Day 7 2016 Book List

Must Read Book List for 2016

Business

• Alibaba's World: How a Remarkable Chinese Company is Changing the Face of Global Business
• by Porter Erisman
• Amazon Comment: In September 2014, a Chinese company that most Americans had never heard of held the largest IPO in history – bigger than Google, Facebook and Twitter combined. Alibaba, now the world's largest e-commerce company, mostly escaped Western notice for over ten years, while building a customer base more than twice the size of Amazon's, and handling the bulk of e-commerce transactions in China. How did it happen? And what was it like to be along for such a revolutionary ride?  In Alibaba's World, author Porter Erisman, one of Alibaba's first Western employees and its head of international marketing from 2000 to 2008, shows how Jack Ma, a Chinese schoolteacher who twice failed his college entrance exams, rose from obscurity to found Alibaba and lead it from struggling startup to the world's most dominant e-commerce player. He shares stories of weathering the dotcom crash, facing down eBay and Google, negotiating with the unpredictable Chinese government, and enduring the misguided advice of foreign experts, all to build the behemoth that's poised to sweep the ecommerce world today. And he analyzes Alibaba's role as a harbinger of the new global business landscape―with its focus on the East rather than the West, emerging markets over developed ones, and the nimble entrepreneur over the industry titan. As we face this near future, the story of Alibaba―and its inevitable descendants―is both essential and instructive.
• Fail Fast or Win Big: The Start-Up Plan for Starting Now
• by Bernhard Schroeder
• Amazon Comment: Entrepreneurs have long been taught that to be successful, they need to spend months perfecting a business plan and finding investors before they can finally launch their business. But with the marketplace changing at lightning speed, this notion is not only outdated - it's costly. There's no point to building a business in a bubble. Today's entrepreneurs must embrace the idea of "failing fast." They need to connect with real customers and determine quickly whether their idea is worth pursuing, needs new direction, or should be abandoned altogether. Fail Fast or Win Big shows entrepreneurs how to: create a rapid prototype of their product or service; develop a business model instead of a business plan; test it repeatedly with customers so they can spot failure early; continue to refine the model based on customer interactions; leverage their network and resources in order to run lean. The longer it takes to launch a company, the more changes there will have been in the market place. Featuring real-life examples of entrepreneurs who set out to fail fast and ended up winning big, this ground breaking guide reveals how the right kind of risk can really pay off.
• Never Be Closing: How to Sell Better Without Screwing Your Clients, Your Colleagues, or Yourself
• by Tim Hurson
• Amazon Comment: Speaker and consultant Tim Hurson presents 12 techniques that benefit both the seller and the client Never Be Closing expands on the principles of Tim Hurson's first book, Think Better, to teach salespeople how to improve their strategy and sell anything to anyone using a simple, repeatable framework. This isn't a book full of mundane tactics for cold-calling or techniques for closing a deal. This is a problem-solving approach that is more beneficial for both the seller and the client. Selling better isn't just a one time thing; it's a way to become a more valuable long-term partner. With their "Productive Selling Model," Hurson and Dunne offer business people a set of 15 tools to pull apart their current techniques, analyze them, and re-assemble them in a dynamic way. The authors include practical advice mixed with helpful anecdotes to build mutually productive relationships between seller and client, including: * The Rashomon Effect, which teaches readers how to bridge the gap between different perspectives. * The Hitchcock Method, which offers readers strategies on developing a script about themselves, their company, and their products. * The Sales Conversation, a three step structure to explore the client's needs, establish credibility, and deliver value. Tim Hurson is the founding partner of Manifest Communications, one of North America's leading social marketing agencies. He launched ThinkX Intellectual Capital in 2004 and is the author of Think Better: An Innovator's Guide to Productive Thinking. Tim Dunne is a consulting partner with ThinkX, KnowInnovation, and New & Improved, firms that offer leadership, innovation, and sales training to companies worldwide.
• The Real Crash: America's Coming Bankruptcy
• by Peter Schiff
• Amazon Comment: Peter D. Schiff has fully revised and updated his provocative New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today bestseller The Real Crash. First published in 2012, The Real Crash argues that America is enjoying a government-inflated bubble, one that reality will explode...with disastrous consequences for the economy and for each of us.  Since 2012, what has happened with our economy? The stock market continues its illusory gains, the Fed "tapers" while some jobs return, and yet the fundamental threat to our way of life has only grown worse-- much, much worse. The United States government nearly defaulted on its debts and the solution was to raise the debt limit-- to spend yet more money, to go even deeper in hock to China, and to burden every American with obligations that are impossible to repay.
• How the Poor Can Save Capitalism: Rebuilding the Path to the Middle Class
• by John Hope Bryant
• Amazon Comment: John Hope Bryant, successful self-made businessman and founder of the nonprofit Operation HOPE, says business and political leaders are ignoring the one force that could truly re-energize the stalled American economy: the poor. If we give poor communities the right tools, policies, and inspiration, he argues, they will be able to lift themselves up into the middle class and become a new generation of customers and entrepreneurs. Raised in poverty-stricken, gang-infested South Central Los Angeles, Bryant saw firsthand how our institutions have abandoned the poor. He details how business loans, home loans, and financial investments have vanished from their communities. After decades of deprivation, the poor lack bank accounts, decent credit scores, and any real firsthand experience of how a healthy free enterprise system functions. 
• The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future
• by Chris Guillebeau
• Amazon Comment: In The $100 Startup, Chris Guillebeau shows you how to lead of life of adventure, meaning and purpose – and earn a good living.  Still in his early thirties, Chris is on the verge of completing a tour of every country on earth – he’s already visited more than 175 nations – and yet he’s never held a “real job” or earned a regular paycheck.  Rather, he has a special genius for turning ideas into income, and he uses what he earns both to support his life of adventure and to give back.  
• Click Millionaires: Work Less, Live More with the an Internet Business You Love
• by Scott Fox
• Amazon Comment: Now get free trial membership in Scott Fox's MasterMinds Entrepreneur Coaching Forum with purchase!  The rules have changed. The American Dream is no longer the "corner office." It's a successful lifestyle business you can run from your home office, the beach, or wherever you desire. It's work you love that still allows you the freedom and income to live the life you truly want. Sound like a tall order? Well, thanks to the Internet, anyone can launch a business with little or no start-up capital or technical expertise. And in Click Millionaires, lifestyle entrepreneurship expert Scott Fox teaches weary corporate warriors and aspiring entrepreneurs how to trade the 9-5 job they hate for an online business they love. 
• Trading Up: Why Consumers Want New Luxury Goods-and How Companies Create Them
• by Michael J. Silverstein
• Amazon Comment: Trading up isn?t just for the wealthy anymore. These days no one is shocked when an administrative assistant buys silk pajamas at Victoria?s Secret. Or a young professional buys only Kendall-Jackson premium wines. Or a construction worker splurges on a $3,000 set of Callaway golf clubs.  In dozens of categories, these ?new luxury? brands now sell at huge premiums over conventional goods, and in much larger volumes than traditional ?old luxury? goods. Trading Up has become the definitive book about this growing trend.
• Arms and the Dudes: How Three Stoners from Miami Beach Became the Most Unlikely Gunrunners in History
• by Guy Lawson
• Amazon Comment: The page-turning, inside account of how three kids from Florida became big-time weapons traders—and how the US government turned on them.  In January of 2007, three young stoners from Miami Beach won a $300 million Department of Defense contract to supply ammunition to the Afghanistan military. Incredibly, instead of fulfilling the order with high-quality arms, Efraim Diveroli, David Packouz, and Alex Podrizki—the dudes—bought cheap Communist-style surplus ammunition from Balkan gunrunners. The dudes then secretly repackaged millions of rounds of shoddy Chinese ammunition and shipped it to Kabul—until they were caught by Pentagon investigators and the scandal turned up on the front page of The New York Times.
• Zombie Loyalists: Using Great Service to Create Rabid Fans
• by Peter Shankman
• Amazon Comment: Marketing and PR expert Peter Shankman has been working with the biggest companies in the world to create what he calls "Zombie Loyalists," fervent fans that help companies massively increase their customer base, brand awareness, and most importantly, revenue. After all, why should you have to tell the world how amazing you are if you can have your existing customers do it for you? Imagine an army of customers who will do your public relations, marketing and advertising, without being asked, each and every time they give you their money. These are Zombie Loyalists. They are ready to buy what you sell, respond to your email offers and demand that their friends to do the same.
• The Sell: The Secrets of Selling Anything to Anyone
• by Fredrik Eklund
• Amazon Comment: Ten years ago, Fredrik Eklund moved to New York City from his native Sweden with nothing but a pair of worn-out sneakers and a dream: to make it big in the city that never sleeps. Since then, he’s become the top seller in the most competitive real estate market on the planet, brokering multimillion-dollar deals for celebrities, selling out properties all over the city, and charming audiences around the world as one of the stars of the hit Bravo series Million Dollar Listing New York.
• Say It and Solve It: Get the results you want from the business conversations that count 
• by Karl James
• Amazon Comment: Karl’s knowledge makes his voice in this territory unique and hugely readable.”  Dave Lewis, President, Personal Care, Unilever  Why are the most important conversations the most difficult to handle? You know you have to have them, but still you put them off. And you want them to go well but you don’t know how to make sure they do.  How do you prepare? What words should you use? How do you make your point without getting too nervous, tongue-tied or upset? And how are you going to solve the problem that needs addressing without upsetting someone?  Say It and Solve it will coach you in the ten expert skills that peace negotiators, mediators and therapists use to take on even the most challenging situations and make every conversation count.  You’ll discover:  Fascinating insights into how conversations really work: when to listen, when to talk and when to shut up!  How to avoid the most common mistakes that everyone makes.  The ten most powerful skills you need to tackle any conversation in any situation.  Expert guidance on handling tricky conversations in real-world, workplace situations.

