Staff Picks Book Reviews
Porchlight is a company filled with voracious readers—talented, creative individuals who know books, and who excel at moving them. Whenever we can, we like to do that by telling you about the books we’re reading.
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Blog / Staff Picks
The Devil You Know: Stories of Human Cruelty and Compassion
Book Review by Gabbi Cisneros
Dr. Gwen Adshead offers an honest and profound look at what it takes to unpack violence in individual situations rather than from statistics, and how the work she puts into it teaches her about her own mind and emotions too.
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Blog / Staff Picks
New Women in the Old West : From Settlers to Suffragists, an Untold American Story
Book Review by Emily Porter
Winifred Gallagher paints a picture of a hostile migration landscape with women—settlers who were White, Black and Asian—coming into their own, laying down the foundation for equal rights for generations to come—while uprooting the lives of Native Americans and Hispanic peoples.
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Blog / Staff Picks
The Cult of We: Wework, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion
Book Review by Dylan Schleicher
Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell ask if WeWork was "an outlier, or was it simply the most vivid example of a cultural rot that had formed within twenty-first-century entrepreneurial and investment culture?"
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Blog / Staff Picks
Becoming Heroines: Unleashing Our Power for Revolution and Rebirth
Book Review by Gabbi Cisneros
Elizabeth Cronise McLaughlin has effectively compiled her experience as CEO of Gaia Project Consulting, LLC, with personal traumas and accomplishments throughout her life, crafting a book that perfectly balances vulnerability and instruction.
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Blog / Staff Picks
The Comfort of Monsters
Book Review by Emily Porter
Richards writes a beautiful ballad to the missing and to those who survive, trying to pick up the pieces without knowing what that means. The pages illustrate the world of those who survive and the many missing faces of those who disappear.
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Blog / Staff Picks
All the Lonely People
Book Review by Gabbi Cisneros
All the Lonely People is a heartfelt story of human friendship that will make any reader feel a little more hopeful about our divided society.
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Blog / Staff Picks
The Power of Strangers: The Benefits of Connecting in a Suspicious World
Book Review by Dylan Schleicher
Talking to people you don’t know is one of the best ways to get the most out of every day and to form lifelong bonds of friendship and understanding.
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Blog / Staff Picks
"I Have Nothing to Hide": And 20 Other Myths about Surveillance and Privacy
Book Review by Dylan Schleicher
The so-called “frictionlessness” of online life and commerce is being lubricated by us ceding our right to privacy, and it’s an increasingly slippery slope.
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Blog / Staff Picks
This is Your Mind on Plants
Book Review by Emily Porter
In his new book, Michael Pollan focuses in on three substances that alter human consciousness—opium, caffeine, mescaline—and takes us on a whirlwind exploration through his research on the plants that contain them.
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Blog / Staff Picks
Vessel: A Memoir
Book Review by Gabbi Cisneros
Through non-linear storytelling, Cai Chongda recalls his youth to young adulthood in 1980s China: his family, their homes, struggles with poverty and illness, his work and education, and the waves of Western influence on the village.
Categories: staff-picks