A groundbreaking study of the impact of current events on the lives and minds of children from the Pulitzer Prize-winning child psychiatrist.Most parents teach their children the lessons and skills they need to function in the world while trying to shield them from the harsher realities of life. But long before children are considered ready to face the complications of the real world, they are learning truths and perspectives most adults imagine are beyond them.

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Children of Crisis, a profound examination of how listening to stories promotes learning and self-discovery.As a professor emeritus at Harvard University, a renowned child psychiatrist, and the author of more than forty books, including The Moral Intelligence of Children, Robert Coles knows better than anyone the transformative power of learning and literature on young minds. In this "persuasive" book (

The inspirational true story of Ruby Bridges.The year is 1960, and six-year-old Ruby Bridges and her family have recently moved from Mississippi to New Orleans in search of a better life. When a judge orders Ruby to attend first grade at William Frantz Elementary, an all-white school, Ruby must face angry mobs of parents who refuse to send their children to school with her. Told with Robert Coles' powerful narrative and dramatically illustrated by George Ford, Ruby's story of coura...

An in-depth investigation from the renowned child psychiatrist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author: "Fascinating."— Los Angeles Times Book ReviewIn this searching, vivid inquiry, Robert Coles shows how children struggle with questions of moral choice. Bringing to life the voices of children from a rich diversity of backgrounds, including regions plagued by poverty or social unrest, he explores their reactions to movies and stories, their moral conduct, their...

Lives We Carry with Us gathers together for the first time a diverse cross section of Coles's profiles, originally published in our premier magazines over the span of five decades but never before collected in book form. Depicting the famous, the lesser known, and the unknown, the profiles here include portraits of James Agee, Dorothy Day, Erik Erikson, Dorothea Lange, Walker Percy, Bruce Springsteen, Simone Weil, and William Carlos Williams among others. Coles has chosen figures whom he c...

A brilliant portrait of a beloved and controversialfigure in twentieth-century spirituality.Simone Weil (1906-1943) was a writer and philosopher who devoted her life to a search for God—while avoiding membership in organized religion. She wrote with the clarity of a brilliant mind educated in the best French schools, the social conscience of a grass-roots labor organizer, and the certainty and humility of a mystic—and she persistently carried out her search ...

What if the greatest threat to humanity… was the human ego itself?When genetic researcher Ethan Hendersen helps develop a revolutionary gene-editing therapy designed to suppress sociopathic behaviour, the results are beyond anything science imagined. Aggression fades. Empathy grows. Human behaviour begins to change.But the breakthrough hides a terrifying possibility.The same technology capable of curing humanity's darkest impulses could also be used to reshape civil...

**PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • The renowned journalist's classic investigation of schizophrenia that follows a flamboyant and fiercely intelligent young woman as she struggles in the throes of mental illness.“The classic case study of schizophrenia that set the stage for reform. . . . Its insight, compassion, and humanity have much to teach us." —Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression**“Sylvia Frumkin” was born in 1948 and began showing sign...

Expecting to treat some mildly ill children from the streets of Bolivia on a quick “service trip,” an idealistic young medical student gets more than he bargained for when he takes a year off from Harvard Medical School to work at an orphanage in La Paz. As he comes to know the children, and sees how they live, Chi Huang is drawn deeper and deeper into their complex and desperate lives. The doctor soon realizes that to truly help these children, he will have to follow the example of Jesus:...

"Excellent" poetry and prose about physicians and their patients, by Raymond Carver, Kay Redfield Jamison, Rachel Naomi Remen, and more ( Library Journal).A Life in Medicine collects stories, poems, and essays by and for those in the healing profession, who are struggling to keep up with the science while staying true to the humanitarian goals at the heart of their work. Organized around the central themes of altruism, knowledge, skill, and duty, ...

In this book, Coles explores the concept of idealism and why it necessary to the individual and society.What are the satisfactions—and the hazards—of a life dedicated to others?Kinds of Service: From social and political struggle in the Civil Rights movement to quiet personal gestures, Coles provides a rich taxonomy of what it means to help.Psychology of Altruism: A compassionate look at the motivations that drive us, drawin...

A look at faith through the voices of children from varied religious backgrounds, by the Pulitzer-winning author of The Moral Intelligence of Children.A New York Times Notable BookWhat do children think about when they consider God, Heaven and Hell, the value of life in the here and now, and the inevitability of death? Child psychiatrist, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, and Harvard professor Robert Coles spent thirty years interviewing hundr...