Education

• The Logic Of Failure: Recognizing And Avoiding Error In Complex Situations 
• by Dietrich Dorner
• Amazon Comment: Why do we make mistakes? Are there certain errors common to failure, whether in a complex enterprise or daily life? In this truly indispensable book, Dietrich Dörner identifies what he calls the “logic of failure”—certain tendencies in our patterns of thought that, while appropriate to an older, simpler world, prove disastrous for the complex world we live in now. Working with imaginative and often hilarious computer simulations, he analyzes the roots of catastrophe, showing city planners in the very act of creating gridlock and disaster, or public health authorities setting the scene for starvation. The Logic of Failure is a compass for intelligent planning and decision-making that can sharpen the skills of managers, policymakers and everyone involved in the daily challenge of getting from point A to point B.
• College Financial Aid: How To Get Your Fair Share
• by Peter V. Laurenzo
• Amazon Comment: In plain and simple language, this book will show you how to effectively plan so you will qualify for as much financial aid as you're legally entitiled to. 
• The Conscious Parent: Transforming Ourselves, Empowering Our Children
• by Dr. Shefali Tsabary
• Amazon Comment: Instead of being merely the receiver of the parents' psychological and spiritual legacy, children function as ushers of the parents' development. Parents unwittingly pass on an inheritance of psychological pain and emotional shallowness. To handle the behavior that results, traditional books on parenting abound with clever techniques for control and quick fixes for dysfunction. In Dr. Shefali Tsabary's conscious approach to parenting, however, children serve as mirrors of their parents' forgotten self. Those willing to look in the mirror have an opportunity to establish a relationship with their own inner state of wholeness. Once they find their way back to their essence, parents enter into communion with their children, shifting away from the traditional parent-to-child "know it all" approach and more towards a mutual parent-with-child relationship. The pillars of the parental ego crumble as the parents awaken to the ability of their children to transport them into a state of presence.

Globalization

• The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen
• Atossa Abrahamian
• Amazon Comment: The buying and selling of citizenship has become a legitimate, thriving business in just a few years. Entrepreneurs are renouncing America and Europe in favor of tax havens in the Caribbean with the help of a cottage industry of lawyers, bankers, and consultants that specialize in expatriation. 
• Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing Out of Catastrophe
• by Antony Loewenstein
• Amazon Comment: Award-winning journalist Antony Loewenstein travels across the US, Britain, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Haiti, Papua New Guinea and Australia to witness the reality of Disaster Capitalism—the hidden world of privatized detention centers and militarized private security, formed to protect corporations as they profit from war zones. He visits Britain’s immigration detention centers, tours the prison system in the United States, and digs into the underbelly of the companies making a fortune from them. Loewenstein reveals the dark history of how large multinational corporations have become more powerful than governments, supported by media and political elites.
• The Next Africa: An Emerging Continent Becomes a Global Powerhouse
• by Jake Bright, Aubrey Hruby
• Amazon Comment: From the New York Times bestselling author of The Cartel comes an explosive novel of the drug trade that takes you deep inside a world riddled with corruption, betrayal, and bloody revenge. The prequel to The Cartel, and set about 10 years earlier, The Power of the Dog introduces a brilliant cast of characters. Art Keller is an obsessive DEA agent. The Barrera brothers are heirs to a drug empire. Nora Hayden is a jaded teenager who becomes a high-class hooker. Father Parada is a powerful and incorruptible Catholic priest. Callan is an Irish kid from Hell’s kitchen who grows up to be a merciless hit man. And they are all trapped in the world of the Mexican drug Federación. From the streets of New York City to Mexico City and Tijuana to the jungles of Central America, this is the war on drugs like you’ve never seen it.
• Who Gets What- and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design
• by Alvin Roth
• Amazon Comment: If you’ve ever sought a job or hired someone, applied to college or guided your child into a good kindergarten, asked someone out on a date or been asked out, you’ve participated in a kind of market. Most of the study of economics deals with commodity markets, where the price of a good connects sellers and buyers. But what about other kinds of “goods,” like a spot in the Yale freshman class or a position at Google? This is the territory of matching markets, where “sellers” and “buyers” must choose each other, and price isn’t the only factor determining who gets what.

