New Releases | November 1, 2022

Looking for your next great read? We're here to help! Each week, our marketing team—Dylan Schleicher (DJJS), Gabbi Cisneros (GMC), Emily Porter (EPP), and Jasmine Gonzalez (JAG)—highlights four newly released books we are most excited about. 

Book descriptions are provided by the publisher unless otherwise noted.

This week, our choices are:

The Age of Resilience: Reimagining Existence on a Rewilding Earth by Jeremy Rifkin, St. Martin’s Press (DJJS) 

Humans have long believed we could force the natural world to adapt to us; only now are we beginning to face the fact that it is we who will have to adapt to survive and thrive in an unpredictable natural world. A massive transformation of our economy (and with it the way we live our lives) has already begun. In The Age of Resilience, Jeremy Rifkin describes this great transformation and its profound effect on the way we think about the meaning of our existence, our economy, and how we govern ourselves as the earth rewilds around us. 
 
We are moving, Rifkin argues, from an Age of Progress to an Age of Resilience. The former was driven by the quest to optimize the expropriation, consumption, and discarding of natural resources in favor of the material opulence of society. Of course, this came at the expense of nature, itself. If the Age of Progress marched in lockstep with efficiency, the choreography of the Age of Resilience strides with adaptivity. Rather than attempting to force the whole of nature to adapt to our desires, we must relearn to adapt our species to the ever-present and powerful forces of a rewilding earth. 
 
The Age of Resilience explores cutting-edge scientific discoveries about human nature and the evolution of life on Earth. The shift from geopolitics to biosphere politics, globalization to glocalization, corporatism to shared commons, the ascendance of bioregional governance, the extension of representative democracy to make room for citizens’ assemblies and distributed peerocracy, and the rise of biophilia consciousness are among the new movements and forces that will help define and shape the coming years. 
 
In The Age of Resilience, Jeremy Rifkin—a world-renowned expert and global governmental advisor on the impact of technological changes on human life and the environment—has written the defining work on the impact of climate change on the way humans organize their lives. 

Back to the Moon: The Next Giant Leap for Humankind by Joseph Silk, Princeton University Press (EPP) 

Just over half a century since Neil Armstrong first stepped foot on the lunar surface, a new space race to the Moon is well underway and rapidly gaining momentum. Laying out a vision for the next fifty years, Back to the Moon is astrophysicist Joseph Silk’s persuasive and impassioned case for putting scientific discovery at the forefront of lunar exploration. 
 
The Moon offers opportunities beyond our wildest imaginings, and plans to return are rapidly gaining momentum around the world. NASA aims to build a habitable orbiting space station to coordinate lunar development and exploration, while European and Chinese space agencies are planning lunar villages and the mining of precious resources dwindling here on Earth. Powerful international and commercial interests are driving the race to revisit the Moon, but lunar infrastructures could also open breathtaking vistas onto the cosmos. Silk describes how the colonization of the Moon could usher in a thrilling new age of scientific exploration, and lays out what the next fifty years of lunar science might look like. With lunar telescopes of unprecedented size situated in permanently dark polar craters and on the far side of the Moon, we could finally be poised to answer some of the most profound questions confronting humankind, including whether we are alone in the Universe and what our cosmic origins are. 
 
Addressing both the daunting challenges and the immense promise of lunar exploration and exploitation, Back to the Moon reveals how prioritizing science, and in particular lunar astronomy, will enable us to address the deepest cosmic mysteries. 

Home Is the Road: Wandering the Land, Shaping the Spirit by Diane Glancy, Broadleaf Books (GMC) 

From the award-winning Native American literary writer Diane Glancy comes a book about travel, belonging, and home. Travel is not merely a means to bring us from one location to another. "My sense of place is in the moving," Glancy writes. For her the road is home--its own satisfying destination. But the road also makes demands on us: asking us to be willing to explore the incomprehensible parts of the landscapes we inhabit and pass through--as well as to, ultimately, let them blur as they go by. This, Glancy says, is home. 

Glancy teases out the lessons of the road that are never easy to define, grappling with her own: childhood's puzzle pieces of her Cherokee heritage and a fraught but still compelling vision of Christianity. As she clocks an inordinate amount of driving, as she experiments with literary forms, she looks to what the land has held for centuries, before the roads were ever there. 

This, ultimately, is a book about land, tradition, religion, questions and the puzzle pieces none of us can put together quite right. It's a book about peripheral vision, conflicting narratives, and a longing for travel. 

Reverse Mentoring: Removing Barriers and Building Belonging in the Workplace by Patrice Gordon, Hachette Go (JAG) 

Most organizations today strive for goals such as employee diversity, inclusive leadership, and younger and fresher ideas. But how do we get there? 
 
In her trailblazing Reverse Mentorship program, world-renowned executive coach and personal development advocate Patrice Gordon creates a safe and engaging culture by having senior leaders learn from junior employees. While typical mentoring programs arrange for a senior manager to teach the more junior employee, Reverse Mentoring is the opposite: it’s all about a leader leaning into their vulnerability, forming a relationship with an underrepresented employee, and amplifying the voice of marginalized people within the company. 
 
Reverse Mentoring offers various tips to make reverse mentorship work. Gordon explores the power of uncomfortable and awkward moments becoming key points of transformation when people have to pause, reflect and assess their past behaviors and current assumptions which are at odds with the topic at hand. She ultimately reveals how bringing more humanity into our organizations allows us to see one another and ourselves in a radically new light.