This Is The Author

"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/

"I found out I was writing a poetry book at the end of last year and I had all of 45 days to put it together. And I wrote this entire book while I was traveling to Peru to go do an Ayahuasca immersion with some shamans in the middle of the jungle and I've never had to work on something so diligently before. Every single day. If I missed one day I would have been off track. I kind of fell into a vortex with this book, this poetry vortex." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/586136/all-of-it-is-you/

"This is a story of natural disasters through human history, from Pompeii to Hurricane Katrina to the Japanese Great Tsunami, the stories of natural disasters, so that we can see how these disasters affect us both physically and socially." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/554995/the-big-ones/

"What planted the seed for this book for me was an agent who came to me because he had benefited personally from our work and from our collaborative problem solving approach and it had a transformative effect upon him and his family. And he came to me and said he thought there was a much broader audience for my work." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/540671/changeable/

"This book actually began when the editor of THE NEW YORKER, David Remnick, called me into his office and asked me to explain Texas because he can’t understand why I live here. And, to be honest, I’ve wondered about that myself. " Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/561612/god-save-texas/

"I’ve worked as a journalist in politics for a number of years and the subject of immigration has always fascinated me, not simply because my family is a family of immigrants but also because of the fundamental questions that the issue of immigration raises: Who are we as a country? Who is an American? What does it mean to be an American? And how have those definitions changed overtime? So when I began this book I wanted to address those central questions through a personal lens and this is the result of that endeavor." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/248653/futureface/

"I first saw STAR WARS when I was tiny, I think I was three. RETURN OF THE JEDI was probably the first movie I saw at the movie theaters, and I saw it many times...I was in love. And I’m still in love. I’ve just loved that world my whole life." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/568276/last-shot-star-wars/

"What planted the seed for this book was the Air traffic control strike of 1981. It was a turning point in my life and, obviously, it was a big turning point in my father’s life. And it was also a huge turning point in labor history, not only in America but around the world." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/549724/air-traffic/

"Our book is about influence. The question is: What is influence? On a very basic level, influence can be defined as the ability to move a person or persons to a desired action, usually within the context of a specific goal. Now that definition is legitimate and certainly works but I don’t believe it’s the substance of influence, which really is pull." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/314009/the-go-giver-influencer/

"My book is about endurance; specifically, it’s about this emerging sport known “fastest known times,” which are basically trail records on the super long trails like the Appalachian Trail and Pacific Crest Trail. But it also talks about the really amazing people who have set these records, and some of them are my friends and mentors. I wanted to talk about them and then also share my experience as a record setter and illustrate how it was so empowering for me to realize that there is no gender divide when it comes to endurance." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/548048/the-pursuit-of-endurance/

"I was inspired by my work as a veterinary internal medicine specialist. Although, if I'm honest, when I first started writing this book it was not going to be about my job as a vet. It was going to be about pretty much anything other than that. But once I started writing I realized that there was really only one story I wanted to tell, and that was the story of my patients and the things that they’ve taught me about life, and about medicine, and about being a veterinarian." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/250324/my-patients-and-other-animals/

"I wrote this book because, over the years, I saw how my perspectives, although molded and sculpted to warrant success, weren’t really the norm of athletes or most people. It’s a false misnomer that you have to have this angst or chip on your shoulder to succeed as an athlete, and science now supports that positivity and optimism are really the drivers of success." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/555798/let-your-mind-run/

Listen to this special This is the Author compilation of Lidia Bastianich, Junot Diaz, Joey Coleman, Daniel José Older, Suzy Fincham-Gray, J. Stuart Ablon, Gregory Pardlo, and Sir Ken Robinson talk about how libraries have influenced their lives.

"The origin of this book came from a speech that I gave a few years ago about the importance of the first 100 days of the customer relationship. At the time, to be frank, I wasn’t sure whether it was a good idea or not. But I was asked to give a speech at an event where there was a contest, and the audience would vote on their favorite speech, and the winner would win a $10,000 prize that was a donation to the charity of their choice. Well, thankfully, the audience voted for my speech. And in that moment, I knew that there might be some legs under this idea." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/561172/never-lose-a-customer-again/