History

• Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War
• by Karen Abbott
• Amazon Comment: Karen Abbott, the New York Times bestselling author of Sin in the Second City and “pioneer of sizzle history” (USA Today), tells the spellbinding true story of four women who risked everything to become spies during the Civil War.  Karen Abbott illuminates one of the most fascinating yet little known aspects of the Civil War: the stories of four courageous women—a socialite, a farmgirl, an abolitionist, and a widow—who were spies.  After shooting a Union soldier in her front hall with a pocket pistol, Belle Boyd became a courier and spy for the Confederate army, using her charms to seduce men on both sides. Emma Edmonds cut off her hair and assumed the identity of a man to enlist as a Union private, witnessing the bloodiest battles of the Civil War. The beautiful widow, Rose O’Neale Greenhow, engaged in affairs with powerful Northern politicians to gather intelligence for the Confederacy, and used her young daughter to send information to Southern generals. Elizabeth Van Lew, a wealthy Richmond abolitionist, hid behind her proper Southern manners as she orchestrated a far-reaching espionage ring, right under the noses of suspicious rebel detectives.
• Magna Carta: The Birth of Liberty
• by Dan Jones
• Amazon Comment: The Magna Carta is revered around the world as the founding document of Western liberty. Its principles—even its language—can be found in our Bill of Rights and in the Constitution. But what was this strange document and how did it gain such legendary status?  Dan Jones takes us back to the turbulent year of 1215, when, beset by foreign crises and cornered by a growing domestic rebellion, King John reluctantly agree to fix his seal to a document that would change the course of history. At the time of its creation the Magna Carta was just a peace treaty drafted by a group of rebel barons who were tired of the king's high taxes, arbitrary justice, and endless foreign wars. The fragile peace it established would last only two months, but its principles have reverberated over the centuries. 
• Thomas Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates: The Forgotten War That Changed American History
• by Brian Kilmeade
• Amazon Comment: This is the little-known story of how a newly indepen­dent nation was challenged by four Muslim powers and what happened when America’s third president decided to stand up to intimidation.  When Thomas Jefferson became president in 1801, America faced a crisis. The new nation was deeply in debt and needed its economy to grow quickly, but its merchant ships were under attack. Pirates from North Africa’s Barbary coast routinely captured American sailors and held them as slaves, demanding ransom and tribute payments far beyond what the new coun­try could afford.
• Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County: A Family, a Virginia Town, a Civil Rights Battle
• by Kristen Green
• Amazon Comment: 
• Combining hard-hitting investigative journalism and a sweeping family narrative, this provocative true story reveals a little-known chapter of American history: the period after the Brown v. Board of Education decision when one Virginia school system refused to integrate.  In the wake of the Supreme Court’s unanimous Brown v. Board of Education decision, Virginia’s Prince Edward County refused to obey the law. Rather than desegregate, the county closed its public schools, locking and chaining the doors. The community’s white leaders quickly established a private academy, commandeering supplies from the shuttered public schools to use in their all-white classrooms. Meanwhile, black parents had few options: keep their kids at home, move across county lines, or send them to live with relatives in other states. For five years, the schools remained closed.
• Mystery Cults of the Ancient World
• by Hugh Bowden
• Amazon Comment: This is the first book to describe and explain all of the ancient world's major mystery cults--one of the most intriguing but least understood aspects of Greek and Roman religion. In the nocturnal Mysteries at Eleusis, participants dramatically re-enacted the story of Demeter's loss and recovery of her daughter Persephone; in the Bacchic cult, bands of women ran wild in the Greek countryside to honor Dionysus; and in the mysteries of Mithras, men came to understand the nature of the universe and their place within it through frightening initiation ceremonies and astrological teachings. These cults were an important part of life in the ancient Mediterranean world, but their actual practices were shrouded in secrecy, and many of their features have remained unclear until now.
• Unknown Wars of Asia, Africa and The America's That Changed History: Unknown Wars of Asia, Africa, and the America's That Changed History
• by Steven M. Johnson
• Amazon Comment: The stories of the "Unknown Wars of Asia, Africa and The Americas" were cataclysmic and bloody events that took the lives of millions and impact our world to this day. Yet, most of these wars are hardly mentioned in articles or even textbooks. Among some of the wars covered are: - The wars that involved the Great Wall of China over its' 1,865 year history as a defensive barrier. - The longest war in history which was the 1,049 year long Vietnamese War of Independence from China and the lessons that should have kept France and the US out of Indo-China. - The wars of the Khmer Empire (802 – 1431) and Jayavarman VII who emerged as an unlikely hero in a time of crises in 1177 to become the greatest king of the Angkor era. - The Jewish Bar Kokhba Revolt (132 – 136) that caused the Emperor Hadrian to cover up the massacre of two veteran Roman Legions and the truth about how close the revolt came to succeeding. The Jewish War from 66 – 73 AD is also covered in a preceding chapter. - The wars of the Spanish Conquistadors to conquer the American Southeast and Southwest in the sixteenth century and the Native American apocalypse in North America that followed. - The Cherokee Wars that came very close to wiping out the colony of South Carolina. - The wars of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade that took the lives of more than 12 million Africans and the slave revolts of the Caribbean and South America. - The Taiping Rebellion (1851 – 1871) that was caused by a Confucian scholar who misunderstood a poorly translated gospel tract and started a rebellion that led to over 30 million deaths. - The 74 year Mongol conquest of China and disasters in Syria, Japan, Vietnam, and Java that led to the breakup of the Mongol Empire. - Before the Holocaust of World War II, there was a Christian holocaust in Germany and Bohemia during the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) that caused more than 8 million deaths mostly from genocide being committed by both Catholics and Protestants. - England’s Pirate Wars – The French Conquest of Indo-China 1857 – 1884 - The future wars that half of the world’s population of Jews, Christians, and Muslims are expecting in the near future. About the author: Steven Johnson has been a regular contributing author to Military Heritage and Strategy & Tactics Magazines and has taught History at Limestone College and Riverside High School in South Carolina for more than 20 years. Steven Johnson’s style of narrative writing and teaching of History is as a master storyteller of true events that are stranger than fiction. The author’s style of writing has been compared to that of the late author Shelby Foote’s Civil War writing.
• Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore
• by Seth Rockman
• Amazon Comment: Enslaved mariners, white seamstresses, Irish dockhands, free black domestic servants, and native-born street sweepers all navigated the low-end labor market in post-Revolutionary Baltimore. Seth Rockman considers this diverse workforce, exploring how race, sex, nativity, and legal status determined the economic opportunities and vulnerabilities of working families in the early republic.
• The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity
• by Jill Lepore
• Amazon Comment: King Philip's War, the excruciating racial war--colonists against Indians--that erupted in New England in 1675, was, in proportion to population, the bloodiest in American history. Some even argued that the massacres and outrages on both sides were too horrific to "deserve the name of a war."  It all began when Philip (called Metacom by his own people), the leader of the Wampanoag Indians, led attacks against English towns in the colony of Plymouth. The war spread quickly, pitting a loose confederation of southeastern Algonquians against a coalition of English colonists. While it raged, colonial armies pursued enemy Indians through the swamps and woods of New England, and Indians attacked English farms and towns from Narragansett Bay to the Connecticut River Valley. Both sides, in fact, had pursued the war seemingly without restraint, killing women and children, torturing captives, and mutilating the dead. The fighting ended after Philip was shot, quartered, and beheaded in August 1676.
• Dreams to Remember: Otis Redding, Stax Records, and the Transformation of Southern Soul
• by Mark Ribowsky
• Amazon Comment: When he died in one of rock's string of tragic plane crashes, Otis Redding was only twenty-six, yet already the avatar of a new kind of soul music. The beating heart of Memphis-based Stax Records, he had risen to fame belting out gospel-flecked blues in stage performances that seemed to ignite not only a room but an entire generation. If Berry Gordy's black-owned kingdom in Motown showed the way in soul music, Redding made his own way, going where not even his two role models who had preceded him out of Macon, Georgia―Little Richard and James Brown―had gone.
• German Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie: Making Sense of the Nazi Past during the Civil Rights Era
• by Monique Laney
• Amazon Comment: This thought-provoking study by historian Monique Laney focuses on the U.S. government–assisted integration of German rocket specialists and their families into a small southern community soon after World War II. In 1950, Wernher von Braun and his team of rocket experts relocated to Huntsville, Alabama, a town that would celebrate the team, despite their essential role in the recent Nazi war effort, for their contributions to the U.S. Army missile program and later to NASA’s space program. Based on oral histories, provided by members of the African American and Jewish communities, and  by the rocketeers’ families, co-workers, friends, and neighbors, Laney’s book demonstrates how the histories of German Nazism and Jim Crow in the American South intertwine in narratives about the past. This is a critical reassessment of a singular time that links the Cold War, the Space Race, and the Civil Rights era while addressing important issues of transnational science and technology, and asking Americans to consider their country’s own history of racism when reflecting on the Nazi past.
• Latino Americans: The 500-Year Legacy That Shaped a Nation
• by Ray Suarez
• Amazon Comment: Latino Americans chronicles the rich and varied history of Latinos, who have helped shaped our nation and have become, with more than fifty million people, the largest minority in the United States. This companion to the landmark PBS miniseries vividly and candidly tells how the story of Latino Americans is the story of our country.
• Last to Die: A Defeated Empire, a Forgotten Mission, and the Last American Killed in World War II
• by Stephen Harding
• Amazon Comment: On August 18, 1945—three days after Japan announced it would cease hostilities and surrender—U.S. Army Air Forces Sergeant Anthony J. Marchione bled to death in the clear, bright sky above Tokyo. Just six days after his twentieth birthday, Tony Marchione died like so many before him in World War II—quietly, cradled in the arms of a buddy who was powerless to prevent his death. Though heartbreaking for his family, Marchione’s death would have been no more notable than any other had he not had the dubious distinction of being the last American killed in World War II combat.

