New Releases | July 11, 2023

Excellent new books are brought into the world every single week. Here at Porchlight, we track them all and elevate four new releases we are excited about as they hit bookstore shelves on Tuesday morning.

The books are chosen by Porchlight's Managing Director, Sally Haldorson, and the marketing team: Dylan Schleicher, Gabbi Cisneros, and Jasmine Gonzalez. (Book descriptions are provided by the publisher unless otherwise noted.) This week, our choices are:

Sally’s pick: Credible: The Power of Expert Leaders by Amanda Goodall, PublicAffairs 

Amanda Goodall has spent a decade researching what makes organizations tick, everywhere from the business world to hospitals and healthcare systems, football and basketball teams, and Formula 1 organizations. By debunking the cult of managerialism (the notion that smart people can run anything and the emphasis on leadership personality), Goodall reshapes our understanding of bosses and the traits necessary for organizational success. She identifies the key characteristics of expert leaders and provides a real and grossly underappreciated model for career success: "go deep into a business, work hard, pay attention, and know your stuff." Those who run hospitals and healthcare systems, for example, should be physicians with deep clinical expertise, not financiers or people parachuted in from other industries. Those who run school systems and universities need to understand from experience the stress of balancing teaching, research, and student welfare 
 
Credible demonstrates categorically that expertise matters more than ever and that we need our leaders to be experts with a deep, understanding of their organizations from many years spent learning the business and working their way up the ladder. The people who work for them are happier because they feel better understood and the organizations they lead are more successful. 

Gabbi’s pick: The Holy Days of Gregorio Pasos by Rodrigo Restrepo Montoya, Two Dollar Radio 

As Gregorio recovers from a soccer injury, he relives a decisive period of his life when he is eighteen and adrift. His parents are divorcing, his sister is estranged, and his poor goalkeeping has just cost his soccer team their most important game of the season. As a graduation present, Gregorio’s defiant uncle Nico takes him to Colombia, where he is introduced to old friends, family memories, and a culture ailing after years of conflict and colonization. When they return, Gregorio follows in his uncle’s footsteps and pursues employment at an art museum in Washington, D.C., where he moves into the basement of a townhouse owned by Magdalena, a Basque exile he befriends. As the year wends on and anti-immigrant rhetoric reaches an apex, Gregorio notes the disparities in his community while struggling to define his own identity and direction. Gregorio joins his friend Raúl’s soccer team, resuming his role as goalkeeper, seeking purpose and redemption. 
 
The Holy Days of Gregorio Pasos is a compassionate story of benevolence, memory, and preservation that considers what has been lost, what must never be forgotten, and our collective responsibility to one another. Poetic and thoughtful, Rodrigo Restrepo Montoya has given us an unforgettable voice in Gregorio Pasos: astute, charming, and illuminating. 

Dylan’s pick: Life on Other Planets: A Memoir of Finding My Place in the Universe by Aomawa Shields, PhD, Viking 

As a kid, Aomawa Shields was always bumping into things, her neck craned up at the sky, dreaming of becoming an astronaut. A year into an astrophysics PhD program, plagued by self-doubt and discouraged by a white male professor who suggested that she—a young Black woman who also loved fashion, makeup, and the arts—didn’t belong, she left astronomy and pursued acting professionally for a decade, before a day job working for NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope drew her back to the stars. She was the oldest and the only Black student in her PhD cohort. This time, no professor, and no voice in her own head, would stop her. Now an astronomer and astrobiologist at the top of her field, Dr. Shields studies the universe outside our Solar System, researching and uncovering the planets circling distant stars with just the right conditions that could support life—while also using her theater education to communicate the wonder and magic of the universe with those of us here on Earth. But it’s been a journey as winding and complex as the physics she has mastered. 
 
Life on Other Planets is a journey of discovery on this world and on others, a story of creating a life that makes space for joy, love, and wonder while being driven by one of our biggest questions: Is anybody else out there? It is about the possibility of living between multiple worlds and not choosing—but instead charting a new path entirely. 

Jasmine’s pick: Sana, Sana: Latinx Pain and Radical Visions for Healing and Justice edited by David Luis Glisch-Sánchez, Nic Rodriguez-Villafañe, Common Notions 

Sana, Sana is a witness to the multiple wounds etched into the landscape of Latinx experience and a testimonial to community efforts to heal them. A multi-genre anthology rooted in the deep desire to not only acknowledge and name the various forms of pain and trauma Latinx people experience regularly, but to do so in the service of imagining new futures and ways of being that prioritize healing and justice not just for Latinx people, but for Queer BIPOC communities and, ultimately, for all people.  

The book’s vision and understanding of Latinidad is broad and expansive. It centers Black, Indigenous, Queer, Trans, and Feminist Latinidades. By advancing an unapologetically radical antiracist, anticapitalist, feminist, and queer politic Sana, Sana holds creative and defiant space for identifying economic, social, political, emotional, and spiritual strategies to forge individual and collective healing and justice. 

WHAT WE'VE BEEN READING AT HOME

"I started Sam by Allegra Goodman because I really love coming-of-age stories. It’s fascinating and occasionally heartbreaking to see how serious themes like broken/breaking families and mental health are perceived from a child’s perspective. It’s a simply written book but feels very real."

—Gabbi Cisneros, Creative Director