New Book Releases | October 21st
New books from Julia Ioffe, Cas Holman, Richard Thaler and Alex Imas, and Sue Monk Kidd are hitting bookshop shelves and online stores this week.
Just as in life itself, every reader goes through ups and downs. We read voraciously for months, often multiple books at a time, and then hit a lull where we struggle to concentrate on just one book we really need to finish. We can read to challenge and change ourselves, emotionally and intellectually, to learn new ways of thinking, seeing, and doing, or use the act of reading to find comfort and entertainment. The act of reading can be a refuge in a familiar genre, a way to generate new ideas at work, or an attempt to understand the world around us and within us, the generations that came before us, and how we can be good ancestors to those who follow.
This week, we can read a big, brilliant history of women in a country that has fallen back into autocracy—that is also an intimate history of the author’s family—and follow that with a reminder of how important it is to add more play and fun to our lives. We can take a full, yet funny dive into the field of behavioral economics with one of the founders of the field, and follow that with “an exhortation to dive deeply into the creative instinct” from one of our great contemporary novelists.
Picking up any one of these four books, or taking on all four at once, will lead to a time of voracious and varied reading.
Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy by Julia Ioffe, published by Ecco
Acclaimed journalist Julia Ioffe tells the story of modern Russia through the history of its women, from revolution to utopia to autocracy.
In 1990, seven-year-old Julia Ioffe and her family fled the Soviet Union. Nearly twenty years later, Ioffe returned to Moscow—only to discover just how much Russian society had changed while she had been living in America. The Soviet women she had known growing up—doctors, engineers, scientists—seemed to have been replaced by women desperate to marry rich and become stay-at-home moms. How had Russia gone from portraying itself as the vanguard of world feminism to becoming a bastion of conservative Christian values?
In Motherland, Ioffe turns modern Russian history on its head, telling it exclusively through the stories of its women. From her own physician great-grandmothers to Lenin’s lover, a feminist revolutionary; from the hundreds of thousands of Soviet girls who fought in World War II to the millions of single mothers who rebuilt and repopulated a devastated country; from the members of Pussy Riot to Yulia Navalnaya, the wife of opposition leader Alexey Navalny, Ioffe chronicles one of the most audacious social experiments in history and documents how it failed the very women it was meant to liberate—and how that failure paved the way for the revanche of Vladimir Putin.
Part memoir, part journalistic exploration, part history, Motherland paints a portrait of modern Russia through the women who shaped it. With deep emotion, Ioffe reveals what it means to live through the cataclysms of revolution, war, idealism, and heartbreak—and how the story of Russia today is inextricably tied to the sacrifices of its women.
Playful: How Play Shifts Our Thinking, Inspires Connection, and Sparks Creativity by Cas Holman, with Lydia Denworth, published by Avery
A designer, educator, and play expert calls for adults to add more fun, exploration, and imagination to their lives.
We’re all born playful. But when we grow up, we learn to suppress this critical, hardwired instinct and our lives become ruled by “getting things done.” As world-famous designer Cas Holman explains, this disconnection from our playful selves is hazardous to everything from our emotional wellbeing to our ability to problem solve and innovate. The emerging science of play shows that it sparks joy, wonder, creativity, and insight at any age.
Here, Holman explains the power of “free play” through open-ended, unstructured activities that we become absorbed in with no obvious goal or purpose. The ways we can play are endless and what recharges us most is unique to each of us: whether it’s a piece of art we create, an entertaining conversation with a stranger, or an experiment to shake up a routine task. Weaving in inspiring stories and eye-opening research, Holman shows us that adopting a playful mindset is crucial in helping us:
- Overcome fear of failure and embrace new ways of thinking
- Destress, reset, and connect with each other
- Grow our creativity at every stage of our lives
- Find joy in bleak times
Playful draws on psychology, history, art, and design thinking to make a powerful case for the vital importance of play for grown-ups in a world obsessed with productivity. Provocative, wise, and full of spirit, it will inspire you to (re)learn how to play.
The Winner's Curse: Behavioral Economics Anomalies, Then and Now by Richard H. Thaler & Alex Imas, published by Simon & Schuster
Nobel Prize winner Richard H. Thaler and rising star economist Alex O. Imas explore the past, present, and cutting-edge future in behavioral economics in The Winner’s Curse.
Why do people cooperate with one another when they have no obvious motivation to do so? Why do we hold on to possessions of little value? And why is the winner of an auction so often disappointed?
Over thirty years ago, Richard H. Thaler introduced readers to behavioral economics in his seminal Anomalies column, written with collaborators including Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. These provocative articles challenged the fundamental idea at the heart of economics that people are selfish, rational optimizers, and provided the foundation for what became behavioral economics. That was then.
Now, three decades later, Thaler has teamed up with economist Alex O. Imas to write a new book with an original and creative format. Each chapter starts with an original Anomaly, retaining the spirit of its time stamp. Then, shifting to the present, the authors provide updates to each, asking how the original findings have held up and how the field has evolved since then.
It turns out that the original findings not only hold up well, but they show up almost everywhere. Anomalies pop up in people’s decisions to save for retirement and how they carry outstanding credit card debt. Even experts fail to optimize. The key concept of loss aversion explains missed putts by PGA pros and the selection of which stocks to sell by portfolio managers. In this era of meme stocks and Dogecoin, it is hard to defend the view that financial markets are highly efficient. The good news, however, is that the anomalies have gotten funnier.
With both readability and rigor, The Winner’s Curse is for anyone, from those with a cursory understanding of economics to fellow economists. Each chapter provides a key insight into human behavior so readers learn how to better understand the choices made by their friends, colleagues, and customers, and they might just become better at making decisions themselves. Only recommended for humans.
Writing Creativity and Soul by Sue Monk Kidd, published by Knopf
From the bestselling author of The Secret Life of Bees and The Book of Longings, an intimate work on the mysteries, frustrations, and triumphs of being a writer, and an instructive guide to awakening the soul.
When Sue Monk Kidd was in high school, a home economics teacher wrote a list of potential occupations for women on the blackboard: teacher, nurse, librarian, secretary. “Writer” was nowhere to be found. On that day, Kidd shut the door on her writerly aspirations and would not revisit the topic until many years later when she announced to her husband and two children that she was going to become a writer. And so began her journey into the mysteries and methods of the writerly life…
In Writing Creativity and Soul, Sue Monk Kidd will pull from her own life and the lives of other writers—Virginia Woolf, Maya Angelou, Harper Lee, and many others—to provide a map for anyone who has ever felt lost as a writer. At the heart of this book is the unwavering belief that writing is a spiritual act, one that draws inspiration from the soul, that wellspring of creativity between imagination and feeling. Once you tap into that part of yourself, said Maya Angelou, there are only three more things you need as a writer: something to say, the ability to say it, and, perhaps most difficult of all, the courage to say it.
Equal parts memoir, guidebook, and spiritual quest, Writing Creativity and Soul is a pilgrimage and a touchstone, a journey into the transformational force of the imagination and the creative genius that lies in the unconscious.
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The Porchlight staff members choosing new books each week are Porchlight's Managing Director, Sally Haldorson, and the marketing team of Gabriella Cisneros and Dylan Schleicher.
Unless otherwise noted, all book descriptions are from the publisher.
