New Book Releases | February 17
This week's best new book releases examine economic development and who it empowers, how we can ensure equality amid widespread backlash to DEI efforts, and consider the ultimate question in life.
Our picks of this week's best new releases examine economic strategies on the African continent, reimagine the work of diversity, equity, and inclusion, explore how we can better align societal social promises with our lived economic realities, and explore "the ultimate question of what makes life alive and worth living."
All four are hitting online stores and local bookshop shelves today. Interested in buying multiple copies for you team, book club, or employee resource group? Check out our services for bulk book buyers.
Unless otherwise noted, all book descriptions are from the publisher.
How Africa Works: Success and Failure on the World's Last Developmental Frontier by Joe Studwell, published by Atlantic Monthly Press
The acclaimed author of How Asia Works brings his “pithy, well-written and intellectually vigorous” (Financial Times) reporting to Africa, revealing essential, promising lessons about the engines of economic growth across the continent.
The culmination of twenty years spent studying Asian economics, Joe Studwell’s celebrated How Asia Works revealed the key policies behind the meteoric growth of the “Asian tigers.” The question he kept hearing from those inspired by his clear-eyed understanding of global development: what about Africa? He was finally convinced to investigate further when the inquiries began coming from Africans themselves. A decade of research, travel, and on-the-ground reporting began.
Studwell expected that Africa’s challenging geography and its crippling legacies of colonialism would necessitate a unique developmental recipe. Yet to his astonishment, the African countries that succeeded did so by embracing the very same strategies their Asian counterparts had—strategies that are far different from those foisted on Africa by the international community. He explores these winning policies via four countries that have seen exceptional economic growth (Botswana, Mauritius, Ethiopia and Rwanda) and that demonstrate both the promise and the particular challenge of the African context. Highlighting the achievements of local leaders, Studwell argues that prosperity is well within reach and that the rapidly rising population—seen as alarming by so many—will be foundational to Africa’s flourishing. How Africa Works is essential, optimistic reading for anyone looking to understand the next chapter of global development.
How Equality Wins: A New Vision for an Inclusive America by Kenji Yoshino & David Glasgow, published by Simon Acumen
The renowned legal experts behind Say the Right Thing return with this clarion call for reimagining the work of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in a divided nation.
Equality in America is under siege. Corporations and universities are abandoning the DEI programs they previously championed. The tools Americans had for advancing fairness are facing a relentless political and legal assault. So how do we build a more just nation when the old playbook is no longer viable?
In this groundbreaking manifesto, Kenji Yoshino and David Glasgow, founders of the Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging at NYU School of Law, candidly unpack where DEI went wrong and offer a roadmap to rebuild equality for the new era.
Drawing on their peerless legal expertise and extensive experience advising leaders in corporate America, academia, and the non-profit sector, Yoshino and Glasgow share tangible strategies to put this nation back on a more inclusive path, such as by fostering free speech and dissent, reclaiming the concept of merit, and welcoming groups that felt neglected by DEI. In doing so, they provide an urgently needed blueprint to ensure the work of equality can overcome the backlash and emerge stronger on the other side.
In an era when equality is imperiled, How Equality Wins provides a bracing critique and hopeful call to action for anyone committed to creating a fairer society.
Ladder or Lottery: Economic Promises and the Reality of Who Gets Ahead by Gary A Hoover, published by University of California Press
Who really gets ahead in a market-based economy?
This book asks the reader a simple question: Is our economy a ladder or a lottery? Are people able to control their position on the economic spectrum by their actions? Some argue that, in our market-based economy, if you play by certain rules and make certain choices, you'll achieve upward mobility no matter what economic position you were born into.
Drawing on his vast economic expertise, Gary A. Hoover explores what this "social contract" requires of its citizens, and what it offers in return. Hoover shows how civil unrest is often directly related to broken society-level promises, exploring protest movements such as Occupy Wall Street, the Tea Party, the Arab Spring, and student debt forgiveness as case studies. He also predicts where future protests can be expected if results promised are not results delivered.
This insightful and data-driven book tackles challenging issues around income inequality, health care, and artificial intelligence, and ultimately equips readers to answer these pressing questions: Is our social contract a ladder to higher economic standing, accessible to all no matter where they start? Or rather a lottery in which many will buy a ticket but only a few will find success? And how can we best align social promises with our lived economic realities?
Traversal by Maria Popova, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
From the Marginalian creator and bestselling author Maria Popova, a bold exploration of what makes a meaningful life.
In Traversal, her startling and moving new book, Maria Popova traverses the border between life and death, chance and choice, chemistry and consciousness: What makes a body a person? What makes a planet a world? How do we safeguard our love of truth from our lust for power? What slakes our longings and what redeems our losses?
Popova illuminates our various instruments of reckoning with these questions—our telescopes and our treatises, our postulates and our poems—through the intertwined lives, loves, and legacies of visionaries both celebrated and sidelined by history, people born into the margins of their time and place who lived to write the future: Mary Shelley, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Fanny Wright, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, Marie Tharp, Alfred Wagener, Humphry Davy, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead. Woven throughout their stories are other threads—the world's first global scientific collaboration, the Irish potato famine, the decoding of the insulin molecule, the invention of the bicycle, how nature creates blue—to make the tapestry of meaning more elaborate yet more clarifying as the book advances, converging on the ultimate question of what makes life alive and worth living.
By turns epic and intimate—as concerned with the physical laws binding atoms into molecules as with the psychic forces binding us to each other—Traversal explores the universe between cells and souls to reveal the world, and our lives, in a dazzling new light.
