Recently I’ve been reading about an Internet shopping company in China that is larger than Amazon, yet in the U.S.A. we are only just beginning to hear about it. The company, or three pillars, as it’s founder calls it, consists of Alibaba, Alipay, and Aliexpress. Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built, by Duncan Clark, is …
After assigning Kathryn Lofton’s Oprah: Gospel of an Icon, which discussed, among other things, how Oprah’s book club created a quasi-religious community, I was thrilled to be asked to be on this web page! I am currently reading The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins. Completed in 1868, The Moonstone is the first detective novel in English. …
Growing up in South Louisiana, the Black church was a large part of my childhood. My mother was incredibly religious; we were a member of three churches and Sunday was our busiest day of the week. As exhausting as that was, I am still reminded of the powerful sermons and the moving music. The Black …
When Breath Becomes Air is the impossibly beautiful story about the end of a gifted young life. This haunting and beautifully written metaphysical memoir seeks to understand the human condition, and its exploration of that question is equal parts Walt Whitman and Religio Medici. The story traces the life—and ultimate death—of Paul Kalanithi, MD, from …
Writing to his teenage son, Samori, Ta-Nehisi Coates tries to provide an answer to what he describes as the question of his life: “how one should live within a black body, within a country lost in the Dream.” The Dream is the mistaken, exclusionary belief of white people that they are white, which, Coates asserts, …
I am currently reading How the García Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez. Another of Alvarez’s books, In the Time of the Butterflies, is one of my all-time favorites and inspired me to pick up this title, her first novel. Alvarez relates the stories of four sisters, alternating between each of their perspectives to …
I’ve been working in early childhood education for years and have read countless books about children, social emotional development, behaviors, early learning and discipline but as my husband and I prepare to welcome our first child in early March I find myself reading these books with a different lens. In particular when I picked up …
I occasionally teach a seminar on the history of the liberal arts, and one of my primary research areas is in decision-making and governance within small-world networked organizations. So Veblen’s study of American institutions of higher education really hits on many issues of interest to me. This book was a pioneering study of organizational behavior …
All spring and summer a dear friend insisted that I read Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts. She didn’t give me much by way of recommendation but that it was short, that it seriously changed her brain and that she wanted to talk about it. Four months later I bought a copy. A month later I finally opened …
I first picked up The Omnivore’s Dilemma because my dad had just finished reading it. For me, reading this book opened my eyes to the American agricultural industry and what food has become in America. A large portion of our food intake is dominated by corn, whether that be a direct ingredient or as the primary …