Novel

• The Ladies of Managua: A Novel
• by Eleni N. Gage
• Amazon Comment: When Maria Vazquez returns to Nicaragua for her beloved grandfather's funeral, she brings with her a mysterious package from her grandmother's past-and a secret of her own. And she also carries the burden of her tense relationship with her mother Ninexin, once a storied revolutionary, now a tireless government employee. Between Maria and Ninexin lies a chasm created by the death of Maria's father, who was killed during the revolution when Maria was an infant, leaving her to be raised by her grandmother Isabela as Ninexin worked to build the new Nicaragua. As Ninexin tries to reach her daughter, and Maria wrestles with her expectations for her romance with an older man, Isabela, the mourning widow, is lost in memories of attending boarding school in 1950's New Orleans, where she loved and lost almost sixty years ago. When the three women come together to bid farewell to the man who anchored their family, they are forced to confront their complicated, passionate relationships with each other and with their country-and to reveal the secrets that each of them have worked to conceal. 
• Linesman (A Linesman Novel)
• by S.K. Dunstall
• Amazon Comment: The lines. No ship can traverse the void without them. Only linesmen can work with them. But only Ean Lambert hears their song. And everyone thinks he’s crazy…Most slum kids never go far, certainly not becoming a level-ten linesman like Ean. Even if he’s part of a small, and unethical, cartel, and the other linesmen disdain his self-taught methods, he’s certified and working.  Then a mysterious alien ship is discovered at the edges of the galaxy. Each of the major galactic powers is desperate to be the first to uncover the ship’s secrets, but all they’ve learned is that it has the familiar lines of energy—and a defense system that, once triggered, annihilates everything in a 200 kilometer radius.
• Moriarty: A Novel
• by Anthony Horowitz
• Amazon Comment: The game is once again afoot in this thrilling mystery from the bestselling author of The House of Silk, sanctioned by the Conan Doyle estate, which explores what really happened when Sherlock Holmes and his arch nemesis Professor Moriarty tumbled to their doom at the Reichenbach Falls.
• The Man Without a Country
• by Edward Everett Hale
• Amazon Comment: The Man Without a Country is the story of American Army lieutenant Philip Nolan, who renounces his country during a trial for treason and is consequently sentenced to spend the rest of his days at sea without so much as a word of news about the United States. Though the story is set in the early 19th century, it is an allegory about the upheaval of the American Civil War and was meant to promote the Union cause.
• An Ember in the Ashes
• by Sabaa Tahir
• Amazon Comment: A “deft, polished debut”  (Publishers Weekly, starred review), Sabaa Tahir‘s AN EMBER IN THE ASHES is a thought-provoking, heart-wrenching and pulse-pounding read. Set in a rich, high-fantasy world with echoes of ancient Rome, it tells the story of a slave fighting for her family and a young soldier fighting for his freedom.  Laia is a slave. Elias is a soldier. Neither is free.
• River of Smoke: A Novel
• by Amitav Ghosh
• Amazon Comment: In Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies, the Ibis began its treacherous journey across the Indian Ocean, bound for the cane fields of Mauritius with a cargo of indentured servants. Now, in River of Smoke, the former slave ship flounders in the Bay of Bengal, caught in the midst of a deadly cyclone. The storm also threatens the clipper ship Anahita, groaning with the largest consignment of opium ever to leave India for Canton. Meanwhile, the Redruth, a nursery ship, carries horticulturists determined to track down the priceless botanical treasures of China. All will converge in Canton's Fanqui-town, or Foreign Enclave, a powder keg awaiting a spark to ignite the Opium Wars. A spectacular adventure, but also a bold indictment of global avarice, River of Smoke is a consuming historical novel with powerful contemporary resonance.
• Across a Green Ocean
• by Wendy Lee
• Amazon Comment: Michael Tang and his sister, Emily, have both struggled to forge a sense of identity in their parents' adopted homeland. Emily, an immigration lawyer in New York City, baffles their mother, Ling, by refusing to have children. At twenty-six, Michael is unable to commit to a relationship or a career--or come out to his family. And now their father, after a lifetime of sacrifice, has passed away.
• Avenue of Mysteries
• by John Irving
• Amazon Comment: John Irving returns to the themes that established him as one of our most admired and beloved authors in this absorbing novel of fate and memory.  In Avenue of Mysteries, Juan Diego—a fourteen-year-old boy, who was born and grew up in Mexico—has a thirteen-year-old sister. Her name is Lupe, and she thinks she sees what's coming—specifically, her own future and her brother's. Lupe is a mind reader; she doesn't know what everyone is thinking, but she knows what most people are thinking. Regarding what has happened, as opposed to what will, Lupe is usually right about the past; without your telling her, she knows all the worst things that have happened to you.
• Playing Days: A Novel
• by Benjamin Markovits
• Amazon Comment: In print for the first time in the United States, acclaimed novelist Benjamin Markovits’s Playing Days is a mostly autobiographical narrative concerning the author’s season playing minor league professional basketball in Germany and the love affair with another player’s estranged wife that ushers him into adulthood.  Growing up in Texas, Ben experienced basketball as a mostly solitary pursuit, one he gave up after riding the bench in high school. But as his college classmates prepare for the real world, Ben is seized by an idea. All he needs is a video camera, an empty court, and his mother’s German citizenship.
• The Cartel: A Novel
• by Don Winslow
• Amazon Comment: From the internationally best-selling author of the acclaimed novel The Power of the Dog comes The Cartel, a gripping, true-to-life, ripped-from-the-headlines epic story of power, corruption, revenge, and justice spanning the past decade of the Mexican-American drug wars.  It’s 2004. DEA agent Art Keller has been fighting the war on drugs for thirty years in a blood feud against Adán Barrera, the head of El Federación, the world’s most powerful cartel, and the man who brutally murdered Keller’s partner. Finally putting Barrera away cost Keller dearly—the woman he loves, the beliefs he cherishes, the life he wants to lead.
• The Power of the Dog
• by Don Winslow
• Amazon Comment: From the New York Times bestselling author of The Cartel comes an explosive novel of the drug trade that takes you deep inside a world riddled with corruption, betrayal, and bloody revenge. The prequel to The Cartel, and set about 10 years earlier, The Power of the Dog introduces a brilliant cast of characters. Art Keller is an obsessive DEA agent. The Barrera brothers are heirs to a drug empire. Nora Hayden is a jaded teenager who becomes a high-class hooker. Father Parada is a powerful and incorruptible Catholic priest. Callan is an Irish kid from Hell’s kitchen who grows up to be a merciless hit man. And they are all trapped in the world of the Mexican drug Federación. From the streets of New York City to Mexico City and Tijuana to the jungles of Central America, this is the war on drugs like you’ve never seen it.

