all, the writer has been a child. But it turns out that childhood experience is often elusive, evades interpretation, and is the hardest to capture on the page.
A wonderful and slightly maddening memoir, this (it’s nonfiction, Jim, but not as we know it). Bayley survived her childhood by absorbing books. She evokes the worlds of David Copperfield, Jane Eyre, and everything Agatha Christie ever wrote, by ventriloquising and interweaving the voices of those stories with the story of her own parental neglect, thereby insisting, if dreamily, that the boundaries between her reliable book-land and her unstable real-life-land will remain blurred. It’s only slightly maddening (I did much the same as a child; part of me will always be Katie tumbling out of the swing). The book’s deliberate ambiguities suggest that Bayley is claiming sanctuary, reserving the right not to divulge what is still too unbearable to relate, and why shouldn’t she? It’s an amazingly honest, touching book.
'The word "mesmerising" is frequently applied to memoirs, but seldom as deservedly as in the case of Girl With Dove' Financial Times
'Reading is a form of escape and an avid reader is an escape artist...'
Brilliantly original, funny and clever Honor Clark, Spectator, Book of the Year
Growing up in a dilapidated house by the sea where men were forbidden, Sally's childhood world was filled with mystery and intrigue. Hippies trailed through the kitchen looking for God - their leader was Aunt Di, who ruled the house with charismatic force. When Sally's baby brother vanishes from his pram, she…
I’m a political theorist at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. I spent the first fifteen years or so of my career working on the Scottish and French Enlightenments (Adam Smith, David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Montesquieu, Voltaire), but in recent years I’ve been drawn more and more to the American founding. In addition to Fears of a Setting Sun, I’m also the author of The Constitution’s Penman: Gouverneur Morris and the Creation of America’s Basic Charter, which explores the constitutional vision of the immensely colorful individual who—unbeknownst to most Americans—wrote the US Constitution.
Joseph Ellis is probably the most popular historian of the founding period, and for good reason: he has few rivals as a storyteller. As with Wood, Ellis has written at least a dozen books that could be included in my list, butFounding Brothers is probably his most well-known, as well as my personal favorite. I assign small bits of it in my American political thought course as a supplement to the primary texts, and students often comment on how much they enjoy reading it.
In this landmark work of history, the National Book Award—winning author of American Sphinx explores how a group of greatly gifted but deeply flawed individuals–Hamilton, Burr, Jefferson, Franklin, Washington, Adams, and Madison–confronted the overwhelming challenges before them to set the course for our nation.
The United States was more a fragile hope than a reality in 1790. During the decade that followed, the Founding Fathers–re-examined here as Founding Brothers–combined the ideals of the Declaration of Independence with the content of the Constitution to create the practical workings of our government. Through an analysis of six fascinating episodes–Hamilton and Burr’s deadly…
Food has always been my existential retreat from the world. Whether eating solo or with people, countless meals have been the best hyperbolic time chambers for strengthening relationships with others and with myself. And I’ve always wanted to write, to participate in ageless forums of subject and technique in this great literary tradition of ours. I guess these two art forms and obsessions were bound to lock horns in my aesthetic makeup. In my world, good reading is good eating. It’s that simple. No other qualifications are needed. I inhaled the following books and was made full every time – to eventually take a stab at a couple of recipes also.
If Cooking Gene is the rallying cry, Food: A Love Story is the marching time music.
Gaffigan expands the food observations and shenanigans from his standup routines and this memoir is just as funny as watching the family man on stage. Gaffigan’s food writing maintains a golden dynamic of being approachable and personal at the same time.
It was full of personality and gave me valuable insight into how to shape my character’s food habits as the focal point of literary scrutiny.
“What are my qualifications to write this book? None really. So why should you read it? Here’s why: I’m a little fat. If a thin guy were to write about a love of food and eating I’d highly recommend that you do not read his book.”
Bacon. McDonalds. Cinnabon. Hot Pockets. Kale. Stand-up comedian and author Jim Gaffigan has made his career rhapsodizing over the most treasured dishes of the American diet (“choking on bacon is like getting murdered by your lover”) and decrying the worst offenders (“kale is the early morning of foods”). Fans flocked to his New York…
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