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 Awakened Brain: The New Science of Spirituality and Our Quest for an Inspired Life
Book Review by Emily Porter
In her new book, The Awakened Brain, Miller shares the results of the scientific research she has conducted finding that individuals with a spiritual or religious belief or practice have happier and healthier lives, as well as healthier brains.
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Blog / Staff Picks
I Left My Homework in the Hamptons: What I Learned Teaching the Children of the One Percent
Book Review by Dylan Schleicher
The pressures associated with poverty and discrimination are more widespread, and more urgent, but that doesn’t mean that the pressures placed on more privileged children aren’t a problem or that they don’t have societal consequences—or that they shouldn't be talked about.
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Blog / Staff Picks
Paradise : One Town's Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire
Book Review by Emily Porter
When the fires cease and the ash settles, the towns and those who have survived pick up the pieces and look to a future after surviving an American wildfire. Johnson shows the destruction, trauma, and the stress these fires put on the land, and on the families who live in areas that come within the fire’s path.
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Eloquence of the Sardine: Extraordinary Encounters Beneath the Sea
Book Review by Gabbi Cisneros
Eloquence of the Sardine is meant to intrigue, to entertain, and to inspire any sort of interest in the ocean and its creatures. It counters the out of sight, out of mind indifference we usually treat them with by opening our eyes to their world.
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This Will All Be Over Soon: A Memoir
Book Review by Emily Porter
This Will All Be Over Soon is an incredibly sincere memoir of a woman trying to grapple with grief, the pandemic, and how to move forward from the depths of life's woes all while falling in love.
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The Infinite Staircase: A Technology Strategist Investigates the Business of Living
Book Review by Dylan Schleicher
Geoffrey Moore's new book offers a wealth of insight and understanding, perhaps even a strategy for living, but his very writing of it is a thankful reminder that we don't have to be just one thing.
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Social Warming: The Dangerous and Polarising Effects of Social Media
Book Review by Gabbi Cisneros
A new book that shows how social media is doing more than enabling harmful behavior, it is structurally facilitating that behavior and profiting off of it too.
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A World Divided: The Global Struggle for Human Rights in the Age of Nation-States
Book Review by Bryan Rogers
Eric D. Weitz performs what amounts to a living autopsy on the history and health of the nation-state dating back nearly two hundred years.
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The Quiet Zone: Unraveling the Mystery of a Town Suspended in Silence
Book Review by Emily Porter
Stephen Kurczy, a journalist who ventures to this small town looking for some silence of his own, finds a reality that is rarely known in today’s modern world.
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Blog / Staff Picks
Go Where There Is No Path: Stories of Hustle, Grit, Scholarship, and Faith
Book Review by Gabbi Cisneros
Christopher Gray wants people to see an outsider's success as earned, not a fluke, and for entrepreneurs to know that for-profit companies, just as well as non-profits, can be good companies that offer solutions to social issues.
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