New Book Releases for the Week of August 12
Featuring new releases from Frederick Luis Aldama and Angela M. Sánchez; Jonathan Mahler; Arthur C. Brooks; and Marc Berman.
There's nothing quite like discovering a great new book. Our selections this week include rich storytelling and fascinating new ideas that are sure to engage you.
The Porchlight staff members choosing books each week include Porchlight's Managing Director, Sally Haldorson, and the marketing team of Gabbi Cisneros, Jasmine Gonzalez, and Dylan Schleicher. As expert booksellers, we browse publisher catalogs and explore new titles from across the book industry to discover what captures our interest, and we're excited to share our findings with readers like you.
Unless otherwise noted, all book descriptions are provided by their respective publishers.
Our Recommended Books This Week
Jasmine's pick: From Cocinas to Lucha Libre Ringsides: A Latinx Comics Anthology edited by Frederick Luis Aldama and Angela M. Sánchez, published by Mad Creek Books
In this comics anthology full of humor and heart, writers and artists from across the US pay tribute to the ways food and sports endure as touchstones in the Latin American diaspora.
In the vein of Frederick Luis Aldama’s bestselling anthology Tales from la Vida, creators offer slice-of-life comics in an array of styles to capture common threads that bind this dizzyingly diverse community. From a simple quesadilla eaten hot on the way to school, to a Puerto Rican grandmother’s offering of guineitos en escabeche, to a homesick Chicano punk’s reverse-engineered tamales, food is a gift from elders to children, a marker of continuity and togetherness amid a dominant culture that may dismiss its flavors. Sports, too, provide a path to friendship and connection across national and language barriers, anchoring fans and participants in a sense of identity and place, whether through the perseverance of the Mayan game pok ta’ pok, the unifying surge of lucha libre or soccer fandom, or a father and daughter’s shared love of horse racing.
Together, the creators collected in From Cocinas to Lucha Libre Ringsides share a mosaic of stories that vividly portray Latinx identity and life today.
Sally's pick: The Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City: 1986-1990 by Jonathan Mahler, published by Random House
New York entered 1986 as a city reborn. Record profits on Wall Street sent waves of money splashing across Manhattan and brought a battered city roaring back to life.
But it also entered 1986 as a city whose foundation was beginning to crack. Thousands of New Yorkers were sleeping in the streets, addicted to drugs, dying of AIDS, or suffering from mental illnesses. Nearly one-third of the city’s Black and Hispanic residents were living below the federal poverty line. Long-simmering racial tensions threatened to boil over.
The events of the next four years would split the city open. Howard Beach. Black Monday. Tawana Brawley. The crack epidemic. The birth of ACT UP. The Central Park jogger. The release of Do the Right Thing. And a cast of outsized characters — Ed Koch, Donald Trump, Al Sharpton, Spike Lee, Rudy Giuliani, Larry Kramer — would compete to shape the city’s future while building their own mythologies.
The Gods of New York is a kaleidoscopic and deeply immersive portrait of a city whose identity was suddenly up for grabs: Could it be both the great working-class city that lifted up immigrants from around the world and the money-soaked capital of global finance? Could it retain a civic culture—a common idea of what it meant to be a New Yorker—when the rich were building a city of their own and vast swaths of its citizens were losing faith in the systems meant to protect them? New York City was one thing at the dawn of 1986; it would be something very different as 1989 came to a close. This is the story of how that happened.
Gabbi's pick: The Happiness Files: Insights on Work and Life by Arthur C. Brooks, published by Harvard Business Review Press
Imagine if your life were a startup. How would you lead it and shape it to be most successful?
That's the question behind The Happiness Files, a rich selection of enlightening and instructive essays by Arthur C. Brooks, known worldwide for his inspiring yet practical wisdom and advice in his weekly column for The Atlantic and in his bestselling books, From Strength to Strength and Build the Life You Want (coauthored with Oprah Winfrey).
The simple answer, as Brooks wisely explains, is to manage your life in a way that leads to truly valuable rewards: love, enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning—in other words, happiness.
Building on his popular Harvard Business School course "Leadership and Happiness," Brooks begins each essay with sharp observations and behavioral science research that shed light on how happiness really works, then offers experiential wisdom and practical advice. Beautifully written, the essays range from ancient philosophy to literature, pop culture, and the contemporary world of work. They explore topics and challenges such as "Procrastinate This, Not That," "Why Success Can Feel So Bitter," and "Five Pillars of a Good Life." Readers will find the chapters helpfully grouped by theme: "On Managing Yourself," "On Jobs, Money, and Building Your Career," "On Balancing Work, Life, and Relationships," and more.
We all need more happiness in our work and in our lives. In The Happiness Files you'll find enlightenment, inspiration, and useful guidance for leading a happier, more successful, and more fulfilling life and career.
Dylan's pick: Nature and the Mind: The Science of How Nature Improves Cognitive, Physical, and Social Well-being by Marc Berman, published by Simon Element
Dr. Marc Berman, the pioneering creator of the field of environmental neuroscience, has discovered the surprising connection between mind, body, and environment, with a special emphasis on the natural environment. He has devoted his life to studying it. If you sometimes feel drained, distracted, or depressed, Dr. Berman has identified the elements of a “nature prescription” that can boost your energy, sharpen your focus, change your mood, and improve your mental and physical health. He also reveals how central attention is to all of these functions, and how interactions with nature can restore it. Nature and the Mind is both an introduction to a revolutionary new scientific field and a helpful guide to better living.
In these pages, he draws on his original research and research from others and shares life-altering findings such as:
- Just eleven more trees on your street can decrease cardio-metabolic disorders like stroke, diabetes, and heart disease.
- A short walk in nature can improve attention by almost twenty percent, decrease depression symptoms, and make people feel more spiritual and self-reflective.
- More greenspace around schools and homes is related to better school performance, reduced crime, and improved working memory.
- Many of these effects can be achieved even if you don’t like nature.
With an engaging and approachable style, Dr. Berman offers the nature prescription for physical health, mental health, and social health. Importantly, you don’t have to pack up your house and move to the country to participate. The nature prescription includes practical ways to bring the outside indoors and to “naturize” our spaces, no matter where you live. The positive effects of nature don’t just end at the individual; contact with nature can make people more caring towards one another, promote economic and racial justice, encourage people to care more for the environment, and more.
This groundbreaking guide explains why and how nature is good for our brains and bodies and gives us a window into fundamental aspects of our psychology and physiology that can be improved through interactions with nature.
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