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2023 Gift Ideas Non-Fiction

Gift ideas for non-fiction lovers Outlive by Dr. Peter Attia Generations by Jean M. Twente, PhD Finding Me by Viola Davis The Wager by David

The Secret Hours

” ‘You want to serve your country, right? What did you think that involved, dressing up and playing parts?This job is about betrayal.  About persuading people to betray other people.  Their countries, their friends, those they work for.  And in return, we betray them too in the end.’ “

The Housemaid

“If I leave this house , it will be in handcuffs.”

Chenneville

“What was there, on to the west?  What lay beyond?  John Chenneville was in a strange land without a map, chasing down a single man in all this emptiness.  He was far from his youth when he had clean linen that had always been laid out on his bed by servants. Other people had started the fires in the fireplaces and brought in wood to keep them going; others made the dinners and set them out; his clothes press was packed tight with clothing from an expensive St. Louis tailor.  But the war had taught him a great deal, that things of immense value were actually small and finite: dry socks, a night’s rest without danger, a time plate full of oatmeal with currants in it, a forgotten candle stub in his pocket.”

The Wager

“Empires preserve their power with the stories they tell, but just as critical are the stories they don’t- the dark silences they impose, the pages they tear out.”

Wellness

“All I understand for sure is that people have a very strong need to explain the world in ways that make them feel better, or safer, or more powerful, or more well liked, or more in control, but not necessarily in ways that are true.  Alas, the truth is of very low importance, psychologically speaking.”

Birnam Wood

“Tony was very proud to be well-read, and had often railed against the defensive anti-intellectualism that defined his country’s culture, but he had nevertheless recognized in himself, at times, a deep desire to perform a kind of excessive rugged practicality in compensation for his bookishness, submitting himself to physical privations, testing his strength and his endurance well beyond what was called for, and devising circuitous home-made solutions to problems that could be solved much more easily, and often more cheaply, by paying someone else to fix them.  It hadn’t been until he’d gone abroad that he’d been able to identify this trait as itself particularly Kiwi, reflecting a broader attitude held among his countrymen that to do a thing with effort was always more respectable than to have it done with ease; inconvenience, in New Zealand, tended to be treated as a test of character, such that it was a point of national pride to be able to withstand discomfort or poor service without giving in to the temptation to complain.”

Evil Eye

“Each time she tried to articulate these thoughts to William, she stopped, afraid of how meaningless the sentences might sounds.  Words simplified situations and emotions, robbed them of their complexity.  Could her words portray how powerless she felt, how torn?  Never fitting in, unable to truly belong. Or would they convey another message, validating Amanda’s assumptions: How insular her community was, how limiting?”