April 2024 list by Donalee Jacobs
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3 Shades of Blue
by James Kaplan
The story of how three legends—Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Bill Evans—came together in 1959 to create Kind of Blue, which is widely considered the great jazz album of time.
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Age of Revolutions
by Fareed Zakaria
The CNN host and best-selling author explores the revolutions—past and present—that define the polarized and unstable age in which we live.
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The Anxious Generation
by Jonathan Haidt
From the bestselling coauthor of The Coddling of the American Mind, an investigation into the collapse of youth mental health - and a plan for a healthier, freer childhood. After more than a decade of stability or improvement, the mental health of adolescents plunged in the early 2010s. Why? He investigates the nature of childhood, including why children need play and how "play-based childhood" began to decline in the 1980s, and was finally wiped out by the arrival of the "phone-based childhood" in the early 2010s. Haidt proposes four simple rules that might set us free and describes steps that parents, teachers, schools, tech companies, and governments can take to end the epidemic of mental illness and restore a more humane childhood.
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The Asteroid Hunter
by D. S. Lauretta
The Principal Investigator of NASA's historic OSIRIS-Rex Asteroid Sample Return Mission offers a behind-the-scenes account of his team's daring quest to retrieve an asteroid sample—one that held the potential to not only unlock the secrets of life's origins but also to avert an unprecedented disaster.
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Back from the Deep
by Doug Horner
Horner relates the amazing story of Gene and Sandy Ralston, a married Idaho couple in their mid 70s, who are self-taught underwater search-and-recovery specialists who volunteer their time and equipment, charging only their travel costs. When the police and FBI exhaust their abilities and options, and when grieving families run out of resources, the Ralstons' are their last best hope. They have located 130 victims from lakes and rivers across the United States and Canada and have an uncanny knack for finding bodies in deep water.
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The Black Box
by Henry Louis Gates
Through essays and speeches, novels, plays and poems, this epic story of Black self-definition in America is told through the myriad of writers who've led the way and who have used words to create a livable world—a "home"—for Black people destined to live out their lives in a racist society.
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Cloistered
by Catherine Coldstream
Finding an apparently perfect world at Akenside Priory, in Northumberland, Catherine trusts herself to a group of twenty silent women, believing she is trusting herself to God as a Carmelite nun. When Sister Catherine realizes that a mesmerizing cult has replaced the ancient ideal of religious obedience, she is faced with a dilemma. Will she submit to this, or will she be forced to speak out? Catherine's honest account of her time in the monastery – and her dramatic flight from it – is both a love song to a lost community and an exploration of what is most compelling, yet most potentially destructive when closed human groups become laws unto themselves.
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Cultures of Growth
by Mary C. Murphy
An award-winning social psychologist discusses how companies and organizations can foster a “growth” mindset, where talent and intelligence can be nurtured, with case studies from the outdoor retailer Patagonia, Microsoft and the New York City school system.
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Ghost Town Living
by Brent Underwood
The siren song of Cerro Gordo, a desolate ghost town perched high above Death Valley, has seduced thousands since the 1800s, but few fell harder for it than Brent Underwood, who moved there in March of 2020. It had once been the largest silver mine in California and Butch Cassidy, Mark Twain, and other infamous characters of the American West were rumored to have stayed there. Newspapers reported a murder a week. But that was over 150 years ago. Underwood bet his life savings - and his life - on this majestic, hardscrabble town. What followed were fires, floods, earthquakes, and perhaps strangest, fame.
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How To Walk Into a Room
by Emily P. Freeman
A Podcast host, Christian spiritual director and best-selling author offers guidance to help readers recognize when to leave situations that are no longer useful, including how to navigate endings without closure and differentiate between peace and discomfort avoidance.
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If You Can't Take the Heat
by Geraldine DeRuiter
From the James Beard Award-winning blogger behind The Everywhereist come hilarious, searing essays on how food and cooking stoke the flames of her feminism. When Mario Batali sent out an apology letter for the sexual harassment allegations made against him, he had the gall to include a recipe - for cinnamon rolls. When Geraldine DeRuiter decided to make the recipe, her subsequent essay, with its scathing commentary about the pervasiveness of misogyny in the food world, would land DeRuiter in the middle of a media firestorm. In If You Can't Take the Heat, DeRuiter shares stories about her shockingly true, painfully funny adventures through gastronomy.
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Light in Gaza
by Jehad Abusalim
Now available in audio, Light in Gaza imagines what the future of Gaza could be, while reaffirming the critical role of Gaza in Palestinian identity, history, and struggle for liberation. A seminal, moving, and wide-ranging anthology of Palestinian writers and artists, the collection constitutes a collective effort to organize and center Palestinian voices in the ongoing struggle while reimagining a better way of living for the future.
