A Woman’s Guide to Having It All: Life Lessons to Live By
By Celia Ward-Wallace
Celia Ward-Wallace wants you to know something: When you were conceived, you had already won the biggest race of your life—you came into the world a winner, whole and full of greatness. Because of that, you can envision and create the life you want. She should know; she comes from a family of political activists and union organizers who wanted to change the world, and remembers her very first activist march at the age of nine. Si se puede!
As might be expected with such progressive parents, Ward-Wallace had no hesitation when she fell in love with a man of a different race. Almost naively, it seems, she was surprised when guys at her husband’s firehouse put him through a hazing in response to this fact. But nobody could anticipate they would cause him a permanent injury.
Despite this and other setbacks, the couple stayed together and have created a strong family unit with their two daughters. Ward-Wallace has used her considerable talents in building a coaching and public speaking business, and has a goal of empowering a million women through her work. This is not a person who thinks small! Her new book takes readers step-by-step through the most important life lesson of all, that a significant life is not measured by how successful you are, how much money you make or how attractive you are, but by who you are.
Each of the Life Lessons chapters in her book puts another step into place. She offers wisdom followed by provocative questions, workbook style, designed to illuminate both obstacles and the suggestion of forward direction. If I had to pick my favorite, it would be this: “My husband has no problem taking care of his needs. . . . I have learned that, instead of being resentful with him for taking care of himself, I have to be more like him.” Somehow many women have gotten a memo that they’re supposed to be giving and doing all the time, but missed the memo about recharging their own batteries.
Life is a journey, sometimes challenging and difficult. Ward-Wallace offers very specific guidelines for satisfying not just two or three, but all the significant areas (she calls them identities) of a woman’s complex life, in order to create satisfaction and joy. It’s good to have a map. (Journey Publishing)
—Abigail Lewis
Clean Plates: A Guide to the Healthiest, Tastiest and Most Sustainable Restaurants for Vegetarians and Carnivores
By Jared Koch
There are endless things to love about Los Angeles—perfect weather, the smell of jasmine, breathtaking views from the mountains to the Pacific, year-round availability of fresh produce, and a community of people dedicated to eating well. So it was no problem for nutritional consultant Jared Koch to round up a team of local writers and send them out to sample meals from eateries dedicated to organic and locally-sourced foods. The result: Clean Plates, a comprehensive pocket guide to the city’s healthiest restaurants. The first 70+ pages are an informational guide that will help you design a diet that is best for you, while the rest of the book is reviews of restaurants that survived a rigorous health and taste test. Writers reviewed, researched and fact-checked more than 100 places, such as Café Gratitude on Larchmont Boulevard (“the all-vegan restaurant can make even the most skeptical customers smile”), Pasadena’s Firefly Bistro (“on Thursday evenings a farmers market sets up outside the restaurant”), and The Misfit in Santa Monica (“once a bank, the space is big, beautiful and moody”). Clean Plates also has a Manhattan and Brooklyn version for bi-coastal babies. Let’s hope they’ll cover more cities soon, so that no matter where you go, you can find great places to nourish your body. (Craving Wellness)
—Jenny Rough
Healing at the Speed of Sound: How What We Hear Transforms Our Brains and Our Lives from Music to Silence and Everything in Between
By Don Campbell and Alex Doman
Our environment—even our highly personal life spaces and workplaces—screeches, drones, hammers, grinds and beeps in habituated sound pollution so routine we barely notice. Air and water pollution we note and resist, seeking consumer protections of legislation and ordinance, but sound pollution we too often reinforce and proliferate, as though complicitous in our own daily din. Authors Campbell and Doman offer simple and effective regimens to transform noise into “sound nutrition,” creating healthy sound environments that harmonize and relieve stress, and a formula for daily experience that promotes health and well-being on all levels. They posit the fundamentality of sound perception to early human language development and social institutions through the practices of singing, aural traditions and documented proto-languages of our Neanderthal ancestors, a primal influence that recapitulates in each of us through in-utero and early-childhood sensitivities. That health, learning ability, memory and self-worth all benefit from education and experience of music and rhythm draws support from extensive research documented in a readable, witty style, suffused with humorous and metaphoric turns of phrase. Documentation ranges from cancer treatments to workplace productivity, psychological and spiritual enrichment to cosmological treatises dealing with the role of sound as an organizing principle in macro and micro physics. The authors maintain a scientific perspective throughout, in reviewing vast interrelated research supporting healthy sound environments and virtually all aspects of our personal and societal health and welfare. (Hudson St. Press/Penguin)
—Mac Graham
