Adults

On April 15, 1837, a "long, gawky" Abraham Lincoln walked into Joshua Speed's dry-goods store in Springfield, Illinois, and asked what it would cost to buy the materials for a bed. Speed said seventeen dollars, which Lincoln didn't have. He asked for a loan to cover that amount until Christmas. Speed was taken with his visitor, but, as he said later, "I never saw so gloomy and melancholy a face." Speed suggested Lincoln stay with him in a room over his store for free and share his large double bed. What began would become one of the most important friendships in American history.

Speed was Lincoln's closest confidant, offering him invaluable support after the death of his first love, Ann Rutledge, and during his rocky courtship of Mary Todd. Lincoln needed Speed for guidance, support, and empathy. Your Friend Forever, A. Lincoln is a rich analysis of a relationship that was both a model of male friendship and a specific dynamic between two brilliant but fascinatingly flawed men who played off each other's strengths and weaknesses to launch themselves in love and life. Their friendship resolves important questions about Lincoln's early years and adds significant psychological depth to our understanding of our sixteenth president.

Skip the small talk and learn how to build a supportive community, engage with new people, and cultivate authentic, long-lasting friendships at every stage of life.

It sometimes seems like everyone has a big, happy, fulfilling social life, full of lifelong friendships...except you. As we grow older and school friendships fade, it can be difficult to meet new people and cultivate meaningful friendships. How do you strike up a conversation with a stranger? How do you move from mutual acquaintances to real friends?

Here to Make Friends has the answers to all of these questions and more. Written by a licensed therapist, this book is packed full of helpful advice and tips to overcome social anxiety and start building a stronger social circle, such as:

• Tips for moving past small talk
• Advice for getting out of your own head
• Suggestions for fun and memorable “friend dates”
• Strategies for connecting meaningfully with other people

Everyone wants to feel connected. Here to Make Friends is the perfect companion for moving past the sometimes-lonely post-school stage and into lasting, fulfilling friendships.

The phenomenon of friendship is universal. Friends, after all, are the family we choose. But what makes these bonds not just pleasant but essential, and how do they affect our bodies and our minds?

In Friendship, science journalist Lydia Denworth takes us in search of the biological, psychological, and evolutionary foundations of this important bond. She finds that the human capacity for friendship is as old as humanity itself, when tribes of people on the African savanna grew large enough for individuals to seek meaningful connection with those outside their immediate families. Lydia meets scientists at the frontiers of brain and genetics research, and discovers that friendship is reflected in our brain waves, our genomes, and our cardiovascular and immune systems; its opposite, loneliness, can kill.

With insight and warmth, Lydia weaves past and present, biology and neuroscience, to show how our bodies and minds are designed for friendship, and how this is changing in the age of social media. Blending compelling science, storytelling, and a grand evolutionary perspective, she delineates
the essential role that cooperation and companionship play in creating human (and non-human) societies.

Friendship illuminates the vital aspects of friendship, both visible and invisible, and offers a refreshingly optimistic vision of human nature. It is a clarion call for putting positive relationships at the centre of our lives.

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER!

A USA TODAY "BEST BOOKS OF 2021" PICK!



In the bestselling tradition of The Presidents Club and Presidential Courage, White House history as told through the stories of the best friends and closest confidants of American presidents.



Here are the riveting histories of myriad presidential friendships, among them:

• Abraham Lincoln and Joshua Speed: They shared a bed for four years during which Speed saved his friend from a crippling depression. Two decades later the friends worked together to save the Union.
• Harry Truman and Eddie Jacobson: When Truman wavered on whether to recognize the state of Israel in 1948, his lifelong friend and former business partner intervened at just the right moment with just the right words to steer the president's decision.
• Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Daisy Suckley: Unassuming and overlooked during her lifetime, Daisy Suckley was in reality FDR's most trusted, constant confidant, the respite for a lonely and overworked President navigating the Great Depression and World War II
• John Kennedy and David Ormsby-Gore: They met as young men in pre-war London and began a conversation over the meaning of leadership. A generation later the Cuban Missile Crisis would put their ideas to test as Ormsby-Gore became the president's unofficial, but most valued foreign policy advisor.

These and other friendships--including Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, Franklin Pierce and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Bill Clinton and Vernon Jordan--populate this fresh and provocative exploration of a series of seminal presidential friendships.



Publishing history teems with books by and about Presidents, First Ladies, First Pets, and even First Chefs. Now former Clinton aide Gary Ginsberg breaks new literary ground on Pennsylvania Avenue and provides fresh insights into the lives of the men who held the most powerful political office in the world by looking at the friends on whom they relied.



First Friends is an engaging, serendipitous look into the lives of Commanders-in-Chief and how their presidencies were shaped by those they held most dear.

In this moving story of the joy and true meaning of friendship, NPR’s award-winning legal affairs correspondent recounts her nearly 50-year friendship with Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, presenting an extraordinary account of how they paved the way for future generations by tearing down professional and legal barriers.

_______________CHOSEN AS A BEST BOOK OF 2022 BY THE GUARDIAN, OBSERVER, DAILY MAIL, FINANCIAL TIMES AND IRISH TIMES'A profound novel about friendship. I loved it to pieces' - Madeline Miller'A shining tour de force' - Ali Smith, Guardian Summer Reading 'An intimate study of the ties that bind us' - Stylist _______________A dazzling new novel of friendship, identity and the unknowability of other people - from the international bestselling author of Home Fire, winner of the Women's Prize for FictionSometimes it was as though the forty years of friendship between them was just a lesson in the unknowability of other people...Maryam and Zahra.In 1988 Karachi, two fourteen-year-old girls are a decade into their friendship, sharing in-jokes, secrets and a love for George Michael. As Pakistan's dictatorship falls and a woman comes to power, the world suddenly seems full of possibilities. Elated by the change in the air, they make a snap decision at a party. That night, everything goes wrong, and the two girls are powerless to change the outcome.Zahra and Maryam.In present-day London, two influential women remain bound together by loyalties, disloyalties, and the memory of that night, which echoes through the present in unexpected ways. Now both have power; and both have very different ideas of how to wield it... Their friendship has always felt unbreakable; can it be undone by one decision?_______________'A new Kamila Shamsie novel is always worth celebrating, but Best of Friends is something else: an epic story that explores the ties of childhood friendship, the possibility of escape, the way the political world intrudes into the personal, all through the lens of two sharply drawn protagonists' - Observer, Books of the Year 2022