People

• Undocumented: A Dominican Boy's Odyssey from a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League
• by Dan-el Padilla Peralta
• Amazon Comment: Dan-el Padilla Peralta has lived the American dream. As a boy, he came here legally with his family. Together they left Santo Domingo behind, but life in New York City was harder than they imagined. Their visas lapsed, and Dan-el’s father returned home. But Dan-el’s courageous mother was determined to make a better life for her bright sons.

• Robert Moses
• by Pierre Christin
• Amazon Comment: From the subway to the skyscraper, from Manhattan’s financial district to the Long Island suburbs, every inch of New York tells the story of one man’s mind: Robert Moses, the architect who designed it all. Now, in Pierre Christin and Olivier Balez's new graphic biography, the rest of Robert’s story will be told.
• La Lucha: The Story of Lucha Castro and Human Rights in Mexico
• by Jon Sack
• Amazon Comment: The Mexican border state of Chihuahua and its city Juárez have become notorious the world over as hotbeds of violence. Drug cartel battles and official corruption result in more murders annually in Chihuahua than in wartorn Afghanistan. Thanks to a culture of impunity, 97 percent of the killings in Juárez go unsolved. Despite a climate of fear, a small group of human rights activists, exemplified by the Chihuahua lawyer and organizer Lucha Castro, works to identify the killers and their official enablers.
• One Righteous Man: Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York
• by Arthur Browne
• Amazon Comment: When Samuel Battle broke the color line as New York City’s first African American cop in the second decade of the twentieth century, he had to fear his racist colleagues as much as criminals. He had to be three times better than his white peers, and many times more resilient. His life was threatened. He was displayed like a circus animal. Yet, fearlessly claiming his rights, he prevailed in a four-decade odyssey that is both the story of one man’s courageous dedication to racial progress and a harbinger of the divisions between police and the people they serve that plague twenty-first-century America.
• In the Country: Stories
• by Mia Alvar
• Amazon Comment: 
• These nine globe-trotting, unforgettable stories from Mia Alvar, a remarkable new literary talent, vividly give voice to the women and men of the Filipino diaspora. Here are exiles, emigrants, and wanderers uprooting their families from the Philippines to begin new lives in the Middle East, the United States, and elsewhere—and, sometimes, turning back again.  A pharmacist living in New York smuggles drugs to his ailing father in Manila, only to discover alarming truths about his family and his past. In Bahrain, a Filipina teacher drawn to a special pupil finds, to her surprise, that she is questioning her own marriage. A college student leans on her brother, a laborer in Saudi Arabia, to support her writing ambitions, without realizing that his is the life truly made for fiction. And in the title story, a journalist and a nurse face an unspeakable trauma amidst the political turmoil of the Philippines in the 1970s and ’80s.
• Twisted: My Dreadlock Chronicles
• by Bert Ashe
• Amazon Comment: In Twisted: My Dreadlock Chronicles, professor and author Bert Ashe delivers a witty, fascinating, and unprecedented account of black male identity as seen through our culture's perceptions of hair. It is a deeply personal story that weaves together the cultural and political history of dreadlocks with Ashe's own mid-life journey to lock his hair. Ashe is a fresh, new voice that addresses the importance of black hair in the 20th and 21st centuries through an accessible, humorous, and literary style sure to engage a wide variety of readers.
• We Could Not Fail: The First African Americans in the Space Program 
• by Richard Paul
• Amazon Comment: The Space Age began just as the struggle for civil rights forced Americans to confront the long and bitter legacy of slavery, discrimination, and violence against African Americans. Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson utilized the space program as an agent for social change, using federal equal employment opportunity laws to open workplaces at NASA and NASA contractors to African Americans while creating thousands of research and technology jobs in the Deep South to ameliorate poverty. We Could Not Fail tells the inspiring, largely unknown story of how shooting for the stars helped to overcome segregation on earth.
• Ada's Algorithm: How Lord Byron's Daughter Ada Lovelace Launched the Digital Age
• by James Essinger
• Amazon Comment: Over 150 years after her death, a widely-used scientific computer program was named “Ada,” after Ada Lovelace, the only legitimate daughter of the eighteenth century’s version of a rock star, Lord Byron. Why?  Because, after computer pioneers such as Alan Turing began to rediscover her, it slowly became apparent that she had been a key but overlooked figure in the invention of the computer.  In Ada Lovelace, James Essinger makes the case that the computer age could have started two centuries ago if Lovelace’s contemporaries had recognized her research and fully grasped its implications.  It’s a remarkable tale, starting with the outrageous behavior of her father, which made Ada instantly famous upon birth. Ada would go on to overcome numerous obstacles to obtain a level of education typically forbidden to women of her day. She would eventually join forces with Charles Babbage, generally credited with inventing the computer, although as Essinger makes clear, Babbage couldn’t have done it without Lovelace. Indeed, Lovelace wrote what is today considered the world’s first computer program—despite opposition that the principles of science were “beyond the strength of a woman’s physical power of application.”

