Friendship

Happy Friendship Day!  Here are ten books on friendship.

Besties by Leah Goren - Besties smartly captures all the reasons why best friends are . . . well, the best- they help you make decisions, are there through rough patches, and will always be your +1 for awkward parties. Even more than that, best friends are the people with whom dearest memories are shared, whether trivial or meaningful. In a style that is at turns both sweet and quirky, celebrated indie artist Leah Goren illustrates the many ways in which close friendships withstand the test of time, cross-country moves, failed romantic relationships, and silly arguments. Featuring whimsical artwork and a sincere message, this is the book friends both young and mature will want to give each other to show their appreciation.

Deep Secrets: Boys, Friendships, and the Crisis of Connection by Niobe Way - Boys are emotionally illiterate and don't want intimate friendships". In this empirically grounded challenge to our stereotypes about boys and men, the author reveals the intense intimacy among teenage boys especially during early and middle adolescence. Boys not only share their deepest secrets and feelings with their closest male friends, they claim that without them they would go "wacko." Yet as boys become men, they become distrustful, lose these friendships, and feel isolated and alone. Drawing from hundreds of interviews conducted throughout adolescence with black, Latino, white, and Asian American boys, this work reveals the ways in which we have been telling ourselves a false story about boys, friendships, and human nature. Boys' descriptions of their male friendships sound more like "something out of Love Story than Lord of the Flies." Yet in late adolescence, boys feel they have to "man up" by becoming stoic and independent. Vulnerable emotions and intimate friendships are for girls and gay men. "No homo" becomes their mantra. These findings are alarming, given what we know about links between friendships and health, and even longevity. Rather than a "boy crisis," the author argues that boys are experiencing a "crisis of connection" because they live in a culture where human needs and capacities are given a sex (female) and a sexuality (gay), and thus discouraged for those who are neither. The author argues that the solution lies with exposing the inaccuracies of our gender stereotypes and fostering these critical relationships and fundamental human skills.

Fifty Shades of They: Insights That Bring Life to Your Relationships by Ed Young - You're only as great as your relationships. Show me your friends and I will show you your future. There is immeasurable growth and success to be found when you're surrounded with the right "they". Do you have the right they in your life? Fifty Shades of They gives you fifty simple, yet profound insights that will help any relationship thrive, from friendships to business partnerships to marriages. Based on biblical standards and the teaching of Ed Young, this book is written for anyone who is looking to give new life to their relationships.

Life's Too Short to Go So F*cking Slow: Lessons from an Epic Friendship That Went the Distance by Susan Lacke - Susan and Carlos were unlikely friends. She was a young, overweight college professor and a bit of a trainwreck--juggling a divorce, a pack-a-day habit, and hiding empty boxes of wine under her bed. He was her boss, an Ironman triathlete, with life figured out. She was a whiner, he was a hard-ass. He had his shit together, she most assuredly did not.
Trash-talking workouts, breakdowns, a devastating diagnosis--this heartwarming story of training buddies reveals a deep and abiding friendship that traversed life, sport, and everything in between. Their journey reveals the inspiring power of sports and friendship to change lives forever.

The Like Switch: An Ex-FBI Agent's Guide to Influencing, Attracting, and Winning People Over by Jack Schafer - From a former FBI Special Agent specializing in behavior analysis and recruiting spies comes a handbook filled with his proven strategies on how to instantly read people and influence how they perceive you, so you can easily turn on the like switch.
The Like Switch is packed with all the tools you need for turning strangers into friends, whether you are on a sales call, a first date, or a job interview. As a Special Agent for the FBI's National Security Division's Behavioral Analysis Program, Dr. Jack Schafer developed dynamic and breakthrough strategies for profiling terrorists and detecting deception. Now, Dr. Schafer has evolved his proven-on-the-battlefield tactics for the day-to-day, but no less critical battle of getting people to like you.
In The Like Switch, he presents these techniques for how you can influence, attract, and win people over. Learn how to think and react like your favorite TV investigators from Criminal Minds or CSI as Dr. Schafer shows you how to improve your LQ (Likeability Quotient), "spot the lie" both in person and online, master nonverbal cues that influence how people perceive you, and turn up or turn down the intensity of a relationship.
Dr. Schafer cracks the code on making great first impressions, building lasting relationships, and understanding others' behavior to learn what they really think about you. With tips and techniques that hold the key to taking control of your communications, interactions, and relationships, The Like Switch shows you how to read others and get people to like you for a moment or a lifetime.

My Glory Was I Had Such Friends by Amy Silverstein - In this moving memoir about the power of friendship and the resilience of the human spirit, Amy Silverstein tells the story of the extraordinary group of women who supported her as she waited on the precipice for a life-saving heart transplant.
Nearly twenty-six years after receiving her first heart transplant, Amy Silverstein's donor heart plummeted into failure. If she wanted to live, she had to take on the grueling quest for a new heart--immediately.
A shot at survival meant uprooting her life and moving across the country to California. When her friends heard of her plans, there was only one reaction: "I'm there." Nine remarkable women--Joy, Jill, Leja, Jody, Lauren, Robin, Valerie, Ann, and Jane--put demanding jobs and pressing family obligations on hold to fly across the country and be by Amy's side. Creating a calendar spreadsheet, the women--some of them strangers to one another--passed the baton of friendship, one to the next, and headed straight and strong into the battle to help save Amy's life.
Empowered by the kind of empathy that can only grow with age, these women, each knowing Amy from different stages of her life, banded together to provide her with something that medicine alone could not.  Sleeping on a cot beside her bed, they rubbed her back and feet when the pain was unbearable, adorned her room with death-distracting decorations, and engaged in their "best talks ever."  They saw the true measure of their friend's strength, and they each responded in kind.
My Glory Was I Had Such Friends is a tribute to these women and the intense hours they spent together--hours of heightened emotion and self-awareness, where everything was laid bare. Candid and heartrending, this once-in-a-lifetime story of connection and empathy is a powerful reminder of the ultimate importance of "showing up" for those we love.

