New Book Releases for the Week of June 24, 2025
Featuring new book releases from Rebecca Grant, Joseph Jebelli, Emily Kasriel, and Augustin Landier and David Thesmar.
A beach read can be anything you want it to be, whether it's a lighthearted romance novel, a lore-rich fantasy series, or a captivating nonfiction title. The four books we're highlighting this week are lush with meticulous research and riveting narratives and will give you plenty to think about while soaking up the early summer sun. Who knew relaxation time could also be so educational?
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: Access: Inside the Abortion Underground and the Sixty-Year Battle for Reproductive Freedom by Rebecca Grant, published by Avid Reader Press
In this definitive, eye-opening history, award-winning author Rebecca Grant charts the reproductive freedom movement from the days before Roe through the seismic impact of Dobbs. The stories in Access span four continents, tracing strategies across generations and borders. Grant centers those activists who have been engaged in direct action to help people get the abortions they need. Their efforts involve no small measure of daring-do, spy craft, sea adventures, close calls, undercover operations, smuggling, sequins, legal dramas, victories, defeats, and above all, a deeply held conviction that all the risks are worth it for the cause.
In Access, we meet a cast of brave, bold, and unforgettable women: the founders of the Jane Collective, a group of anonymous providers working clandestinely between Chicago apartments to perform abortions in the pre-Roe years; the originators and leaders of the abortion fund movement; Verónica Cruz Sánchez, a Mexican activist who works to support self-managed abortion with pills and fights to free women targeted by the criminalization of abortion; and Rebecca Gomperts, a Dutch doctor who realizes that there is one place abortion bans cannot reach: international waters.
Post-Dobbs, activist groups have once again stepped up and put themselves on the line to resist. Building on the work of their feminist forebearers and international allies, they are charting new pathways for access in the face of unprecedented acts to subjugate and control half of America's population. Working above ground, underground, and in legal gray areas, they've helped people travel across state lines for care, established telehealth practices, and formed community networks to distribute pills for free to people who needed them.
Drawing on expert research and investigative reporting, told with deep compassion and humanity by a journalist who has spent her career on the frontlines of the fight, Access celebrates the bravery, ingenuity, and determination of women across decades who have fought for a fundamental human right—and serves as an inspiring rallying cry for the work that lies ahead.
Sally's pick: The Brain at Rest: How the Art and Science of Doing Nothing Can Improve Your Life by Joseph Jebelli, PhD, published by Dutton
We are constantly told to make the most of our time. Work harder, with more focus. Stop procrastinating. Optimize. To be happy, creative, and successful requires discipline. The most important thing is to be efficient with every precious hour.
But what if all that advice was wrong, and letting the brain rest, and the mind wander, could improve our lives? Dr. Joseph Jebelli proves this surprising and fascinating point in The Brain at Rest, blending science and personal stories with practical tips about using the brain's "default network," which turns itself on when we turn off the constant need to always do and achieve. By activating our default network through long walks, baths, and spending time in nature, we can all be more content, less stressed, and actually more productive.
Perfect for anyone interested in science and creativity, or anyone feeling overwhelmed in their day-to-day lives, The Brain at Rest is a deeply researched and entertaining antidote to overwork and burnout, showing readers the way to happier, healthier, and more balanced lives.
Gabbi's pick: Deep Listening: Transform Your Relationships with Family, Friends, and Foes by Emily Kasriel, published by William Morrow & Company
We all think we're good listeners . . . but how many of us actually are? Even in important moments—like a high-stakes work meeting or a stressful conversation with a spouse—we are distracted, daydreaming, or planning out what we ourselves want to say. We may walk away from the interaction unsure if we have fully understood our counterpart.
True Deep Listening has the power to transform relationships—between coworkers, friends, lovers, and even warring countries. Emily Kasriel, who ran one of the most extensive studies on listening practices across the globe, lays out her proven 8-step method:
- Create Space: Find or create a place of safety.
- Listen to Yourself: Forge a more positive relationship with yourself.
- Be Present: Eliminate external distractions that get in the way of truly listening.
- Be Curious: Refine listening qualities such as empathy and acknowledgment.
- Hold the Gaze: Explore the power of a warm-hearted gaze and other nonverbal cues.
- Hold the Silence: Unravel the many types of silence and reasons why you resist silence.
- Reflect Back: Crystallize what you're hearing and reflect it back to your speaker.
- Go Deeper: Illuminate what ordinarily lies hidden—your speaker's deeper narrative
Kasriel offers satisfying answers to the big questions of human communication: How can the act of listening transcend a mere transactional exchange of information? How can we reach across divides—cultural, political, and generational—to foster true emotional connection? And why does your teenage daughter only open up about her life when you're in the car together?
Beautifully illustrated with the author's original black and white watercolors, Deep Listening is an essential guide that will improve our connection to others and enhance our compassion.
Dylan's pick: The Price of Our Values: The Economic Limits of Moral Life by Augustin Landier and David Thesmar, published by University of Chicago Press
Modern life is an exercise in discomfort. In the face of endless injustice, how much selfishness is permissible? How do we square suffering elsewhere with our hope to thrive at home? How does one strive for the greater good while guarding one's personal interests? The Price of Our Values argues that the answers to these questions are economic: by weighing our sense of the personal costs associated with the outer limits of our moral beliefs.
These tradeoffs—the want to be good, the personal costs of being good, and the points at which people abandon goodness due to its costs—are somewhat unsettling. But as economists Augustin Landier and David Thesmar show, they are highly predictable, even justified. Our values guide us, but we are also forced to consider economic costs to settle decisions.
The Price of Our Values is an economic reckoning with the universal unease of contemporary moral life. Wielding insights from the philosophical founders of the field, Landier and Thesmar provide frameworks for thinking about the place of values—justice, freedom, beauty—in the decisions of modern life. They do so in terms that seek to be consistent with both our good intentions and their limits.
Buy these recommended new book releases and more directly from Porchlight Book Company.
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