Read Beat (...and repeat)

Louisa Lim grew up in Hong Kong and later covered China and Hong Kong for a decade as a correspondent for BBC and NPR. Her previous book, "The People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited," recalled China's brutal suppression of protest in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
Now a teacher at the University of Melbourne in Australia, she found herself immersed in familiar territory when protests broke out in her native Hong Kong in 2019. The protests were a reaction to a crackdown by Chinese authorities who want to bring the city under its control.
Lim said she found herself caught up in the protests that swept through Hong Kong before the covid shutdown, forcing her to question her objectivity as a journalist in covering the scene.
"Indelible City" covers Hong Kong's past, from the British takeover in 1842 to its "return" to China in 1997 to the present situation as Beijing lays down ever-stricter rules for citizens.
Lim talks to Steve Tarter about an exodus from Hong Kong by citizens who seek to avoid Chinese domination and start little Hong Kongs across the globe. 

Building a future for coral reefs may not seem to be a priority in a world threatened with climate change, an ocean festooned with plastic and alarming extinction rates being registered even in insects, always thought of as the planet's ultimate survivors.
As Juli Berwald notes in her interview with Steve Tarter, coral reefs aren't just pretty places to view while on vacation. Coral reefs take up less than 1 percent of the ocean's area but help a fourth of all marine species survive at one time or another. "A billion people rely on those ecosystems for sustenance or work," she writes.
"The combined revenue from food, recreation and protection from storms attributed to coral reefs has been calculated at between 2.7 and 10 trillion dollars a year. The death of the reefs means food insecurity for tens of millions," noted Berwald.
Some predictions indicate that the world's great coral reefs could be lost by 2050.
But Berwald injects hope in her account. Coral farming is a real thing and, with more support, could show some great results.
One of the unsung heroes, among many individuals that Berwald consults in her research, is Frank Mars of the Mars candy firm, one billionaire who's not flying into space but diving into the problem of saving the coral reefs.
Berwald isn't just seeking answers to environmental problems but also provides a touching account of her daughter's battle with mental illness in "Life on the Rocks."

"This is Where You Belong--Finding Home Wherever You Are" covers Melody Warnick's own experience of moving about in the United States, never staying anywhere longer than a couple of years, traveling from California to Utah to Iowa to Texas--until she got to Blacksburg, Va.
There, Warnick has found peace and stability--not because Blacksburg is a model city or one of those places that always turns up among the top 10 small towns to live in or any of the lists that litter the internet--but because Warnick decided to make an effort to enjoy the place she was at.
That effort is accompanied by interviews, facts and formulas to urge others to understand what she's learned--that the place isn't as important as the person.
Chapters such as "Buy Local," "Say Hi to your Neighbors" and "Volunteer" steer one on ways to get out and commit to the place they live.

Yet another book on President Kennedy? It's true but Mark Updegrove, the author of four previous books dealing with U.S. presidents, tries to cut through the myth and the conspiracy theories with this effort.
Updegrove, who served as the director of the LBJ Presidential Library for eight years and now heads the LBJ Foundation, doesn't shy away from acknowledging that Kennedy was badly outplayed by Soviet leader Nikita Kruschev at their first meeting. 
The Bay of Pigs disaster in Cuba is also outlined but, as Updegrove noted, JFK didn't suffer a loss in popularity as a result. For a man who barely outdistanced Richard Nixon in the 1960 election, JFK gained appreciably in the office.
It's worth noting that Kennedy was supposedly more worried about his own military when it came to the Cuban missile crisis than the Russian response. 
Coming out of that showdown, Kennedy clearly established himself as a leader but other trials showed him to be more worried about politics than civil rights. Updegrove credits Bobby Kennedy who attended a meeting of leading African Americans for counseling the president to take action when the south was aflame in the 60s.
On Vietnam, Updegrove says there's nothing in the record to indicate that Kennedy would have pulled out any sooner than his predecessors. Overall, it's hard to believe that the Kennedy tenure was only three years when you stack up all the issues faced in that time. 

