Books like How to Be Perfect by Michael Schur

Freakonomics reveals how hidden incentives shape everyday life, from crime to education, using data-driven insights that challenge conventional wisdom.

Robert M. Pirsig’s classic blends a true‑to‑life motorcycle trip with a deep meditation on self‑discovery and philosophy, exploring how we live and how we might live better.

Eckhart Tolle guides readers toward a pain‑free existence by teaching how to recognize and release mental patterns that cause suffering, encouraging living fully in the present moment.

Candide: A Tale of Conviviality and Optimism in a Wretched World

A groundbreaking guide to embracing vulnerability and courage.

In *Musicophilia* Oliver Sacks explores how music shapes our brains, drawing on case studies of patients with neurological disorders and everyday listeners to reveal the science and magic behind our love of sound.

On new thought.

A motivational guide for movie stars, focusing on their personal growth and life lessons.

This book argues against Cartesian dualism and traditional views of consciousness, proposing a new theory that consciousness is a product of a computer-like virtual machine.

A practical guide that outlines a rule for eliminating toxic behavior in the workplace, explaining how to identify, confront, and prevent the presence of "assholes" in organizations.

Roz Chast turns her sharp humor into a touching memoir about caring for aging parents, using cartoons, family photos, and real moments to explore the challenges and absurdities of adult children stepping into the caregiver role.

A witty, heartfelt collection of essays by comedian Phoebe Robinson that examines race, gender, and pop culture, blending sharp humor with personal insight.

A harrowing true‑crime narrative of Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus, and Michelle Knight, who survived ten years of kidnapping and abuse by Ariel Castro in Cleveland, and the investigative reporting that uncovered their story.

A collection of motivational, romantic, and family-inspired quotes designed to inspire joy, personal growth, and a hopeful outlook on life.

David McNeill, a pioneer in the ongoing study of the relationship between gesture and language, here argues that gestures are active participants in both speaking and thinking. He posits that gestures are key ingredients in an "imagery-language dialectic" that fuels speech and thought. The smallest unit of this dialectic is the growth point, a snapshot of an utterance at its beginning psychological stage.In Gesture and Thought, the central growth point comes from a Tweety Bird cartoon. Over the course of twenty-five years, the McNeill Lab showed this cartoon to numerous subjects who spoke a variety of languages, and a fascinating pattern emerged. The shape and timing of gestures depends not only on what speakers see but on what they take to be distinctive; this, in turn, depends on the context. Those who remembered the same context saw the same distinctions and used similar gestures; those who forgot the context understood something different and changed gestures or used none at all. Thus, the gesture becomes part of the growth point—the building block of language and thought.Gesture and Thought is an ambitious project in the ongoing study of how we communicate and how language is connected to thought.