New Book Releases for the Week of May 27, 2025
Featuring new book releases from Kevin Smokler, Cristina Jiménez, Augustine Sedgewick, Patricia A. McCoy.
Reading a personal story is one of the best ways to learn something new. This week, each of our four selected books features a compelling narrative bound to draw you in. Explore the struggles and triumphs of women filmmakers, follow an immigrant examining the truth and significance of the American Dream, discover the evolution of fatherhood throughout history, or learn about the financial safety net that has long supported American families but is gradually unraveling.
The Porchlight staff members choosing books each week include Porchlight's Managing Director, Sally Haldorson, and the marketing team of Dylan Schleicher, Gabbi Cisneros, and Jasmine Gonzalez. 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
Gabbi's pick: Break the Frame: Conversations with Women Filmmakers by Kevin Smokler, published by Oxford University Press
In the twenty-first century alone, women filmmakers have succeeded at directing every size, genre, and style of motion picture. Their movies have won Oscars (Free Solo), made actors into household names (Jennifer Lawrence in Winter's Bone), received induction into the Library of Congress's National Film Registry (Real Women Have Curves), and become worldwide box office phenomena (Captain Marvel, Deep Impact). Nevertheless in 2023, the year of Barbie, women directed only 12% of the top 250 movies in America. demonstrating how far moviemaking remains from gender parity. When women filmmakers succeed, they do so against these odds.
Break the Frame is a collection of 24 career-spanning interviews with America's celebrated, reigning, and rising women filmmakers. Each conversation considers the director's complete filmography as a map of their evolving artistry and evidence of their unassailable contributions to a historically misogynist industry. Author Kevin Smokler listens as women filmmakers speak to the struggle and triumphs of developing and directing movies that are shaping how the film business sees women in the director's chair, and how their audiences see themselves and each other. This book is both an opportunity and invitation to devote one's time, admiration and enthusiasm to movies directed by women.
Jasmine's pick: Dreaming of Home: How We Turn Fear into Pride, Power, and Real Change by Cristina Jiménez, published by St. Martin’s Press
Dreaming of Home is a coming-of-age story both for a young woman finding her true self and for a social movement of immigrant youth trailblazers who inspired the world and changed the lives of millions.
Cristina Jiménez’s family fights to stay afloat as Ecuador falls into a political and economic crisis. When she is thirteen, her parents courageously decide to seek a better life in the U.S., landing in a one-bedroom apartment in Queens, New York. There are many challenges, but eventually, Cristina discovers she is not alone; she finds her calling within a community of social justice organizers. With deep candor and humor, Cristina opens the door to what it’s like to grow up undocumented and the reality that being a “good” immigrant doesn’t shield you from systematic racism, danger, or even the confusion of falling in love.
Through personal stories and historical truth telling, Cristina invites us to acknowledge the America that never was and to imagine the America that could be when everyday people build power and fight for change. And she reminds us that home is more than a physical place on the map, offering each of us a roadmap for finding the home within even when the world around us seems to be crumbling.
Sally's pick: Fatherhood: A History of Love and Power by Augustine Sedgewick, published by Scribner
Fatherhood is one of the most meaningful aspects of human culture, but we know little about when or where fatherhood first emerged, or even how or why. Despite its enigmatic beginnings, fatherhood has, for centuries, given shape to ideas about the world, defined human experiences, and provided the foundation of patriarchy. The history of fatherhood is not just the story of one of humanity’s great values: caring for those who cannot care for themselves. And it is not merely the story of patriarchy—“the power of fathers”—which is arguably the oldest and most widespread form of social hierarchy and political oppression. It is the story of how these twin strands of history became so entangled that they are often indistinguishable.
In Fatherhood, celebrated historian Augustine Sedgewick explains how this style of parenting emerged in the first place, why it has changed over time, and whether it will endure as we know it, despite its extraordinary costs. Told through the lives of emblematic fathers like Aristotle, Saint Augustine, Henry VIII, Thomas Jefferson, Charles Darwin, and Sigmund Freud, this is an ambitious yet intimate look at how masculinity has evolved and how men have come to hold disproportionate power by expanding and reinforcing the power of fathers in times of crisis.
Sedgewick, acclaimed for his “literary gifts and prodigious research” (The Atlantic), takes us from the Bronze Age to the present to revolutionize our understanding of fathers and challenge the fictions that have surrounded them for centuries. Fatherhood transforms our understanding of this fundamental idea, experience, and institution, allowing us to better know our past and re-envision our common future.
Dylan's pick: Sharing Risk: The Path to Economic Well-Being for All by Patricia A. McCoy, published by University of California Press
Over the past sixty years, businesses and government have increasingly off-loaded financial risk onto US households. The toll has pushed tens of millions of people to the financial breaking point, worsened social inequity, and jeopardized US democracy. In Sharing Risk, consumer advocate and scholar Patricia A. McCoy draws on the nation’s traditions of risk sharing to argue that society should lift up families by pooling and spreading the financial risks that they now must bear alone.
Most policy discussions of financial stress on households look at the milestones of economic well-being in isolation: making ends meet, homeownership, quality health care, financing college, and a secure retirement. McCoy offers the first integrated examination of how risk sharing can enable families to realistically achieve all five goals without sacrificing one for another. She makes specific policy recommendations and shows how risk sharing, with its long and venerable history that includes Social Security and the Affordable Care Act, would provide economic well-being for all.
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