Back-to-School Books for Your Brain

Can I have your ATTENTION, please? Novelist and polymath Joshua Cohen presents his first collection of nonfiction, organized around the theme of distraction. In a world of ceaseless information and ever-evolving technologies, Cohen shows the vitality of nuanced consideration and the folly of constant diversions.

Patrick Radden Keefe has garnered prizes ranging from the National Magazine Award to the Orwell Prize to the National Book Critics Circle Award for his meticulously-reported, hypnotically-engaging work on the many ways people behave badly. Rogues brings together a dozen of his most celebrated articles from The New Yorker. As Keefe says in his preface, “they reflect on some of my abiding preoccupations: crime and corruption, secrets and lies, the permeable membrane separating licit and illicit worlds, the bonds of family, the power of denial.”

Whether you’re an INFP, an ESFJ, or you just DGAF, Merve Emre’s The Personality Brokers will offer an important look into our obsession with reductive identity labels and the concept of self-definition. In a culture hoping to break away from simplistic categories of who a person can be, Emre’s book is an essential step forward.

Every kind of animal, including humans, is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of our immense world. Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist Ed Yong takes us on “a thrilling tour of nonhuman perception” (The New York Times), allowing us to experience the skeins of scent, waves of electromagnetism, and pulses of pressure that other animals perceive.

Yuval Noah Harari’s past books were nothing short of histories of mankind. Turning his erudite attention to the overwhelming present, Harari gives us blistering insights into some of our most pressing conundrums, such as the relevancy of nation states and religions, and what we should teach our children (who, you’ll recall, are going to back to school as you read this).

For millennia, the location of the Nile River’s headwaters was shrouded in mystery. Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke were sent by England to claim this prize, and extend their colonial powers. From the start the two men clashed becoming venomous enemies. Yet there was a third man on both expeditions, his name obscured by imperial annals, whose exploits were even more extraordinary. Without Sidi Mubarak Bombay, who led, carried, and protected the expedition, neither Englishman would have come close to the headwaters of the Nile, or perhaps even survived. In River of the Gods Candice Millard has written another peerless story of courage and adventure, set against the backdrop of the race to exploit Africa by the colonial powers.

NYU professor of sociology Eric Klinenberg posits that rather than shared ideologies, it’s our shared spaces like libraries, churches, bookstores, and parks that are America’s keys to coming together. The current climate of extreme division must be amended, but Klinenberg believes we must step out of our heads and into the real world, to the physical places we communally utilize, to find our literal common ground.

From #1 New York Times bestselling author Michael Pollan, a radical challenge to how we think about drugs and an exploration into the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants–and the equally powerful taboos.

Did you know that milk used to kill thousands of children every year because it contained formaldehyde? And that was just in New York alone? Before the Food and Drug Act was passed in 1906, food manufacturers had no oversight and could basically peddle whatever they wanted and call it “food.” That is, until Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley became chief chemist of the agriculture department and began testing food on a group of men known as “the Poison Squad.” Wiley, along with others, like Upton Sinclair, waged a war against unsafe food and saved generations of Americans from eating poison.

A renowned historian traces the life of a single object handed down through three generations of Black women to craft a “deeply layered and insightful” (The Washington Post) testament to people who are left out of the archives.

When Norman Eisen was the U.S. ambassador to the Czech Republic from 2011 to 2014, he made a troubling discovery: hidden under the furniture in the ambassador’s residence in Prague were numerous swastikas. This led him to research the previous occupants of the place, and the result is The Last Palace, a book that uses the lives of the past residents to tell the story of the dark and complicated history of 20th-century Europe.

Unlike most personal finance books that focus on skills and behaviors, Finance for the People asks you to examine your beliefs and experiences around money–blending extremely practical exercises with mindfulness, and including more than 50 illustrations and diagrams to make the concepts accessible (and even fun). With deep insider expertise from years spent in many different corners of the financial industry, Paco de Leon is a friendly, approachable, and wise guide who invites readers to change their relationship with money.

There is a certain sector of highly wealthy people who use their resources to fight for equality and other social issues. Yet, as Anand Giridharadas argues in Winners Take All, they don’t really change anything. When it comes to real change in, for instance, the social order, these elites don’t want their positions (or their wealth) threatened. As Giridharadas writes, though these select few “may be among the more socially concerned elites in history,” they are “also, by the cold logic of numbers, among the more predatory in history.” A deeply disturbing and fascinating look at our broken system and the exploitation of our awareness of its brokenness, Winners Take All is a must-read for the lowly 90% of Americans who aren’t rich.

A sweeping, genre-bending “masterpiece” (Minneapolis Star Tribune) exploring Black art, music, and culture in all their glory and complexity–from Soul Train, Aretha Franklin, and James Brown to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Whitney Houston, and Beyoncé.

Benjamin Franklin was a hardworking fellow: a prodigious writer, a ceaseless inventor, and a dogged founding father. Pulitzer-finalist Nick Bunker dives deep into Franklin’s youth to figure out just where he got all that fiery assiduity. Anyone who has ever read Franklin’s one-of-a-kind but totally self-serving autobiography (a staple of high school curriculums) will relish this, let’s say, less biased view of one of America’s most ingenious (and eccentric) figures.

In this beautifully written masterwork, the Pulitzer Prize-winner and bestselling author of Caste chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life.