Politics

• Without You, There Is No Us
• by Suki Kim
• Amazon Comment: Every day, three times a day, the students march in two straight lines, singing praises to Kim Jong-il and North Korea: Without you, there is no motherland. Without you, there is no us. It is a chilling scene, but gradually Suki Kim, too, learns the tune and, without noticing, begins to hum it. It is 2011, and all universities in North Korea have been shut down for an entire year, the students sent to construction fields—except for the 270 students at the all-male Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST), a walled compound where portraits of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il look on impassively from the walls of every room, and where Suki has accepted a job teaching English. Over the next six months, she will eat three meals a day with her young charges and struggle to teach them to write, all under the watchful eye of the regime. 
• We Too Sing America: South Asian, Arab, Muslim, and Sikh Immigrants Shape Our Multiracial Future
• by Deepa Iyer
• Amazon Comment: Many of us can recall the targeting of South Asian, Arab, Muslim, and Sikh people in the wake of 9/11. We may be less aware, however, of the ongoing racism directed against these groups in the past decade and a half.  In We Too Sing America, nationally renowned activist Deepa Iyer catalogs recent racial flashpoints, from the 2012 massacre at the Sikh gurdwara in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, to the violent opposition to the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and to the Park 51 Community Center in Lower Manhattan.
• It IS About Islam: Exposing the Truth About ISIS, Al Qaeda, Iran, and the Caliphate
• by Glenn Beck
• Amazon Comment: #1 bestselling author and radio host Glenn Beck exposes the real truth behind the roots of Islamic extremism in Muslim teachings in this sharply insightful handbook that debunks commonly held assumptions about Islam and the dream of a renewed caliphate.  From the barbarians of ISIS to the terror tactics of Al-Qaeda and its offshoots, to the impending threat of a nuclear Iran, those motivated by extreme fundamentalist Islamic faith have the power to endanger and kill millions. The conflict with them will not end until we face the truth about those who find their inspiration and justification in the religion itself.
• Broad Influence: How Women Are Changing the Way America Works
• by Jay Newton-Small
• Amazon Comment: 2016 will be one of the most historic years in politics: It marks the potential for the first female President of the United States, and the 100th anniversary of the first woman elected to Congress. Additionally, in 2016, single women will be one of the most pivotal voting groups heading into the general election, being courted by both Democrats and Republicans.  At the centennial of the first woman elected to Congress (which was three years before women legally earned the right to vote), their presence and influence in Washington has reached a tipping point that affects not only the inner workings of the Federal Government, but also directly influences how Americans live and work.
• Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class
• by Ian Haney Lopez
• Amazon Comment: Campaigning for president in 1980, Ronald Reagan told stories of Cadillac-driving "welfare queens" and "strapping young bucks" buying T-bone steaks with food stamps. In trumpeting these tales of welfare run amok, Reagan never needed to mention race, because he was blowing a dog whistle: sending a message about racial minorities inaudible on one level, but clearly heard on another. In doing so, he tapped into a long political tradition that started with George Wallace and Richard Nixon, and is more relevant than ever in the age of the Tea Party and the first black president. 
• The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class
• by David Roediger
• Amazon Comment: Combining classical Marxism, psychoanalysis, and the new labor history pioneered by E. P. Thompson and Herbert Gutman, David Roediger’s widely acclaimed book provides an original study of the formative years of working-class racism in the United States. This, he argues, cannot be explained simply with reference to economic advantage; rather, white working-class racism is underpinned by a complex series of psychological and ideological mechanisms that reinforce racial stereotypes, and thus help to forge the identities of white workers in opposition to Blacks.
• Dancing with the Devil in the City of God: Rio de Janeiro on the Brink
• by Juliana Barbassa
• Amazon Comment: 
• In the tradition of Detroit: An American Autopsy and Maximum City comes a deeply reported and beautifully written biography of the seductive and chaotic city of Rio de Janeiro from prizewinning journalist and Brazilian native Juliana Barbassa.  Juliana Barbassa moved a great deal throughout her life, but Rio was always home. After twenty-one years abroad, she returned to find the city that once ravaged by inflation, drug wars, corrupt leaders, and dying neighborhoods was now on the precipice of a major change.

Self-Improvement

• Stronger: Develop the Resilience You Need to Succeed
• by Dr. George S. Everly Jr.
• Amazon Comment: Professional athletes, surgeons, first responders - all perform remarkable feats in the face of intense stress. Why do they thrive under pressure, while others succumb? What separates the two is attitude. Resilient people meet adversity head-on and bounce back from setbacks. They seem to naturally exude an inner strength - but studies show that resilience is something that anyone can build. Analyzing the heroic exploits of U.S. Navy Seals and others who succeed against all odds, Stronger identifies five factors that combine to unlock deep reserves of personal power: active optimism - believe that you can change things for the better; decisive action - you can't succeed if you don't takethe leap; moral compass - face any challenge with clear guiding principles; relentless tenacity - try, try again; interpersonal support - gain strength from those around you. Drawing on the unique perspective of a standout team of authors (a stress management expert, a skilled entrepreneur, and a Navy SEAL), Stronger explores the science behind resilience and explains how you can develop this vital trait for yourself. Whatever your profession, today's demanding world calls for a special kind of strength. This revealing book holds the key.
• Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self
• by Richard Rohr
• Amazon Comment: Dissolve the distractions of ego to find our authentic selves in God In his bestselling book Falling Upward, Richard Rohr talked about ego (or the False Self) and how it gets in the way of spiritual maturity. But if there's a False Self, is there also a True Self? What is it? How is it found? Why does it matter? And what does it have to do with the spiritual journey? This book likens True Self to a diamond, buried deep within us, formed under the intense pressure of our lives, that must be searched for, uncovered, separated from all the debris of ego that surrounds it. In a sense True Self must, like Jesus, be resurrected, and that process is not resuscitation but transformation.
• The Art of Stillness
• by Pico Iyer
• Amazon Comment: A follow up to Pico Iyer’s essay “The Joy of Quiet,” The Art of Stillness considers the unexpected adventure of staying put and reveals a counterintuitive truth: The more ways we have to connect, the more we seem desperate to unplug.  Why might a lifelong traveler like Pico Iyer, who has journeyed from Easter Island to Ethiopia, Cuba to Kathmandu, think that sitting quietly in a room might be the ultimate adventure? Because in our madly accelerating world, our lives are crowded, chaotic and noisy. There’s never been a greater need to slow down, tune out and give ourselves permission to be still. 
• Comeback & Beyond: How to Turn Your Setbacks Into Comebacks
• by Tim Storey
• Amazon Comment: Have you ever experienced a devastating setback in your life? Maybe you have struggled in marriage or family; perhaps your finances have taken a catastrophic blow. All of us encounter difficulties that can be both painful and seemingly impossible to overcome. When your hopes and dreams have turned into a nightmare, it may seem that your life is over. But, God is in the business of resurrecting dead visions. It does not matter if your setback seems insurmountable; don't take a step back, because God has already prepared your comeback. Comeback and Beyond, the book from acclaimed author, Tim Storey, has the answers, strategies, and motivation you must have to turn your tragedy into triumph. You will discover insights from the amazing turnarounds of some of the world's most prominent winners and the specific steps they took to experience a full-blown comeback, better and stronger than ever before. Get ready to experience new hope and a renewed passion for the ultimate life that God has meant for you. It s time for your comeback!
• A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life
• by Brian Grazer
• Amazon Comment: 
• From Academy Award–winning producer Brian Grazer and acclaimed business journalist Charles Fishman comes the New York Times bestselling, brilliantly entertaining peek into the weekly “curiosity conversations” that have inspired Grazer to create some of America’s favorite and iconic movies and television shows—from 24 to A Beautiful Mind.  For decades, film and TV producer Brian Grazer has scheduled a weekly “curiosity conversation” with an accomplished stranger. From scientists to spies, and adventurers to business leaders, Grazer has met with anyone willing to answer his questions for a few hours. These informal discussions sparked the creative inspiration behind many of Grazer’s movies and TV shows, including Splash, 24, A Beautiful Mind, Apollo 13, Arrested Development, 8 Mile, J. Edgar, Empire, and many others.
• Think Like a Freak: The Authors of Freakonomics Offer to Retrain Your Brain
• by Steven D. Levitt
• Amazon Comment: Now in Paperback—the New York Times bestseller—and follow up to the revolutionary bestsellers Freakonomics and SuperFreakonomics—with a new author Q&A.  With their trademark blend of captivating storytelling and unconventional analysis, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner take us inside their thought process and teach us all how to think a bit more productively, more creatively, more rationally. In Think Like A Freak, they offer a blueprint for an entirely new way to solve problems, whether your interest lies in minor lifehacks or major global reforms. The topics range from business to philanthropy to sports to politics, all with the goal of retraining your brain. Along the way, you’ll learn the secrets of a Japanese hot-dog-eating champion, the reason an Australian doctor swallowed a batch of dangerous bacteria, and why Nigerian e-mail scammers make a point of saying they’re from Nigeria.
• Between the World and Me
• by Ta-Nehisi Coates
• Amazon Comment: In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race,” a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men—bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden?  Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son—and readers—the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children’s lives were taken as American plunder. Beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward.

