Summary: Coleman Hughes’s The End of Race Politics is a double-barreled, sawed-off shotgun of a book. Its modest page-count shortens both barrels, but they still pack a punch at close range. The shell in the first barrel contains arguments in favor of Hughes’s “colorblind principle,” which impels us to “treat people without regard to race, both in [...]
Summary: Bruce D. Perry and Maia Szalavitz’s The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog is a harrowing yet hopeful examination of childhood trauma and its consequences. Presented as a series of real-life clinical narratives backed by scientific research, Perry and Szalavitz tell the story of how Perry learned to care for some of the least fortunate [...]
Summary: Joe Abercrombie’s Before They Are Hanged is the middle book in The First Law Trilogy. As Collem West enters a bitter war in the north for the Union’s holdings in Angland, Sand dan Glokta is sent to the southern port of Dagoska to root out a conspiracy and coordinate the city’s defense against the Gurkish Emperor’s [...]
Summary: The purpose of David Brooks’s How to Know a Person is to help readers learn to become “Illuminators,” which he defines as folks who “have a persistent curiosity about other people” and are experts in “the craft of understanding others” (13). In service of this goal, Brooks explores his personal history, the life stories of other [...]
Summary: Well over a century since its original publication, Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a classic that stands the test of time. This captivating epistolary novel tells the tale of a small group of people who encounter a mysterious and daunting horror. Throughout their harrowing adventure, these heroes leverage their capacities for friendship, love, cooperation, courage, and loyalty [...]
Summary: Stories of Your Life and Others is the first collection of short stories by Ted Chiang, a man who will surely be remembered as one of this era’s finest writers. Ranging from reimagined biblical fables to ethical examinations of near-future technology, Stories contains a batch of bizarre narratives brimming with emotional poignancy and intellectual depth. With [...]
Summary: Dorothy Baker’s Cassandra at the Wedding is a captivating work of 20th century fiction. The narrators are identical twins––Cassandra and Judith––who return home to their family’s ranch in California to celebrate Judith’s wedding. Most of the story is told from Cassandra’s point of view, revealing her fraught internal conflicts over what her sister’s imminent marriage means [...]
Summary: Charlie D. Hankin’s Break and Flow examines the language, culture, history, and politics of hip hop in Cuba, Brazil, and Haiti. Organizing his chapters around a series of themes––yearning, raplove, uprooting, scale, writing, and violence––Hankin invites the reader to consider the many ways that hip hop culture and rap music have influenced (and been influenced by) [...]
Summary: Lisa Damour’s The Emotional Lives of Teenagers provides a handy crash course for parents and mental health professionals who are seeking to understand and support the teenagers in their lives. Drawing from her career in clinical psychology and contemporary research, Damour lays out the reasons why adolescence is a particularly challenging and special time in a young [...]
Summary: Naomi Novik’s The Golden Enclaves is the third and final book in her Scholomance trilogy. Still reeling from the chaos of graduation day, Galadriel and her companions are tossed into a complex tangle of international conflicts threatening to disrupt the lives of magic users everywhere. Through providing aid to compromised enclaves across several continents, they learn [...]