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
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.
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Blog / Staff Picks
Across the Airless Wilds: The Lunar Rover and the Triumph of the Final Moon Landings
Book Review by Dylan Schleicher
The rocket scientists who figured out how to break us free from Earth’s gravity and get us to the moon usually get all the glory. Earl Swift tells their story, too, but goes beyond them to tell the tale of the engineers who made the final leg of the last three missions to the moon—aboard lunar rovers—possible.
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Blog / Staff Picks
Praying with Jane Eyre: Reflections on Reading as a Sacred Practice
Book Review by Gabbi Cisneros
If Vanessa Zoltan can make such thoughtful, universal, contemporary, and personal connections with a nineteenth-century gothic Romance novel, I think that there are endless possibilities for what we can learn from the abundance of diverse authors and stories that exist today.
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Blog / Staff Picks
Objects of Desire: Stories
Book Review by Emily Porter
Clare Sestanovich gives us a peek into the desires of modern life, lives that are figuring out the everyday, and writes lovely short stories that give us snippets of all these lives that tie together.
Categories: staff-picks