Never Unfriended: The Secret to Finding and Keeping Lasting Friendships by Lisa-Jo Baker - In a world where women can unfriend each other with the swipe of a finger, how do we find friendships that we can trust to last? Maybe by first becoming those kinds of lasting friends ourselves. As the community manager at the website incourage.me since 2010, Lisa-Jo Baker has had the chance to engage hundreds of conversations with women about friendship. She's learned that no one can make us quite as unsure about ourselves as another woman. And nothing can wound as deeply as unkind words from a friend. While we are all hungry for friendship, it's the fear of feeling awkward and being rejected, left out, or hurt (again) that often keep us from connecting. But what if we knew we could never be unfriended? Would we risk friendship then? Starting with that guarantee from the most faithful friend who ever lived--Jesus--this book is a step-by-step guide to friendships you can trust. It answers the questions that lurk under the surface of every friendship--What are we afraid of? What can't we change? What can we change? And where do we start?--with personal stories and practical tips to help you make the friends, and be the friend, that lasts.

Nobody's Cuter Than You: A Memoir of the Beauty of Friendship by Melanie Shankle - There is nothing as precious in life as a friend who knows you and loves you in spite of yourself. Yet over the last couple of decades, we've substituted the joy of real friendship with cheap imitations. We settle for "community" on Facebook and Twitter and a series of text messages that allow us to communicate with someone without the commitment. We like each other's beautifully filtered photos on Instagram and delude ourselves into believing we have a community. But real friendship requires effort. It's showing up, laughing loud, and crying hard. It's forgiving and loving and giving the benefit of the doubt. It's making a casserole, doing a carpool pickup, and making sure she knows those cute shoes are 50 percent off. Written in the same comedic style as the New York Times bestsellers Sparkly Green Earrings and The Antelope in the Living Room, Nobody's Cuter than You is a laugh-out-loud look at the special bond that exists between friends and a poignant celebration of all the extraordinary people God had the good sense to bring into our lives at exactly the right moments. From the friendships we develop over a lifetime to the ones that wounded us and the ones that taught us to love better, Melanie Shankle reveals the influence our friends have on who we were, who we are, and who we will become. And on a day when our jeans feel too tight, our chins have decided to embrace hormone-related acne reminiscent of our teen years, and our kids have tested the limits of our sanity, they are the ones who will look at us and say, "Nobody's cuter than you!"

Soul Friends: The Transforming Power of Deep Human Connection by Stephen Cope - Most of us will have many friends throughout our lifetimesfriends of all shapes, sizes, and callings. Many of these are wonderful, meaningful friendships. Some are difficult. But some magic few of these are connections that have gone right to our soul. These five or seven or ten friendships have been powerful keys to determining who we have become and who we will become. . . . These are the people I call Soul Friends. As the Senior Scholar-in-Residence for over 25 years at the renowned Kripalu Center, Stephen Cope has spent decades investigatingand writing aboutthe integration of body, mind, and spirit and the rich complexity of our relationships with others, and with ourselves. Perhaps the central truth that arises from his work is this: human beings are universally wired for one thingvital connection with one another. Soul Friends invites us on a compelling journey into the connectivity of the human psyche, the study of which has fascinated scholars, philosophers, and thinkers for centuries. Cope seamlessly blends science, scholarship, and storytelling, drawing on his own life as well as the histories of famous figuresfrom Eleanor Roosevelt to Charles Darwin to Queen Victoria whose formative relationships shed light on the nature of friendship itself. In his exploration, he distills human connection into six distinct yet interconnected mechanisms: containment, twinship, adversity, mirroring, identification, and conscious partnership. Then he invites us to reflect on how these forms of connection appear in our own lives, helping us work toward a fuller understanding of "who we have become and who we will become." Without a doubt, the journey to our most fulfilled selves requires us to look within. But in order to truly thrive, we must make the most of who we are in relation to one another as well. Unsparingly honest, deeply wise, and irresistibly readable, Soul Friends gives us a map to find our way.

Stop Being Lonely: Three Simple Steps to Developing Close Friendships and Deep Relationships by Kira Asatryan - Loneliness isn't something that happens only when we are physically alone. It can also happen when we are with people. Online friends, followers, or "likers" don't necessarily add up to much when you crave fulfilling interaction, and satisfying, long-term relationships are not a mystery to be left up to chance (or technology). The good news is that, according to relationship coach Kira Asatryan, loneliness has a reliable antidote: the feeling of closeness. We can andshould cultivate closeness in our relationships using the steps outlined in this book: knowing, caring, and mastering closeness.
Whether with romantic partners, friends, family members, or business colleagues, these techniques will help you establish true closeness with others. The simple and straightforward actions Asatryan presents in this wonderfully practical book will guide you toward better relationships and less loneliness in all social contexts.