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We asked our authors to recommend a book they had read over the past couple of years. Here is what they said:
I recently read Princeton University historian Keith Wailoo’s Pushing the Cool: Big Tobacco, Racial Marketing, and the Untold Story of the Menthol Cigarette. I found this book to be a fascinating read. Wailoo makes connections between Eric Garner, George Floyd, and the racial marketing of menthol cigarettes that begun in the 1960’s. These events, according to Wailoo, are intimately connected. The historical journey Wailoo takes the reader on highlights the assaults on Black urban health and explains why many African-Americans are struggling to breathe. The time one takes to read the book is repaid with the gaining of significant insight. —Patrick T. Smith
As a case study in wisdom, there is no better subject than the life and career of Abraham Lincoln. I found Professor Miller’s book to be the best in-depth analysis of how Lincoln resolved the profound ethical and moral dilemmas he faced. —Patrick E. Longan
Drawing on the thought of Montaigne, Pascal, Rousseau, and Tocqueville, the Storeys explore the roots of the malaise they find rampant in the rising generation. This is a book for anyone who takes the aims of education seriously. —Yuval Levin
This book is a fitting climax to MacIntyre’s project, which means it at once illuminates our moral alternatives and provides a robust account of how we should live. —Stanley Hauerwas
I get really absorbed and engaged in books when I am on vacation. I read this one whilst exploring the beautiful rugged, expanse of sand dunes of Upton Towans in Cornwall. Surrounded by unspoilt nature, I was able to use the book to compare and contrast my scientific reality with my spiritual reality seen through a Sufi lens. Self-understanding is the beginning of greater worldly comprehensions. Ultimately Chittick identifies fragmented consciousness represented by scholarly and analytic ways, inviting us to contemplate evocative and mystic traditions as a path to wisdom. Reading this book offered a sublime stillness. A truly meditative read. —Sabena Y. Jameel
I’ve just finished reading Born a Crime by Trevor Noah. It’s full of gritty details about the early life of this remarkable comedian, as a “colored” person who grew up in impoverished, post-apartheid black South Africa. His writing offers an insightful reflection providing possible explanations of how his character might have developed under such extreme social duress and economic impoverishment. Clearly, “nurture” was a significant factor for Trevor, but there had to have been other character development influences, coming perhaps from “nature.” This is an entertaining and captivating read about Trevor, but it is also a peek inside South African history and culture, as seen through his eyes. —Rosalyn W. Berne
