Men We Reaped: A Memoir by Jesmyn Ward
Two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward (Salvage the Bones, Sing, Unburied, Sing) contends with the deaths of five young men dear to her, and the risk of being a black man in the rural South. In five years, Ward lost five young men in her life -- to drugs, accidents, suicide, and the bad luck that can follow people who live in poverty, particularly black men. Dealing with these losses, one after another, made Ward ask the question: Why? And she began to write about the experience of living through all the dying. Ward -- who earned her BA and MA at Stanford University and an MFA at University of Michigan and who is currently an associate professor of English at Tulane University -- grew up in poverty in rural Mississippi. She writes in powerful and raw language about the pressures this brings, about the men who can do no right, and about the women who stand in for family in a society where the men are often absent.
What Money Can’t Buy; The Moral Limits of Markets by Michael J. Sandel
Should we pay children to read books or to get good grades? Is it ethical to pay people to test new drugs or donate their organs? What about auctioning admission to elite universities? In his international best seller, Michael Sandel, Harvard professor, asks readers to rethink the role that markets and money play in our society and how people can protect the moral integrity that serves as the foundation of our nation.
The Social Animal by David Brooks
With unequaled insight, New York Times columnist David Brooks has long explored and explained the way we live. David Brooks has written an absolutely fascinating book about how we form our emotions and character. Standing at the intersection of brain science and sociology, and writing with the wry wit of a James Thurber, he explores the unconscious mind and how it shapes the way we eat, love, live, vacation, and relate to other people. In The Social Animal, he makes the recent revolution in neuroscience understandable, and he applies it to those things we have the most trouble knowing how to teach: What is the best way to build true relationships? This is the story of how success happens, told through the lives of one composite American couple, Harold and Erica. Drawing on a wealth of current research from numerous disciplines, Brooks takes Harold and Erica from infancy to old age, illustrating a fundamental new understanding of human nature along the way.
Barbarian Days A Surfing Life by William Finnegan
**Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Autobiography**
Barbarian Days immerses the reader in the edgy camaraderie of close male friendships forged in challenging waves. Itis an old-school adventure story, an intellectual autobiography, a social history, a literary road movie, and an extraordinary exploration of the gradual mastering of an exacting, little understood art. Today, Finnegan’s surfing life is undiminished. Raised in California and Hawaii, Finnegan started surfing as a child. He has chased waves all over the world, wandering for years through the South Pacific, Australia, Asia, Africa. A bookish boy, and then an excessively adventurous young man, he went on to become a distinguished writer and war reporter. –Penguin Random House