• Why Women Have Sex 
• by Cindy Meston and David Buss
• Do women have sex simply to express love, experience pleasure, or reproduce? When clinical psychologist Cindy M. Meston and evolutionary psychologist David M. Buss, both at the University of Texas at Austin, joined forces to investigate women's underlying sexual motivations, what they found astonished them.  Using women's own words, and backed by extensive scientific evidence, the authors delve into the use of sex as a defensive tactic against a mate's infidelity, a ploy to boost social status, a barter for household chores, and even as a cure for a migraine headache. Meston and Buss offer a revelatory examination of the deep-seated psychology and biology that often unwittingly drive women to have sex, sometimes in pursuit of joy, and sometimes for darker, more disturbing reasons.  Why Women Have Sex stands as the richest and deepest psychological understanding of women's sexuality yet achieved and promises to inform every woman's (and her partner's) awareness of her relationship to sex.

• The EQ Edge
• by Steven Stein and Howard Book
• What is the formula for success at your job? As a spouse? A parent? A Little League baseball coach or behind the bench of a minor hockey team?  What does it take to get ahead? To separate yourself from the competition? To lead a less stressful and happier existence? To be fulfilled in personal and professional pursuits?  What is the most important dynamic of your makeup? Is it your A) intelligence quotient? or B) emotional quotient? If you picked "A", you are partly correct. Your intelligence quotient can be a predictor of things such as academic achievement. But your IQ is fixed and unchangeable. The real key to personal and professional growth is your emotional intelligence quotient, which you can nurture and develop by learning more about EQ from the international bestseller The EQ Edge.  Authors Steven J. Stein and Howard E. Book show you how the dynamic of emotional intelligence works. By understanding EQ, you can build more meaningful relationships, boost your confidence and optimism, and respond to challenges with enthusiasm-all of which are essential ingredients of success. 
• The Stronger Sex 
• by Richard Driscoll
• Why do women tend to dominate in intimate arguments, while men concede, placate, or withdraw? Indeed, why do women tend to force relationship issues, while men usually try to avoid them? Nature compels women to confront men to test their commitment and push them to provide, while it compels men to duck confrontations and avoid offending the women who can carry their genes into the next generation.  Not surprisingly, what is good for genetic survival can be bad for relationships. Our primeval differences set men and women on one collision course after another, producing the endless skirmishes in the battle of the sexes. Invariably, we're left exasperated, incapable of understanding the other sex.

