I Am, I Am, I Am is a memoir written by Maggie O’Farrell that chronicles seventeen near death experiences in her life. Each chapter tells a story of a different life-altering experience, from a childhood illness, to near drowning after a midnight jump into the ocean, to a hospital procedure gone awry. The book culminates …
What do I read for fun when I’m writing a book about American history? As it happens, more American history. The book on my nightstand right now is These Truths: A History of the United States, by Jill Lepore. Lepore, a professor at Harvard, knows how to tell a story. At a time when some …
Radical Candor is intended to be a self-help book for managers, but I’ve found it has changed my perspective on many of my relationships both professional and personal. The premise is pretty simple: the most important thing you can do to create healthy productive relationships with people you care about is to tell the truth …
Despite the brain’s ability to map out function and behavior in an organized way, the mind transcends this fundamental capacity, and functions in many diverging directions based on a variety of environmental influences. Michael Pollan explores this complex interaction between nature and nurture – the neurological debate of the century – in his most recent …
For the past year I’ve been developing a fascination for Greek mythology. I think it probably started last summer when I read The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood. It tells the story of Homer’s Illiad from the perspective of Penelope, wife of the hero Odysseus, who waits 20 years for her husband to return home from …
I am in the middle of the novel In the Distance by Hernan Diaz right now. The novel tells the story of Håkan Söderström, a young Swedish immigrant to the United States in the nineteenth century. After losing his older brother during the passage from Europe to America, and accidentally ending up in San Francisco …
I am reading One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez and even though my progress is often interrupted by fifty-page readings for anthropology I am still completely engrossed in the book. Set in the town of Macondo the plot follows the glories and defeats of the Buendía family as they struggle with love, …
Since we’re right in the middle of the Multifaith Fellowship, I’ve been reading a lot of books and articles about engaging faith/religion/tradition with society and history. One of my favorites so far is by Miroslav Volf, Flourishing: Why We Need Religion in a Globalized World. Flourishing is the work of professor Volf’s seminar, “Faith & Globalization” …
Russia/USSR has long been a place that fascinates me. As a kid growing up in the 1980’s, some of my earliest memories were of Mikhail Gorbachev’s visits to the US. As a product of a liberal arts college, I took classes in Russian language, history, and literature (in addition to my chemistry classes). The Russia …
If you’re interested in the world of Modern Orthodox Jews, I’d definitely recommend reading any of Tova Mirvis’s wonderful novels. However, Mirvis’s 2017 memoir, The Book of Separation, which documents her decision to leave the Orthodoxy, should be on the top of your reading list. Even if you’re not interested in Modern Orthodox Judaism–which you …