As a child, my favorite day of each school year was the day I received my textbooks for the year. I remember poring over them for hours on end until I'd finished them all, cover to cover, by the end of the week. In the spirit of back-to-school, I've compiled my reading list for the upcoming year – a tip about teachers' children, the "new" year for us will forever begin in August and end in June. 😉
This list was curated to help grapple with the social and political climate of today and challenge us to craft a better, more equitable tomorrow. The full list is at the blog below! Share in the comments, what are you reading?
Personal Development & Idealogical Growth
Yes We (Still) Can: Politics in the Age of Obama, Twitter, and Trump, by Dan Pfeiffer
Minority Leader: How to Lead from the Outside and Make Real Change, by Stacey Abrams
David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants, by Malcolm Gladwell
Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, by Sebastian Junger
Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Black Silent Majority, by Michael Javen Fortner
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari
I'm Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness, by Austin Channing Brown
Reimagining the Social Contract for the 21st Century
Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, by Matthew Desmond
Raising the Floor: How a Universal Basic Income Can Renew Our Economy and Rebuild the American Dream, by Andy Stern
Concrete Economics: The Hamilton Approach to Economic Growth and Policy, by Stephen S. Cohen and J. Bradford DeLong
Current Cultural Accounts, Analyses, & Critiques
Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, by J.D. Vance
The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, by George Packer
Sleeping Giant: How the New Working Class Will Transform America, by Tamara Draut
Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, by Arlie Russell Hochschild
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, by Jonathan Haidt
Deciding What’s True: The Rise of Political Fact-Checking in American Journalism, by Lucas Graves
What We Think About When We Try Not to Think About Global Warming: Toward a New Psychology of Climate Action, by Per Espen Stoknes
Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence
White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, by Nancy Isenberg
American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, by Chris Hedges
Historical Accounts, Analyses & Collections
The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, by Michael Lewis
The Invention of Russia: The Journey from Gorbachev’s Freedom to Putin’s War, by Arkady Ostrovsky
Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939, by Volker Ulrich
The Anatomy of Fascism, by Robert Paxton
The Origins of Totalitarianism, by Hannah Arendt
The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Chris Clark
Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, by Douglas Blackmon
The American Transcendentalists: Essential Writings, by Lawrence Buell
Current Culturally Relevant Fiction
The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood
1984, by George Orwell
It Can't Happen Here, by Sinclair Lewis
Jennifer Government, by Max Barry
Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury
The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald