BOOK CLUB

Members of the iRise Above community selected books that engender conversation, spark enlightenment, and help people to be inspired and empowered to rise above breast cancer.

Select your book. Register for free. Join the conversation virtually via Zoom connection three times (every other week) over a six-week period.

THE GIFTS OF PERFECTION
BY BRENÉ BROWN

  • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • For over a decade, Brené Brown has found a special place in our hearts as a gifted mapmaker and a fellow traveler. She is both a social scientist and a kitchen-table friend whom you can always count on to tell the truth, make you laugh, and, on occasion, cry with you. And what’s now become a movement all started with The Gifts of Imperfection, which has sold more than two million copies in thirty-five different languages across the globe. What transforms this book from words on a page to effective daily practices are the ten guideposts to wholehearted living. The guideposts not only help us understand the practices that will allow us to change our lives and families, they also walk us through the unattainable and sabotaging expectations that get in the way. Brené writes, “This book is an invitation to join a wholehearted revolution. A small, quiet, grassroots movement that starts with each of us saying, ‘My story matters because I matter.’ Revolution might sound a little dramatic, but in this world, choosing authenticity and worthiness is an absolute act of resistance.”

  • Meeting 1: Monday, January 8, 2024 7:30-8:30PM EST

    Meeting 2: Monday, January 22, 2024 7:30-8:30PM EST

    Meeting 3: Monday, February 5, 2024 7:30-8:30PM EST

  • Register in advance for this meeting:

    https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZMtce6qpjMiHNGwOo5urWlJ2UvGP0w1Fut0

    After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

UNTAMED BY GLENNON DOYLE

  • #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • In her most revealing and powerful memoir yet, the activist, speaker, bestselling author, and “patron saint of female empowerment” (People) explores the joy and peace we discover when we stop striving to meet others’ expectations and start trusting the voice deep within us.

    NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY O: The Oprah Magazine • The Washington Post • Cosmopolitan • Marie Claire • Bloomberg • Parade • “Untamed will liberate women—emotionally, spiritually, and physically. It is phenomenal.”—Elizabeth Gilbert, author of City of Girls and Eat Pray Love. “Packed with incredible insight about what it means to be a woman today.”—Reese Witherspoon (Reese’s Book Club Pick)

    This is how you find yourself.

    There is a voice of longing inside each woman. We strive so mightily to be good: good partners, daughters, mothers, employees, and friends. We hope all this striving will make us feel alive. Instead, it leaves us feeling weary, stuck, overwhelmed, and underwhelmed. We look at our lives and wonder: Wasn’t it all supposed to be more beautiful than this? We quickly silence that question, telling ourselves to be grateful, hiding our discontent—even from ourselves.

    For many years, Glennon Doyle denied her own discontent. Then, while speaking at a conference, she looked at a woman across the room and fell instantly in love. Three words flooded her mind: There She Is. At first, Glennon assumed these words came to her from on high. But she soon realized they had come to her from within. This was her own voice—the one she had buried beneath decades of numbing addictions, cultural conditioning, and institutional allegiances. This was the voice of the girl she had been before the world told her who to be. Glennon decided to quit abandoning herself and to instead abandon the world’s expectations of her. She quit being good so she could be free. She quit pleasing and started living.

    Soulful and uproarious, forceful and tender, Untamed is both an intimate memoir and a galvanizing wake-up call. It is the story of how one woman learned that a responsible mother is not one who slowly dies for her children, but one who shows them how to fully live. It is the story of navigating divorce, forming a new blended family, and discovering that the brokenness or wholeness of a family depends not on its structure but on each member’s ability to bring her full self to the table. And it is the story of how each of us can begin to trust ourselves enough to set boundaries, make peace with our bodies, honor our anger and heartbreak, and unleash our truest, wildest instincts so that we become women who can finally look at ourselves and say: There She Is.

    Untamed shows us how to be brave. As Glennon insists: The braver we are, the luckier we get.

  • Meeting 1: Monday, February 19, 2024 7:30-8:30PM EST

    Meeting 2: Monday, March 4, 2024 7:30-8:30PM EST

    Meeting 3: Monday, March 18, 2024 7:30-8:30PM EST

  • Register in advance for this meeting:

    https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0vde2hpjwqHNwuNax8KUWfjYd1YoxCOV47

    After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

BETWEEN TWO KINGDOMS: A MEMOIR OF A LIFE INTERRUPTED BY SULEIKA JAOUAD

  • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A searing, deeply moving memoir of illness and recovery that traces one young woman’s journey from diagnosis to remission to re-entry into “normal” life—from the author of the Life, Interrupted column in The New York Times

    ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, The Rumpus, She Reads, Library Journal, Booklist • “I was immersed for the whole ride and would follow Jaouad anywhere. . . . Her writing restores the moon, lights the way as we learn to endure the unknown.”—Chanel Miller, The New York Times Book Review

    “Beautifully crafted . . . affecting . . . a transformative read . . . Jaouad’s insights about the self, connectedness, uncertainty and time speak to all of us.”—The Washington Post

    In the summer after graduating from college, Suleika Jaouad was preparing, as they say in commencement speeches, to enter “the real world.” She had fallen in love and moved to Paris to pursue her dream of becoming a war correspondent. The real world she found, however, would take her into a very different kind of conflict zone.

