April 2, 2024

Finding the right book at the right time can transform your life or your organization. We help you discover your next great read by showcasing four recently released titles each week.

These books are handpicked 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:

Gabbi’s pick: I Cheerfully Refuse by Leif Enger, Atlantic Monthly Press

A storyteller “of great humanity and huge heart” (Minneapolis Star Tribune), Leif Enger debuted in the literary world with Peace Like a River which sold over a million copies and captured readers’ hearts around the globe. Now comes a new milestone in this boldly imaginative author’s accomplished, resonant body of work. Set in a not-too-distant America, I Cheerfully Refuse is the tale of a bereaved and pursued musician embarking under sail on a sentient Lake Superior in search of his departed, deeply beloved, bookselling wife. Rainy, an endearing bear of an Orphean narrator, seeks refuge in the harbors, fogs and remote islands of the inland sea. Encountering lunatic storms and rising corpses from the warming depths, Rainy finds on land an increasingly desperate and illiterate people, a malignant billionaire ruling class, crumbled infrastructure and a lawless society. Amidst the Gulliver-like challenges of life at sea and no safe landings, Rainy is lifted by physical beauty, surprising humor, generous strangers, and an unexpected companion in a young girl who comes aboard. And as his innate guileless nature begins to make an inadvertent rebel of him, Rainy’s private quest for the love of his life grows into something wider and wilder, sweeping up friends and foes alike in his strengthening wake.

I Cheerfully Refuse epitomizes the “musical, sometimes magical and deeply satisfying kind of storytelling” (Los Angeles Times) for which Leif Enger is cherished. A rollicking narrative in the most evocative of settings, this latest novel is a symphony against despair and a rallying cry for the future.

Dylan’s pick: The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins by Stefanos Geroulanos, Liveright

Books about the origins of humanity dominate bestseller lists, while national newspapers present breathless accounts of new archaeological findings and speculate about what those findings tell us about our earliest ancestors. We are obsessed with prehistory—and, in this respect, our current era is no different from any other in the last three hundred years. In this coruscating work, acclaimed historian Stefanos Geroulanos demonstrates how claims about the earliest humans not only shaped Western intellectual culture, but gave rise to our modern world.

The very idea that there was a human past before recorded history only emerged with the Enlightenment, when European thinkers began to reject faith-based notions of humanity and history in favor of supposedly more empirical ideas about the world. From the “state of nature” and Romantic notions of virtuous German barbarians to theories about Neanderthals, killer apes, and a matriarchal paradise where women ruled, Geroulanos captures the sheer variety and strangeness of the ideas that animated many of the major thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Charles Darwin, and Karl Marx. Yet as Geroulanos shows, such ideas became, for the most part, the ideological foundations of repressive regimes and globe-spanning empires. Deeming other peoples “savages” allowed for guilt-free violence against them; notions of “killer apes” who were our evolutionary predecessors made war seem natural. The emergence of modern science only accelerated the West’s imperialism. The Nazi obsession with race was rooted in archaeological claims about prehistoric IndoGermans; the idea that colonialized peoples could be “bombed back to the Stone Age” was made possible by the technology of flight and the anthropological idea that civilization advanced in stages.

As Geroulanos argues, accounts of prehistory tell us more about the moment when they are proposed than about the deep past—and if we hope to start improving our future, we would be better off setting aside the search for how it all started. A necessary, timely, indelible account of how the quest for understanding the origins of humanity became the handmaiden of war and empire, The Invention of Prehistory will forever change how we think about the deep past.

Sally’s pick: We Loved It All: A Memory of Life by Lydia Millet, W. W. Norton & Company

Across more than a dozen acclaimed works of fiction, readers have become intimate with Lydia Millet’s distinctive voice and sly wit. We Loved It All, her first nonfiction book, combines the precision of fact with the power of narrative to evoke our enmeshment with the more-than-human world.

Emerging from Millet’s quarter century of wildlife and climate advocacy, We Loved it All marries scenes from her life with moments of nearness to “the others”— the animals and plants with whom we share the earth. Accounts of fears and failures, jobs and friendships, childhood and motherhood are interspersed with exquisite accounts of nonhumans and arresting meditations on the power of story to shape the future.

Seeking to understand why we immerse ourselves in the domestic and immediate, turning away from more sweeping views, she examines how grand cultural myths can deny our longing for the company of nature and deprive us of its charisma and inspiration. In a thrilling distillation of experience and emotion, she evinces the familiar sense of feeling both well-meaning and powerless—a creature subject to forces that are baffling in their immensity. The fear and grief of extinction and climate change, Millet suggests, are forms of love that might be turned to resistance.

We Loved It All shimmers with curiosity and laconic humor yet addresses with reverence the most urgent crises of our day. An incantatory, bewitching devotional to the vast and precious bestiary of the earth, it asks that we extend to other living beings the protection they deserve—the simple grace of continued existence.

Jasmine’s pick: You Can't Market Manure at Lunchtime: And Other Lessons from the Food Industry for Creating a More Sustainable Company by Maisie Ganzler, Harvard Business Review Press

Did the title of this book get your attention? Good. Because as silly as it is, the idea behind it is serious, earnest, and authentic: you can't become a sustainable operation if you're doing the right things in the wrong place or at the wrong time.

Many businesses are in the dark about how to actually do better for the planet and the people in their company and their supply chain while also growing their margin. Some believe it can't be done. But it can. Maisie Ganzler has done it, and now she's going to show you how to build sustainability into your business, too. Her five big lessons come from three decades of successes and failures leading a $1.7 billion corporation toward a more sustainable future. Join Ganzler as she takes you to pig farms and boardrooms, factories and farmers' markets, teaching you not only how to operate more sustainably but also how to get the credit you deserve for doing it.

No matter what industry you're in, Ganzler's stories from the front lines in the food business will inspire and educate you on what it takes to get sustainability right.