Full of useful suggestions, insights and solutions for newcomers, this book features stories by AA members about what helped them get sober and successfully navigate early sobriety.

An insightful, joyful tour of the transformative powers of starting something new, no matter your age—from the bestselling author of Traffic and You May Also Like “Vanderbilt elegantly and persuasively tackles one of the most pernicious of the lies we tells ourselves—that the pleasures of learning are reserved for the young.” —Malcolm Gladwell, bestselling author of Outliers Why do so many of us stop learning new skills as adults? Are we afraid to be bad at something? Have we forgotten the sheer pleasure of beginning from the ground up? Inspired by his young daughter’s insatiable curiosity, Tom Vanderbilt embarks on a yearlong quest of learning—purely for the sake of learning. Rapturously singing Spice Girls songs in an amateur choir, losing games of chess to eight-year-olds, and dodging scorpions at a surf camp in Costa Rica, Vanderbilt tackles five main skills but learns so much more. Along the way, he interviews dozens of experts about the fascinating psychology and science behind the benefits of becoming an adult beginner and shows how anyone can get better at beginning again—and, more important, why they should take those first awkward steps. Funny, uplifting, and delightfully informative, Beginners is about how small acts of reinvention, at any age, can make life seem magical.

The last two decades have witnessed a revolution in the realm of typography, with the virtual disappearance of hot-lead typesetting in favor of the so-called digital typesetting. The principle behind the new technology is simple: imagine a very fine mesh superimposed on a sheet of paper. Digital typesetting consists in darkening the appropriate pixels (tiny squares) of this mesh, in patterns corresponding to each character and symbol of the text being set. The actual darkening is done by some printing device, say a laser printer or phototypesetter, which must be told exactly where the ink should go. Since the mesh is very fine-the dashes surrounding this sentence are some six pixels thick, and more than 200 pixels long-the printer can only be controlled by a computer program, which takes a "high-level" description of the page in terms of text, fonts, and formatting commands, and digests all of that into "low-level" commands for the printer. TEX is such a program, created by Donald E. Knuth, a computer scientist at Stanford University.

Quintessential Anne Serre—this restless, prowling novel explores love as a form of greed, and confused need as one shape of bereftness Anna has been living happily for twenty years with loving, sturdy, outgoing Guillaume when she suddenly (truly at first sight) falls in love with Thomas. Intelligent and handsome, but apparently scarred by a terrible early emotional wound, he reminds Anna of Jude the Obscure. Adrift and lovelorn, she tries unsuccessfully to fend off her attraction, torn between the two men. “How strange it is to leave someone you love for someone you love. You cross a footbridge that has no name, that’s not named in any poem. No, nowhere is a name given to this bridge, and that is why Anna found it so difficult to cross.” Anne Serre offers here, in her third book in English, her most direct novel to date. The Beginners is unpredictable, sensual, exhilarating, oddly moral, perverse, absurd—and unforgettable.

Theo and Raquel Motherwell are the only newcomers to the sleepy town of Wick in fifteen-year-old Ginger Pritt’s memory. Hampered by a lingering innocence while her best friend, Cherry, grows more and more embroiled with boys, Ginger is instantly attracted to the worldliness of this dashing couple. But as Ginger’s keen imagination takes up the seductive mystery of their past, she is only left with more questions. Who—or what—exactly, are the Motherwells? And what is it they want with her? Both a lyrical coming-of-age story and a spine-tingling tale of ghostly menace, The Beginners introduces Rebecca Wolff as an exciting new talent in fiction.

Sometimes you have to go a long way to find what you’re looking for. And sometimes a little beginner’s luck is all you need...

Amusing, irreverent, sophisticated and highly accessible, Einstein for Beginners is the perfect introduction to Einstein's life and thought. Reaching back as far as Babylon (for the origins of mathematics) and the Etruscans (who thought they could handle lightning), this book takes us through the revolutions in electrical communications and technology that made the theory of relativity possible. In the process, we meet scientific luminaries and personalities of imperial Germany, as well as Galileo, Faraday, and Newton; learn why moving clocks run slower than stationary ones, why nothing can go faster than the speed of light; and follow Albert's thought as he works his way toward E = mc2, the most famous equation of the twentieth century.