    It started with an itch—first on her feet, then up her legs, like a thousand invisible mosquito bites. Next came the exhaustion, and the six-hour naps that only deepened her fatigue. Then a trip to the doctor and, a few weeks shy of her twenty-third birthday, a diagnosis: leukemia, with a 35 percent chance of survival. Just like that, the life she had imagined for herself had gone up in flames. By the time Jaouad flew home to New York, she had lost her job, her apartment, and her independence. She would spend much of the next four years in a hospital bed, fighting for her life and chronicling the saga in a column for The New York Times.

    When Jaouad finally walked out of the cancer ward—after countless rounds of chemo, a clinical trial, and a bone marrow transplant—she was, according to the doctors, cured. But as she would soon learn, a cure is not where the work of healing ends; it’s where it begins. She had spent the past 1,500 days in desperate pursuit of one goal—to survive. And now that she’d done so, she realized that she had no idea how to live.

    How would she reenter the world and live again? How could she reclaim what had been lost? Jaouad embarked—with her new best friend, Oscar, a scruffy terrier mutt—on a 100-day, 15,000-mile road trip across the country. She set out to meet some of the strangers who had written to her during her years in the hospital: a teenage girl in Florida also recovering from cancer; a teacher in California grieving the death of her son; a death-row inmate in Texas who’d spent his own years confined to a room. What she learned on this trip is that the divide between sick and well is porous, that the vast majority of us will travel back and forth between these realms throughout our lives. Between Two Kingdoms is a profound chronicle of survivorship and a fierce, tender, and inspiring exploration of what it means to begin again.

  • Meeting 1: Monday, April 29, 2024 7:30-8:30PM EST

    Meeting 2: Monday, May 13, 2024 7:30-8:30PM EST

    Meeting 3: Monday, June 3, 2024 7:30-8:30PM EST

  • Register in advance for this meeting:

    https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZUtceGsqzovEtwis_iu6oVjIsyazelelsyS

    After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

WHEN THINGS FALL APART: HEART ADVICE FOR DIFFICULT TIMES
BY PEMA CHÖDRÖN

  • Pema Chödrön's perennially best-selling classic on overcoming life's difficulties cuts to the heart of spirituality and personal growth--now in a newly designed 20th-anniversary edition with a new afterword by Pema--makes for a perfect gift and addition to one's spiritual library.

    How can we live our lives when everything seems to fall apart—when we are continually overcome by fear, anxiety, and pain? The answer, Pema Chödrön suggests, might be just the opposite of what you expect. Here, in her most beloved and acclaimed work, Pema shows that moving toward painful situations and becoming intimate with them can open up our hearts in ways we never before imagined. Drawing from traditional Buddhist wisdom, she offers life-changing tools for transforming suffering and negative patterns into habitual ease and boundless joy.

  • Meeting 1: Monday, August 12, 2024 7:30-8:30PM EST

    Meeting 2: Monday, August 26, 2024 7:30-8:30PM EST

    Meeting 3: Monday, September 9, 2024 7:30-8:30PM EST

  • Register in advance for this meeting:

    https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYocO-gpzwqEt3kLUYqxjQLDddEPq9nEUF_

    After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

BROKEN OPEN: HOW DIFFICULT TIMES CAN HELP US GROW
BY ELIZABETH LESSER

  • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • This inspiring guide to healing and growth illuminates the richness and potential of every life, even in the face of loss and adversity—now updated with additional toolbox materials and a new preface by the author.

    In the more than twenty-five years since she co-founded Omega Institute—now the world’s largest center for spiritual retreat and personal growth—Elizabeth Lesser has been an intimate witness to the ways in which people weather change and transition. In a beautifully crafted blend of moving stories, humorous insights, practical guidance, and personal memoir, she offers tools to help us make the choice we all face in times of challenge: Will we be broken down and defeated, or broken open and transformed? Lesser shares tales of ordinary people who have risen from the ashes of illness, divorce, loss of a job or a loved one—stronger, wiser, and more in touch with their purpose and passion. And she draws on the world’s great spiritual and psychological traditions to support us as we too learn to break open and blossom into who we were meant to be.

  • Meeting 1: Monday, September 16, 2024 7:30-8:30PM EST

    Meeting 2: Monday, September 30, 2024 7:30-8:30PM EST

    Meeting 3: Monday, October 7, 2024 7:30-8:30PM EST

  • Register in advance for this meeting:

    https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZIocuGtqzMqHtYMGyQGueVVnZWAf_FntIm5

    After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

FLOW: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF OPTIMAL EXPERIENCE
BY MIHALY CSIKSZENTMIHALYI

  • Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's famous investigations of "optimal experience" have revealed that what makes an experience genuinely satisfying is a state of consciousness called flow. During flow, people typically experience deep enjoyment, creativity, and a total involvement with life. In this new edition of his groundbreaking classic work, Csikszentmihalyi demonstrates the ways this positive state can be controlled, not just left to chance. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience teaches how, by ordering the information that enters our consciousness, we can discover true happiness and greatly improve the quality of our lives.

  • Meeting 1: Monday, November 18, 2024 7:30-8:30PM EST

    Meeting 2: Monday, December 2, 2024 7:30-8:30PM EST

    Meeting 3: Monday, December 16, 2024 7:30-8:30PM EST

  • Register in advance for this meeting:

    https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZctd-utrzwqH90KLaE0LBpQTIb3i56crXxI

    After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.