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The Manicurist's Daughter
by Susan Lieu
The author explores her family's harrowing story as Vietnamese refugees who open two nail salons, who are well on their way to the American Dream, only to lose their inimitable matriarch after a routine plastic surgery operation goes horribly awry.
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Momma Cusses
by Gwenna Laithland
A major TikTok star offers a humorous field guide to responsive parenting and trying not to be the reason your kid needs therapy. In Momma Cusses, Gwenna uses her signature style of snark and sarcasm to explain her interpretation of responsive parenting vs. reactive parenting and outline the steps she takes to raise her kids. Whether you are a parent or someone who has had a parent, we all need to learn how to handle our emotional spirals responsively. Now we can all be in it together by tackling some of the hilarious, yet all-too-real scenarios outlined in Gwenna's book.
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Nuclear War
by Annie Jacobsen
Exploring a nuclear war scenario, a Pulitzer Prize finalist in history, in this in-depth and urgent book, draws on new interviews with military and civilian experts who have built the weapons; created the response plans; and been responsible for those decisions should they need to have been made.
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Quick Fixes
by Benjamin Y. Fong
Through nine chapters, each devoted to the modern history of a drug or class of drugs, Fong examines Americans' fraught relationship with psychoactive substances. As society changes it produces different forms of stress, isolation, and alienation. These changes, in turn, shape the sorts of drugs society chooses. By laying out the histories, functions, and experiences of our chemical comforts, the hope is to help answer that ever perplexing question: what does it mean to be an American?
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Plentiful Country
by Tyler Anbinder
A history of the Irish immigrants who arrived in the United States during the Great Potato Famine shows how their strivings in and beyond New York exemplify the astonishing tenacity and improbable triumph of Irish America.
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There's Always This Year
by Hanif Abdurraqib
While Hanif Abdurraqib is an acclaimed author, a poet, and an insightful music critic, he is most of all, at heart, an Ohioan. Growing up in Columbus in the '90s, Abdurraqib witnessed a golden era of basketball, one in which legends like LeBron were forged, and countless others weren't. His lifelong love of the game leads him into a lyrical, historical, and emotionally rich exploration of what it means to make it, who we think deserves success, the tensions between excellence and expectation, and the very notion of role-models, all of which he expertly weaves together with memoir.
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Third Millennium Thinking
by Saul Perlmutter
Based on a wildly popular UC Berkeley course, and presented by a physicist, a psychologist and a philosopher, this introduction to the tools and frameworks scientists have developed to keep from fooling themselves, to understand the world, and to make decisions. We can all borrow these trust-building techniques to tackle problems both big and small. Using provocative thought exercises, jargon-free language, and vivid illustrations drawn from history, daily life, and scientist's insider stories. Third Millennium Thinking offers a novel approach for readers to make sense of the nonsense.
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Transient and Strange
by Nell Greenfieldboyce
As a science reporter, Nell Greenfieldboyce has reported from inside a space shuttle, the bottom of a coal mine, and the control room of a particle collider; she's presented news on the color of dinosaur eggs, ice worms that live on mountaintop glaciers, and signs of life on Venus. In her debut book, she delivers an original collection of powerful, emotionally raw, and unforgettable personal essays that probe the places where science touches our lives most intimately. A beautiful blend of explanatory science, original reporting, and personal experience, Transient and Strange captures the ache of ordinary life, offering resonant insights into both the world around us and the worlds within us.
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Unbecoming a Lady
by Therese Oneill
With laugh-out-loud humor, a best-selling author profiles the unforgettable, impressive 19th- and early 20th-century women who refused to conform to social standards and who were collectively unbecoming as women, but forever changed what women can become. Profiles include Dr. Mary Edwards Walker, the only woman ever awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor; Elizabeth Packard, whose unjust incarceration in a madhouse led to nationwide reforms to protect the rights of those with mental health issues; and Lilian Gilbreth, little-known for scientifically removing the stigma of the sanitary napkin and designing the modern-day kitchen.
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Who's Afraid of Gender?
by Judith Butler
The groundbreaking thinker whose book Gender Trouble redefined thoughts about gender and sexuality, confronts the attacks on "gender" that have become central to todays politics. Operating in tandem with deceptive accounts of critical race theory and xenophobic panics about migration, the anti-gender movement demonizes struggles for equality, fuels aggressive nationalism, and leaves millions of people vulnerable to subjugation. Who's Afraid of Gender? is a bold and hopeful call to refuse the alliance with authoritarian movements and to make a broad coalition with all those whose struggle for equality is linked with fighting injustice.
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Why We Die
by Venki Ramakrishnan
A Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist and former president of the Royal Society takes us on a journey to the frontiers of biology where he examines the innovative efforts to extend lifespan by altering our genetic makeup, discussing the social and ethical costs of attempting to live forever.
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