A New York Times Bestseller! An extraordinary look at what it means to grow old and a heartening guide to well-being, Happiness Is a Choice You Make weaves together the stories and wisdom of six New Yorkers who number among the “oldest old”— those eighty-five and up. In 2015, when the award-winning journalist John Leland set out on behalf of The New York Times to meet members of America’s fastest-growing age group, he anticipated learning of challenges, of loneliness, and of the deterioration of body, mind, and quality of life. But the elders he met took him in an entirely different direction. Despite disparate backgrounds and circumstances, they each lived with a surprising lightness and contentment. The reality Leland encountered upended contemporary notions of aging, revealing the late stages of life as unexpectedly rich and the elderly as incomparably wise. Happiness Is a Choice You Make is an enduring collection of lessons that emphasizes, above all, the extraordinary influence we wield over the quality of our lives. With humility, heart, and wit, Leland has crafted a sophisticated and necessary reflection on how to “live better”—informed by those who have mastered the art.

Leland was a Post Office, an elementary school, a telephone central, a lake and a bridge. All are gone except the lake. Mary Beth Munn Yntema became the keeper of data of the pioneers, their homes and farms, their children and their school. She writes down her memories so Leland would not be forgotten. Lake Leland with a post office at the end of its bridge is the focus of a community of families that arrived from many places. They carved farms out of the virgin timber and shared a simple life of fishing and swimming in the summer, cattle care and timber tasks the rest of the time. The main stories occur from 1890 to 1940. A railroad logging company, two sawmill operations and family dairy farms were the economic base. A unique society centered on the one-room school that built life-long friendships and an extended social family. The children were welcome in neighbor homes as if they were relatives. Everyone cooperated in the farm and timber tasks. Everyone rejoiced in successes of the children and shared the sorrows of the many untimely deaths or loss of house or barn to fires. The virgin timber cut was over. The Great Depression came. The story closes with the Second World War, its draft, internment camp and casualties. The school and post office closed as families moved to new jobs. Mary Beths own coming of age experiences play out against this framework of houses and people of Leland.

Master of Precision is the fascinating firsthand account of Henry Martyn Leland's life and work during the early days of the automobile industry.

On August 7, 1989, Congressman Mickey Leland departed on a flight from Addis Ababa, with his thirteen-member delegation of Ethiopian and American relief workers and policy analysts, bound for Ethiopia's border with Sudan. This was Leland's seventh official humanitarian mission in his nearly decade-long drive to transform U.S. policies toward Africa to conform to his black internationalist vision of global cooperation, antiracism, and freedom from hunger. Leland's flight never arrived at its destination. The plane crashed, with no survivors. When Leland embarked on that delegation, he was a forty-four-year-old, deeply charismatic, fiercely compassionate, black, radical American. He was also an elected Democratic representative of Houston's largely African American and Latino Eighteenth Congressional District. Above all, he was a self-proclaimed "citizen of humanity." Throughout the 1980s, Leland and a small group of former radical-activist African American colleagues inside and outside Congress exerted outsized influence to elevate Africa's significance in American foreign affairs and to move the United States from its Cold War orientation toward a foreign policy devoted to humanitarianism, antiracism, and moral leadership. Their internationalism defined a new era of black political engagement with Africa. In This Land of Plenty presents Leland as the embodiment of larger currents in African American politics at the end of the twentieth century. But a sober look at his aspirations shows the successes and shortcomings of domestic radicalism and aspirations of politically neutral humanitarianism during the 1980s, and the extent to which the decade was a major turning point in U.S. relations with the African continent. Exploring the links between political activism, electoral politics, and international affairs, Benjamin Talton not only details Leland's political career but also examines African Americans' successes and failures in influencing U.S. foreign policy toward African and other Global South countries.

Leland Hall (1883-1957) was the author of "Sinister House" and "They Seldom Speak."

15 Years of the best photography from the creators of LelandReport.com, a photo-a-day diary from Leelanau County, Michigan

An autobiographical account of twin boys growing up in a small town in Missouri.