Books by Deborah Cohen

Get the best-not just the most-out of your teams.Our modern workforce is suffering. For too long, organizations and leaders have sought success through a focus on efficiency and productivity, and it's costing us dearly. Workplace bullying and abuse has reached epidemic levels-along with high rates of burnout, staff turnover, and mental illness. Clearly, something needs to change. In Humanity Works Better, leadership experts Debbie Cohen and Kate Roeske-Zummer chart a new path forward: one that brings humanity, awareness, choice, and courage to the workplace. The result? A happier work environment that draws the best-rather than squeezes the most-out of people.Through the same tools and practices they've used to transform teams at organizations like Adobe, DocuSign, Saba, Pinterest, the authors guide you through a framework that converts company culture from toxic to healthy, from competitive to collaborative, from fearful to trusting, one human at a time. You'll address your own internal roadblocks to become a better person, and a better leader. And you'll master the skills and complexities to navigate the complex relationships that make us human.As you undertake this personal journey, you'll become aware of who you want to be and how to live the whole of your life, inside and outside the workplace. You'll emerge more confident, more effective, and more human, with the skills to lead a purpose-driven workforce that is energized, engaged, and driven to succeed. That's not just good leadership; it's good business.

A Sunday Telegraph and Times Higher Education 'Book of the Week', Deborah Cohen's Family Secrets is a gripping book about what families - Victorian and modern - try to hide, and why.In an Edinburgh town house, a genteel maiden lady frets with her brother over their niece's downy upper lip. Would the darkening shadow betray the girl's Eurasian heritage? On a Liverpool railway platform, a heartbroken mother hands over her eight-year old illegitimate son for adoption. She had dressed him carefully that morning in a sailor suit and cap. In a town in the Cotswolds, a vicar brings to his bank vault a diary - sewed up in calico, wrapped in parchment - that chronicles his sexual longings for other men. Drawing upon years of research in previously sealed records, the prize-winning historian Deborah Cohen offers a sweeping and often surprising account of how shame has changed over the last two centuries. Both a story of family secrets and of how they were revealed, this book journeys from the frontier of empire, where British adventurers made secrets that haunted their descendants for generations, to the confessional vanguard of modern-day genealogy two centuries later. It explores personal, apparently idiosyncratic, decisions: hiding an adopted daughter's origins, taking a disabled son to a garden party, talking ceaselessly (or not at all) about a homosexual uncle.In delving into the familial dynamics of shame and guilt, Family Secrets investigates the part that families, so often regarded as the agents of repression, have played in the transformation of social mores from the Victorian era to the present day. Written with compassion and keen insight, this is a bold new argument about the sea-changes that took place behind closed doors.Born into a family with its own fair share of secrets, Deborah Cohen was raised in Kentucky and educated at Harvard and Berkeley.She teaches at Northwestern University, where she holds the Peter B. Ritzma Professorship of the Humanities.Her last book was the award-winning Household Gods, a history of the British love-affair with the home.

Disabled veterans were World War I's most conspicuous legacy. Nearly eight million men in Europe returned permanently disabled by injury or disease. This is a comparative analysis of the very different ways in which two belligerent nations - Germany and Britain - cared for their disabled.

At what point did the British develop their mania for interiors, wallpaper, furniture, and decoration? Why have the middle classes developed so passionate an attachment to the contents of their homes? This book chronicles a hundred years of British interiors, focusing on class, choice, shopping and possessions.