New Book Releases | March 3
In tumultuous times, it helps to take regular breaks from the news cycle to dig deeper into how we arrived at this moment and explore new possibilities for the future. There is no better technology for that work than the book, and there are four new releases this week that serve as a great guide to thinking about our past, present, and future.
This week's best new releases include Rebecca Solnit's follow up to Hope in the Dark and Claude Steele's first book since Whistling Vivaldi, a new book from an author who novelist Richard Powers says "gives [him] something bigger than hope,” and a book from Porchlight Book of the Year winner Kevin Ashton that was "more than twenty-five years in the making."
All four books are available online and on independent bookstore shelves today. Interested in buying multiple copies for your 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.
The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change by Rebecca Solnit, published by Haymarket Books
Rebecca Solnit offers a thrilling account of the sheer breadth and scale of social, political, scientific, and cultural change over the past three quarters of a century.
In this sequel to her enduring bestseller Hope in the Dark, Solnit surveys a world that has changed dramatically since the year 1960. Despite the forces seeking to turn back the clock on history, change is not a possibility; it is an inevitability.
The changes amount to nothing less than dismantling an old civilization and building a new one, whose newness is often the return of the old ways and wisdoms. In this rising worldview, interconnection is a core idea and value. But because the transformation is obscured within a longer arc of history, its scale is seldom recognized.
While the white nationalist and authoritarian backlash drives individualism and isolation, this new world embraces antiracism, feminism, a more expansive understanding of gender, environmental thinking, scientific breakthroughs, and Indigenous and non-Western ideas, pointing toward a more interconnected, relational world.
Churn: The Tension That Divides Us and How to Overcome It by Claude M. Steele, published by Liveright
Nearly two decades after the publication of Whistling Vivaldi, a landmark work that analyzed stereotype threats and how we can mitigate their corrosive effects, the legendary social psychologist Claude M. Steele returns with an equally ambitious work that examines “churn”—the mental agitation and physical stress we can experience in diverse settings in everyday life—and the surprising role that trust-building can achieve in reducing churn across identity divides.
Too often, we deal with the commonplace tensions of diversity and difference by pretending they don’t exist, by avoiding talking and relating to one another across what can seem like wide chasms of identity difference. Steele highlights a different path forward, a path rooted in trying to see full humanity and potential in human difference. He spells out practices—as he puts it, “a game played on the ground”—for how to build trust across all kinds of human divides: between individuals, or in larger settings, like classrooms, board rooms, even in whole institutions, corporations, and organizations. It is a game we can all play, he believes. Churn doesn’t dwell on age-old tensions that continue to fester. It provides tangible ways to make a better world in the fractured society we inhabit.
Carefully intertwining state-of-the-art research with poignant anecdotes drawn from Steele’s own biracial background, Churn is essential reading for anyone dedicated to fostering a community rooted in love and commitment. “Wise to its core” (Lee C. Bollinger, president emeritus, Columbia University) and filled with a deep well of hope, Steele’s summa work brilliantly succeeds in teaching us how to work through the churn that continues to suffuse our lives.
The Glorians: Visitations from the Holy Ordinary by Terry Tempest Williams, published by Grove Press
Whether we believe it or not, rapid change is upon us. I am searching for grace.
In this time of political fragility, climate chaos, and seeking beauty wherever we can find its glimmer, Terry Tempest Williams introduces us to the Glorians. They are not distant deities, but the ordinary, often overlooked presences—animal, plant, memory, moment—that reveal our shared vulnerability and interconnectedness with the natural world. The Glorians can be as small as an ant ferrying a coyote willow blossom to its queen or as commonplace as the night sky. But what they can collectively show us—about the radical act of attending to beauty and carrying forward against all odds—is immense.
Journeying through encounters with the Glorians in the red rock desert of Utah during the pandemic to Harvard University where she teaches in the Divinity School, Williams weaves a story of astonishing personal and societal insight. As she grapples with the unsettled state of the world, she turns not to despair but to deep reflection. She sees how the Glorians are calling us to attention, not as an army, but as fellow inhabitants of our sacred, threatened home. They remind us of the power of contact between species and the profound courage—and awareness—it will take to dream a more cohesive future into being.
Wise and lyrical, The Glorians is a testament to the power of witness, a field guide to finding grace in the unexpected, and a moving invitation to engage with one another and our surroundings with renewed intention. In a modern world filled with increasing noise and anxiety, Terry Tempest Williams offers honest sustenance for the mind and spirit and distinguishes herself again as a trusted voice to whom we can turn to more fully understand our times.
The Story of Stories: The Million-Year History of a Uniquely Human Art by Kevin Ashton, published by Harper
An irresistible and enchanting journey through human history—from mankind’s earliest fires to the latest smart phones—that tells the surprising and untold story of storytelling.
Joan Didion told us, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” And yet, the story of stories has never been told until now. MIT technology pioneer Kevin Ashton was at the forefront of the digital revolution that led to the invention of the smartphone, the ultimate storytelling device. This latest technology in the long arc of human storytelling allows anyone, for the first time in history, to tell stories to everyone. In The Story of Stories, Ashton tells the untold story of storytelling. The result is an eye-opening, compelling journey through the eight great revolutions of storytelling, all of which follow a simple pattern: each major new storytelling tool increases the number of people who can share stories and the number of people with whom those stories can be shared.
Our first night-fires created the earliest audiences for spoken stories. Language did not lead us to stories; stories led us to language. In time, the development of rhyme, song, and other mnemonic devices allowed those spoken stories to be preserved for generations; pictures drawn on cave walls turned preservation into permanence, telling stories we still experience thousands of years later; writing enabled storytellers to spread tales to faraway places; the Chinese invented printing with moveable metal type around 700 CE; the Toltecs independently invented it at about the same time; 750 years later Gutenberg independently invented it again, adding a converted wine press to create the mass production of mass communication. Over time, printing presses increased the number of storytellers and the size of their audiences by many orders of magnitude, a trend which led us to great revolutions, and electric, then electronic, then digital storytelling and all our storytelling tools of today—and tomorrow’s.
In this remarkable book, more than twenty-five years in the making, Ashton looks at the development of human storytelling to help us understand where we are in the latest iteration that is the digital era. Drawing on examples from art, literature, music, and pop culture, from the Bible to Bon Jovi, Aristotle to Artificial Intelligence, Frederick Douglass to Facebook, and cave paintings to cinema, The Story of Stories is a passionate and crucial exploration of how stories and the tools we use to tell them continue to change us, cause revolutions, and connect us to each other and give our lives meaning.