Social Issues

• $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America
• by Kathryn J. Edin
• Amazon Comment: Jessica Compton’s family of four would have no cash income unless she donated plasma twice a week at her local donation center in Tennessee. Modonna Harris and her teenage daughter Brianna in Chicago often have no food but spoiled milk on weekends. 
• The Underground Girls of Kabul
• by Jenny Nordberg
• Amazon Comment: In Afghanistan, a culture ruled almost entirely by men, the birth of a son is cause for celebration and the arrival of a daughter is often mourned as misfortune. A bacha posh (literally translated from Dari as “dressed up like a boy”) is a third kind of child – a girl temporarily raised as a boy and presented as such to the outside world. Jenny Nordberg, the reporter who broke the story of this phenomenon for the New York Times, constructs a powerful and moving account of those secretly living on the other side of a deeply segregated society where women have almost no rights and little freedom. 
• Clash!: How to Thrive in a Multicultural World
• by Hazel Rose Markus and Alana Conner
• Amazon Comment: "Clash! explains some of the most bedeviling cultural divides in our workplaces and communities. It's mandatory reading for teachers, managers, and parents who want to raise their kids to succeed in a multicultural world." - Chip Heath, coauthor of Decisive and Switch As the world gets smaller, people from different backgrounds are colliding like never before. Leading cultural psychologists Hazel Markus and Alana Conner reveal how a single culture clash - the clash of independence and interdependence - ignites both global hostilities and daily tensions between regions, races, genders, classes, religions, and organizations. Markus and Conner then show how we can leverage both independence and interdependence to mend the rifts in our communities, workplaces, and schools. 
• Real Native Genius: How an Ex-Slave and a White Mormon Became Famous Indians
• by Angela Pulley Hudson
• Amazon Comment: Weaving together histories of slavery, Mormonism, popular culture, and American medicine, Angela Pulley Hudson offers a fascinating tale of ingenuity, imposture, and identity. While illuminating the complex relationship between race, religion, and gender in nineteenth-century North America, Hudson reveals how the idea of the “Indian” influenced many of the era’s social movements. Through the remarkable lives of Tubbee and Ceil, Hudson uncovers both the complex and fluid nature of antebellum identities and the place of "Indianness" at the very heart of American culture.
• Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family
• by Anne-Marie Slaughter
• Amazon Comment: When Anne-Marie Slaughter accepted her dream job as the first female director of policy planning at the U.S. State Department in 2009, she was confident she could juggle the demands of her position in Washington, D.C., with the responsibilities of her family life in suburban New Jersey. Her husband and two young sons encouraged her to pursue the job; she had a tremendously supportive boss, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; and she had been moving up on a high-profile career track since law school. But then life intervened. Parenting needs caused her to make a decision to leave the State Department and return to an academic career that gave her more time for her family.
• Project Fatherhood: A Story of Courage and Healing in One of America's Toughest Communities
• by Jorja Leap
• Amazon Comment: In 2010, former gang leader turned community activist Big Mike Cummings asked UCLA gang expert Jorja Leap to co-lead a group of men struggling to be better fathers in Watts, South Los Angeles, a neighborhood long burdened with a legacy of racialized poverty, violence, and incarceration. These men, black and brown, from late adolescence to middle age, are trying to heal themselves and their community, and above all to build their identities as fathers. Each week, they come together to help one another answer the question “How can I be a good father when I’ve never had one?”
• A Country Called Prison: Mass Incarceration and the Making of a New Nation
• by Mary D. Looman and John D. Carl
• Amazon Comment: The United States is the world leader in incarcerating citizens. 707 people out of every 100,000 are imprisoned. If those currently incarcerated in the US prison system were a country, it would be the 102nd most populated nation in the world. Aside from looking at the numbers, if we could look at prison from a new viewpoint, as its own country rather than an institution made up of walls and wires, policies and procedures, and legal statutes, what might we be able to learn?In A Country Called Prison, Mary Looman and John Carl propose a paradigm shift in the way that American society views mass incarceration. Weaving together sociological and psychological principles, theories of political reform, and real-life stories from experiences working in prison and with at-risk families, Looman and Carl form a foundation of understanding to demonstrate that prison is more than an institution built of fences and policies - it is a culture. Prison continues well after incarceration, as ex-felons leave correctional facilities (and often return to impoverished neighborhoods) without money or legal identification of American citizenship. Trapped in the isolation of poverty, these legal aliens turn to illegal ways of providing for themselves and are often reimprisoned. This situation is unsustainable and America is clearly facing an incarceration epidemic that requires a new perspective to eradicate it. A Country Called Prison offers concrete, concrete, feasible, economical suggestions to reform the prison system and help prisoners return to a healthier life after incarceration.
• A Plague of Prisons: The Epidemiology of Mass Incarceration in America
• by Ernest Drucker
• Amazon Comment: When Dr. John Snow first traced an outbreak of cholera to a water pump in the Soho district of London in 1854, the field of epidemiology was born. Ernest Drucker’s A Plague of Prisons takes the same concepts and tools of public health that have successfully tracked epidemics of flu, tuberculosis, and AIDS to make the case that our current unprecedented level of imprisonment has become an epidemic. Drucker passionately argues that imprisonment—originally conceived as a response to the crimes of individuals—has become mass incarceration: a destabilizing force, a plague upon our body politic, that undermines families and communities, damaging the very social structures that prevent crime.  Described as a “towering achievement” (Ira Glasser) and “the clearest and most intelligible case for a reevaluation of how we view incarceration” (Spectrum Culture), A Plague of Prisons offers a cutting-edge perspective on criminal justice in twenty-first-century America that “could help to shame the U.S. public into demanding remedial action” (The Lancet).
• The Moral Arc: How Science Makes Us Better People
• by Michael Shermer
• Amazon Comment: From Galileo and Newton to Thomas Hobbes and Martin Luther King, Jr., thinkers throughout history have consciously employed scientific techniques to better understand the non-physical world. The Age of Reason and the Enlightenment led theorists to apply scientific reasoning to the non-scientific disciplines of politics, economics, and moral philosophy. Instead of relying on the woodcuts of dissected bodies in old medical texts, physicians opened bodies themselves to see what was there; instead of divining truth through the authority of an ancient holy book or philosophical treatise, people began to explore the book of nature for themselves through travel and exploration; instead of the supernatural belief in the divine right of kings, people employed a natural belief in the right of democracy.  In The Moral Arc, Shermer will explain how abstract reasoning, rationality, empiricism, skepticism--scientific ways of thinking--have profoundly changed the way we perceive morality and, indeed, move us ever closer to a more just world.

Sports

• Indentured: The Inside Story of the Rebellion Against the NCAA
• by Noe Nocera and Ben Strauss
• Amazon Comment: For more than half a century, the NCAA has been one of the most powerful, and impregnable, institutions in America, a cartel that has had a powerful grip on college sports and the athletes who play the games. It has helped created a $13 billion entertainment industry—college sports—which makes millionaires of coaches, athletic directors, and conference commissioners, while the players themselves are restricted to their scholarships—scholarships that often don’t guarantee a diploma or an education
• Billion Dollar Ball: A Journey Through the Big-Money Culture of College Football
• by Gilbert Gaul
• Amazon Comment: Over the past decade college football has not only doubled in size, but its elite programs have become a $2.5-billion-a-year entertainment business, with lavishly paid coaches, lucrative television deals, and corporate sponsors eager to slap their logos on everything from scoreboards to footballs and uniforms. Profit margins among the top football schools range from 60% to 75%—results that dwarf those of such high-profile companies as Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft—yet thanks to the support of their football-mad representatives in Congress, teams aren’t required to pay taxes. In most cases, those windfalls are not passed on to the universities themselves, but flow directly back into their athletic departments.
• Saturday Millionaires: How Winning Football Builds Winning Colleges
• by Kristi Dosh
• Amazon Comment: Last year Football Bowl Subdivision college football programs produced over $1 billion in net revenue. Record-breaking television contracts were announced. Despite the enormous revenue, college football is in upheaval. Schools are accused of throwing their academic mission aside to fund their football teams. The media and fans are beating the drum for athletes to be paid. And the conferences are being radically revised as schools search for TV money. Saturday Millionaires shows that schools are right to fund their football teams first; that athletes will never be paid like employees; how the media skews the financial facts; and why the TV deals are so important. 
• The King of Sports: Why Football Must Be Reformed
• by Gregg Easterbrook
• Amazon Comment: Gridiron football is the king of sports – it's the biggest game in the strongest and richest country in the world. In The King of Sports, Easterbrook tells the full story of how football became so deeply ingrained in American culture. Both good and bad, he examines its impact on American society. The King of Sports explores these and many other topics:* The real harm done by concussions (it's not to NFL players).* The real way in which college football players are exploited (it's not by not being paid).* The way football helps American colleges (it's not bowl revenue) and American cities (it's not Super Bowl wins).* What happens to players who are used up and thrown away (it's not pretty).* The hidden scandal of the NFL (it's worse than you think).
• The Game: Inside the Secret World of Major League Baseball's Power Brokers
• by Jon Pessah
• Amazon Comment: In the fall of 1992, America's National Pastime is in crisis and already on the path to the unthinkable: cancelling a World Series for the first time in history. The owners are at war with each other, their decades-long battle with the players has turned America against both sides, and the players' growing addiction to steroids will threaten the game's very foundation.
• Havana Hardball: Spring Training, Jackie Robinson, and The Cuban League
• by Cesar Brioso
• Amazon Comment: “An in-depth look at a pivotal time in baseball history.”—Lou Hernández, author of Baseball’s Great Hispanic Pitchers  “Set against the backdrop of Old Havana, Cesar Brioso has given us an insightful, often loving ode to a memorable season when baseball’s past and future came together.”—Tim Wendel, author of Summer of ‘68: The Season That Changed Baseball, and America, Forever  “Long before the true Gold Age of Cuban baseball marked by the most recent quarter-century, there was also an era of pre-revolutionary professional winter league action housed in Havana. Brioso brings much of that lost ?other’ Cuban baseball back to life.”—Peter C. Bjarkman, author of A History of Cuban Baseball, 1864–2006  “A must read for baseball enthusiasts. Recounts the travels of Cuban ballplayers, the particular plight of black Cubans and African Americans, and the triumphs and travails of Cuba’s professional leagues.”—Adrian Burgos Jr., author of Cuban Star: How One Negro-League Owner Changed the Face of Baseball