New Book Releases for the Week of August 5
Featuring new releases from Eveline Shen, Juan Bendaña, Katharina Reinecke, and Madeleine Beekman.
How you communicate with others matters profoundly and can often require a change in mindset and courage to make sure your message comes across effectively. These four books will help you better understand how to show up in the world and interact with others meaningfully.
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: Choosing to Lead Against the Current: The Courageous Operating System for Changemakers—Empowering leaders to transform the world with integrity, impact, and purpose by Eveline Shen, published by North Atlantic Books
In the face of complex challenges, capable leaders need more than a simple box of leadership tools. They need an internal system of leadership, a tested operating system to help them navigate successfully through forces of oppression, while staying connected to their purpose, values, and vision.
In Choosing to Lead Against the Current, award-winning movement leader, social change strategist, and executive director Eveline Shen shares her Courageous Operating System, a revolutionary system designed to help positive transformation leaders cultivate their power, sustain themselves both mentally and physically, and create lasting conditions for success.
With inspiring stories and case-studies drawn from her own experiences, as well as, from her work with other change leaders, topics include how to:
- Turn encounters with adversity into sources of strength
- Redefine success on one’s own terms
- Build creative momentum against forces of oppression
- Transform failures into progress
- Prioritize short and long-term self-care
Shen’s system has been taught to leaders in over 200 organizations across the U.S. and global South. It’s holistic in nature, with different elements designed to work as one. Choosing to Lead Against the Current takes readers through the system's components, with exercises at the end of each chapter to help integrate them into any leadership style.
Shen’s offering teaches anyone leading against the current how to harness their full leadership power to build a future that values the liberation of all people and life on this planet.
Gabbi's pick: Confident by Choice: The Three Small Decisions That Build Everyday Courage by Juan Bendaña, published by Ballantine Books
Being happier, building better relationships, overcoming fear: the missing link between you and everything you want to achieve is self-confidence. The problem? Confidence is hard to build, and even when we do, it often feels temporary and forced.
After years of research and working with over 250,000 individuals, Juan Bendaña uncovered the four myths about confidence that actually cause and reinforce self-doubt. Confidence is not linked to genetics, extraversion, insecurities, or competence.
To combat these myths, Juan Bendaña developed the Confidence Cycle, a repeatable flywheel that will help you gain and sustain confidence in every aspect of life through three key decisions:
- Decision #1:
Micro-Energy: Direct excitement toward the area of improvement. - Decision #2:
Micro-Courage: Find the bravery to move through discomfort. - Decision #3:
Micro-Action: Complete a small action.
RESULT: Micro-Proof & Boost of Confidence: Receive evidence that you are headed in the right direction, which gives you more confidence, thus continuing the cycle.
This actionable and hands-on guide will jumpstart your confidence and help you build lasting courage to be your best self and face life’s inevitable challenges.
Dylan's pick: Digital Culture Shock: Who Creates Technology and Why This Matters by Katharina Reinecke, published by Princeton University Press
Robots that encroach on your personal space, baffling emojis, a chatbot that gives you an answer that seems terribly rude—does any of this sound familiar? If so, you may know what it feels like to experience a clash of cultures, or even culture shock, in technology. Culture—shared values, norms, and behaviors—influences both the design of technology and its use. An encounter with new technology can teach us to embrace the unfamiliar, but a mismatch between design and user can create misunderstanding and loss of trust, and can even become a tool of digital imperialism. In Digital Culture Shock, computer scientist Katharina Reinecke travels through countries and cultures around the world to show the many fascinating ways that technology design and use can differ
Reinecke argues that technology is inherently cultural because developers apply their own knowledge and experiences when creating it. And this can make the technology fail in other settings. For example, robotaxis trained on driver behavior on a California highway are paralyzed when confronted with the more complicated traffic flows of Egypt. Western online social networks, designed to convey one’s individuality, violate the need to preserve the image of a family in more group-oriented cultures. Likewise, the visual complexity common in many East Asian websites can be overwhelming to North Americans and European users, who tend to prefer simpler designs. Making it clear what’s at stake, Reinecke urges us to resist generalizing our own cultural peccadillos in technology design.
Sally's pick: The Origin of Language: How We Learned to Speak and Why by Madeleine Beekman, published by Simon & Schuster
Journeying to the dawn of Homo sapiens, evolutionary biologist Madeleine Beekman reveals the “happy accidents” hidden in our molecular biology—DNA, chromosomes, and proteins—that led to one of the most fateful events in the history of life on Earth: our giving birth to babies earlier in their development than our hominid cousins the Neanderthals and Denisovans. Faced with highly dependent infants requiring years of nurturing and protection, early human communities needed to cooperate and coordinate, and it was this unprecedented need for communication that triggered the creation of human language—and changed everything.
Infused with cutting-edge science, sharp humor, and insights into the history of biology and its luminaries, Beekman weaves a narrative that’s both enlightening and entertaining. Challenging the traditional theories of male luminaries like Chomsky, Pinker, and Harari, she invites us into the intricate world of molecular biology and its ancient secrets. The Origin of Language is a tour de force by a brilliant biologist on how a culture of cooperation and care have shaped our existence.
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