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Dear Reader, We meet Stephanie Land in a homeless shelter as her daughter learns to walk. She only has $10 in her bank account and is soon moving into transitional emergency housing. In the 2019 best-selling book Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive, we see Land's struggle to provide a... Continue Reading →
Dear Reader, Every once in a while, you start into a book not knowing what you are getting yourself into. This is precisely what happened to me when I began reading Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion by Jia Tolentino. Initially, I believed this book to be an analysis on the many ways we humans indulge... Continue Reading →
Dear Reader, Every once in a while, you will pick up a book, read two sentences of the summary and think to yourself “no thanks, next!” That is how I felt when I initially encountered The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure by... Continue Reading →
Dear Reader, “I’m haunted every day by what I did as an economic hit man (EHM).” Those are John Perkins’s opening words of his autobiographical tell-all The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. While the book cover and title initially drew me into this story, I was a little hesitant that this was a... Continue Reading →
Dear Reader, While many of us seek out information on “how to” do something, the book When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing by Daniel H. Pink is all about “when to” do things. This book answers questions such as “when to change careers” and “when is a divorce more likely to happen” among others.... Continue Reading →
Dear Reader, There are four types of people in this world, well, at least according to Gretchen Rubin there is. In her highly-acclaimed book, The Four Tendencies: The Indispensable Personality Profiles That Reveal How to Make Your Life Better (and Other People's Lives Better, Too), Rubin divides people into Upholders, Questioners, Obligers, and Rebels based... Continue Reading →
Dear Reader, Have you ever heard of the book “If Beale Street Could Talk” by James Baldwin? Me neither, but a few powerful reviews of the book made me curious to check it out: “A moving, painful story, so vividly human and so obviously based on reality that it strikes us as timeless.” –Joyce Carol... Continue Reading →
Dear Reader, “What do Al Gore and Mount Pinatubo have in common?” This is one of the many questions that economist Steven D. Levitt and writer Stephen J. Dubner answer in their hit book SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance. SuperFreakonomics like its predecessor Freakonomics explores how the... Continue Reading →
Dear Reader, How is it that one person can look like a college student and the other middle-aged while both are in their early 30s? Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn and Dr. Elissa Epel get to the bottom of aging in their book The Telomere Effect: A Revolutionary Approach to Living Younger, Healthier, Longer. Telomeres are the... Continue Reading →
Dear Reader, Was there ever a more insidious emotion than desire? I recently finished reading the novel Call Me by Your Name by Italian author André Aciman, which features ‘desire’ as a key theme of the story. Call Me by Your Name is a 2007 romantic fiction novel set in Italy in 1987. The book... Continue Reading →
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