This Is The Author

"This subject is something of a departure for me. I think a lot of people associate me with books about food and agriculture or maybe gardening. But if you go back far enough there’s a strain of interest or continuity that perhaps explains it. I think my real subject as a writer is the human engagement with nature, with other species in nature." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/529343/how-to-change-your-mind/

"I started out wanting to write a book about how a marriage could survive infidelity. I had this idea of creating this character who was a very powerful woman, who had everything in her life under control, who then had to confront this massive, unexpected problem. Then I was going to show how she got through it. The interesting thing what happened is that she had other ideas. As I wrote the book, I got father and farther away from what I thought it was going to be about." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/537836/do-this-for-me/

"My book is the story of my life told from the perspective of race. It’s about my own racial journey and understanding who I am and who America is." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/555849/im-still-here/

"What planted the seed for BOYING UP was GIRLING UP, which I wrote to explain the process of becoming a woman from a girl. And there was a lot of interest from people I spoke to who liked GIRLING UP who wondered if I could do the equivalent for boys." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/567379/boying-up/

"I’ve been doing this work for a long time, many of you know, over 35 years, and this is my fourth book. What I really think of as a gift to the people doing customer experience work, leaders around the world, people on the front lines, and I wanted to really create a simplified approach to how to improve customers’ lives." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/556171/would-you-do-that-to-your-mother/

"The inspiration for my book was actually a conversation I was having with the Disney book group. I was working with them to promote the book AHSOKA, which I did the audiobook for and helped promote since I do the voice of Ahsoka Tano in Star Wars. And we were brainstorming what more we could do together, and somebody asked me if I’d be interested in telling my story of how I started her universe and how I became the voice of Ahsoka. I said, 'You know, I don't really feel like I’ve lived enough of a life to write a memoir, in fact I still feel like I have several more chapters yet to live out. But I would love to write an advice book because I do not feel that I would have a story to tell without Disney. Disney taught me how to dream it and do it.'" Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/580082/its-your-universe/

"We didn’t think we were ever gonna write books. Pamela at Ballantine said “Would you guys wanna write a book?” and we were like, “How much?" "Who’s gonna read that?” She had all these ideas and then all of a sudden we were like, wait a minute...maybe, maybe we do have something to say. Would people read it?" Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/535098/like-brothers/

"I think there were two ideas behind this book. One of them is simply the joy of exploration. Before Deb and I began these travels around the country we’d been living for a number of years in China. And there we had a bias in favor of just going whenever we could–on trains or buses or horses or yaks–to see remote things. We had the opportunity to do that in the U.S. because of our long background with a small airplane, so we thought: let’s try it here. The other, as time went on, was to sort of grab people by the lapels and tell them what we had seen." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/550194/our-towns/

"What planted the seed for this book was beginning to see children who were obese and beginning to see Type II Diabetes in children, which in the entirety of my training in pediatrics we had never seen before. And so I realized we had a very serious problem. Also what inspired me was doing mindful eating myself for decades and enjoying it so much, and then finding that when I did classes or workshops on mindful eating, people really enjoyed it a lot themselves. And also they had a lot of insights about their behaviors and were freed from kinds of prisons they had put themselves in around eating." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/9948/mindful-eating/

"This book wasn’t so much written as collected, in the sense that over the years (and some of these essays are fairly old, some of them go back a good decade or so), writers get the opportunity every now and then to give talks. Most of the time when you have a book out, people ask you to read from the book. Other times, people want what I guess is being referred to these days as valued added. You’ve written this book, or a bunch of books, but people want to know what’s going on inside you." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/558311/the-destiny-thief/

"FAILURE IS AN OPTION is the story of a Jewish man who’s failed most of his life. It’s actually personal stories tied together, from my early childhood all the way up until now, and about how in small ways I have failed all along." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/558430/failure-is-an-option/

"THE MEANING REVOLUTION is a book about the difficulties every company has to solve in order to operate effectively. This is a dilemma between individual accountability and collective cooperation. On the one hand, every company wants each one of its members to work as hard and as conscientiously as possible. But on the other hand, the company also wants each member to subordinate their own individual work to the collective needs of the organization as a whole." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/555558/the-meaning-revolution/

"I was inspired to write this book after I had just completed writing my last two books: SO SAD TODAY, which is a collection of essays, and LAST SEXT, which is a collection of poems...and I found myself still trying to parse what love is, what lust is, and fantasy from reality, so I was still obsessed with these topics." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/557707/the-pisces/

"The inspiration for this book was actually a classic baseball book by the political writer George Will, who became a sports writer for a time and wrote a book called MEN AT WORK: THE CRAFT OF BASEBALL. And I am very upfront saying that this is George Will’s idea for soccer, because his book was terrific." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/184701/masters-of-modern-soccer/

"What planted the seed for this book idea was that following Dave’s stroke, because I knew he couldn’t remember anything in his state of amnesia and I didn’t really count on myself to be able to remember everything about the ICU and rehab, I began writing him a series of letters. And the word document, I saved it just the first night as DearDave.doc because that was how the first letter started." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/554652/beauty-in-the-broken-places/

"My book ASK A MANAGER is about the difficult conversations you might need to have at work during your career and how to approach them, including the specific wording to use when you do. It focuses in particular on the awkward and kind of cringey conversations that people dread the most, things like what to say if you’re allergic to your boss’s perfume, or if you made a pretty serious mistake at work, or if you lost your cool and you snapped at a coworker." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/554334/ask-a-manager/

"This is what I guess some people would call a food memoir. THE BEST COOK IN THE WORLD came about because of a time when my mom was sick. I was in her kitchen in her cabin in the foothills of the Appalachians and it just struck me as how wrong it was—she was in the hospital, and the kitchen was cold and dark and empty, and it was just wrong. And it struck me then that there was no written record of her food. Not just recipes, but there was no written history, no memoir in even the most unofficial way, of how her food came to be. I wrote this book because I wanted to fix that." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/17374/the-best-cook-in-the-world/

"The seed for this book was my experience building this startup and how painful that process was, and how much I didn’t want anyone else to have to go through the exact same pain. Or at least if they did go through it, they would know that they could have avoided it by listening to this book." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/547217/lost-and-founder/

"What planted the seed for this book was literally when I was a little girl, and my father gave me a pair of boxing gloves, and he taught me how to defend myself. I was the third of three daughters and this is the world I came into. And you’ll hear all about my boxing-glove story in the audiobook." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/228438/born-with-wings/

"My book SUICIDE OF THE WEST is about how capitalism, democracy, modernity itself is unnatural and accidental. We stumbled into almost everything we value about the civilization we live in and because we stumbled into it, we tend to take it for granted. When you take something for granted that is a kind of ingratitude. So my argument sort of traces where Western civilization comes from, where democracy and capitalism come from, and how we are losing it." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/530123/suicide-of-the-west/