"Generation Sleepless--Why Tweens and Teens Aren't Sleeping Enough and How We Can Help Them" is a mouthful of a title but Heather Turgeon and Julie Wright have a lot to say when it comes to the sleeping habits of our youth.
In an interview with Steve Tarter, Julie Wright explains that sleep is just as important to teens as it is to babies.
One of the points made in "Generation Sleepless" is that, whether due to extracurricular activities or routine school schedules, almost half of U.S. public high schools start at 7 a.m.
The problem is that they may not allow students who stay up late enough sleep. That could affect performance, note the authors.
The Minnesota state medical association states that there's an "erroneous societal concept that sleep is negotiable, rather than a biologic imperative."
And sleeping in on Saturday won't necessarily prove productive. It can come back to steal sleep from a young person later on, said Wright.
"Sleep stealers" are cited in the book as well as ways to wind down at night in order to assure a good night's sleep.

Francie Hinrichsen has made a career out of helping small businesses get their brands and websites in order but she found another passion: helping women entrepreneurs.
She started Founding Females "where I get to root for women," she said.
And she wrote this book, a step-by-step guide on how women can get that business started.
"Everything's in the mind. That's where it all starts. Knowing what you want is the first step towards getting it." That's a quote from Mae West that begins the section on outlining your business idea.
"It's better to see the vision than to keep it locked away in your heart. Lay it all out! Give those ambitions hope! Delight in the chance to pour your heart out!" That's Francie's advice on stating your business idea.
Other steps follow: financial, marketing and digital points that are explained clearly so that the would-be entrepreneur knows what to do and why she's doing.
By the way, guys: While it's a female guide, Francie says the mechanics work, regardless of gender. 

Lisa Scottoline fits into the category of celebrity writer very nicely. Having sold over 30 million copies, her books are published in over 35 countries. 

So you might think that launching a new book, “What Happened to the Bennetts,” a mystery about a family that's moved into a witness protection program after a deadly carjacking incident, would be, well, routine.

Instead, Scottoline opened a new box of the books recently live on Facebook to mark the occasion. Let her tell it: “This isn’t the first time I’ve opened a box of my own books. I’ve done that forty-three times."

"You might be wondering, does it ever get old?"

"The answer is, have you had spaghetti?"

"I have."

"I’ve had spaghetti about a million times."

"I could have it a million more times.”

She goes on: “By any reasonable measure, an unboxing video should be a stupid thing to watch. I used to think they were weird, until I watched one, then two, and then a million."

"This is why I stay off of YouTube."

"And why I’m not on TikTok."

"Because tick-tock is the sound of my time wasting, and I can waste time like it’s a job.”

And finally: “If you throw a pandemic at me, then a war, sooner or later I’m going to watch some lady get a new pair of sneakers.”

These are comments taken from a weekly column she writes with her daughter Francesca Serritella for the Philadelphia Inquirer titled “Chick Wit.” 

Elizabeth Williamson has excelled at three of the top newspapers in the country: Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and New York Times. Her reporting skills are in evidence in "Sandy Hook," a book that not only covers the tragic shooting that occurred on Dec. 14, 2012 when 20 first graders and six educators were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. but the strange aftermath as some people insisted the event never occurred at all. Described as one of the most shocking cultural ruptures of the internet era, "Santy Hook" documents a belligerence that has become all too common in our interconnected world.
Williamson takes us through the torment that parents, already suffering the loss of a small child, had to contend with as families were accosted online, on the street, even shot at at one point--tormented by people who accused the parents of faking their children's deaths.
The pattern of denial and attack didn't stop at Sandy Hook, of course. They reach right to the present as the investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol continues. That incident, fueled by a former president's claims of a rigged election drove a mob to violence in the nation's capital

Arthur Brooks always wanted to be a French horn player. And became one, winding up playing professionally in the United States and Europe. In his early twenties, however, he realized he wasn’t getting better at his instrument. He was getting worse.

“I visited famous teachers and practiced more, but I couldn’t get back to where I had been. Pieces that had been easy to play became hard; pieces that had been hard became impossible,” he noted.

Brooks, the author of “From Strength to Strength,” suggests that what he went through was traumatic but not all that unusual. While there’s a drop-off in abilities that people experience in their forties and fifties, the good news is that there’s a second wave to ride to success that favors people who are older, says Brooks.

A decline in fluid intelligence doesn’t mean you’re washed up, the author states. “It means it’s time to jump off the fluid intelligence curve and onto the crystallized intelligence curve. Crystallized intelligence relies on a stock of knowledge and tends to increase with age, Brooks said.

A lot of what people think is being recycled, isn't. That's Jennie Romer talking. A San Francisco attorney who first looked into the problem of  plastic bags and plastic pollution 15 years ago, Romer's book is a guide to better recycling. While nine states now have laws that ban plastic bags, "we still have quite a few places where that's not happening," she said.