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 …
When viewed through a dichotomy between reason and revelation, the Hebrew Bible is often regarded as a work of revelation. Unfortunately, this has led to a general dismissal of these ancient texts as supernatural nonsense in modern realms of discourse in which reason is supposed to reign supreme. The author of this book challenges such …
I love this book so much on so many levels, though it isn’t in any way an easy one to just breeze through. There is a definite learning curve to navigating the story line within the author’s style of writing, and it can feel challenging and even laborious at times. Keep going—it’s a brilliant, moving, …
I am currently reading The Opposite of Loneliness by Marina Keegan, a life taken too soon. Keegan was such a gifted writer. The words jump off of the page and I had to remind myself that the person who wrote these pieces was a young person, just like me! I am still amazed. For me, …