December 10, 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.

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:

Dylan’s pick: The Afterlife is Letting Go by Brandon Shimoda, City Lights Publishing 

In a series of reflective, multi-layered, sometimes multi-voiced essays, poet Brandon Shimoda explores the “afterlife” of the U.S. government’s forced removal and mass incarceration of Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans during WWII, excavating the ways these events continue to resonate today. What emerges is a panoramic, yet intimate portrait of intergenerational trauma and healing. 

Informed by personal/familial history, years of research and travel, including visits to museums, memorials and the ruins of incarceration sites, these essays take us on both a physical and a metaphysical journey. What becomes increasingly clear are the infinite connections between the treatment of Japanese Americans and other forms of oppression, criminalization, dispossession, and state violence enacted by the United States, past, present, and ongoing.

Jasmine’s pick: Custodians of Wonder: Ancient Customs, Profound Traditions, and the Last People Keeping Them Alive by Eliot Stein, St. Martin’s Press 

Eliot Stein has traveled the globe in search of remarkable people who are preserving some of our most extraordinary cultural rites. In Custodians of Wonder: Ancient Customs, Profound Traditions, and the Last People Keeping Them Alive, Stein introduces readers to a man saving the secret ingredient in Japan's 700-year-old original soy sauce recipe. In Italy, he learns how to make the world's rarest pasta from one of the only women alive who knows how to make it. And in India, he discovers a family rumored to make a mysterious metal mirror believed to reveal your truest self. From shadowing Scandinavia's last night watchman to meeting a 27th-generation West African griot to tracking down Cuba's last official cigar factory “readers” more than a century after they spearheaded the fight for Cuban independence, Stein uncovers an almost lost world.

Climbing through Peru’s southern highlands, he encounters the last Inca bridge master who rebuilds a grass-woven bridge every year from the fabled Inca Road System. He befriends a British beekeeper who maintains a touching custom of "telling the bees" important news of the day. And he crunches through a German forest to find the official mailman of the only tree in the world with its own address – to which countless people from across the world have written in hopes of finding love. These are just some of the last custodians preserving age-old rites on the brink of disappearance against all odds. Let Eliot Stein introduce you to all of them.

Sally’s pick: The Guru Gap: How America’s Financial Gurus Are Leading You Astray, and How to Get Back on Track by David McKnight, Matt Holt 

Gurus like Dave Ramsey, Suze Orman, and others have amassed followers by the millions because of their paint-by-the-numbers financial strategies that are easy to digest and implement. And while they have helped many Americans eliminate debt and take their first steps toward financial freedom, their dumbed-down financial advice is inadequate and incomplete for those looking to maximize their savings.

In fact, disciplined investors who have saved well and played by the rules risk losing hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of their retirement journey by heeding this outdated, one-size-fits-all advice.

In The Guru Gap, David McKnight, bestselling author of The Power of Zero, closes the gap between what mainstream media personalities advise and the sophisticated, math-based approach your retirement plan requires. This strategy includes: 

• The most cost-efficient way to ensure you never outlive your money 

• A step-by-step plan to shield your savings from the threat of future tax increases 

• Insight on how to shield yourself from the risks that threaten to derail your retirement plan 

This book is your guide to understanding the shortfalls of guru-based retirement strategies so you can bridge the advice gap that stands between you and a sustainable financial future.

Gabbi’s pick: Reversing Deforestation: How Market Forces and Local Ownership Are Saving Forests in Latin America by Brent Sohngen and Douglas Southgate, Stanford University Press 

Dire reports of surging deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon appear often in international headlines, with commentators decrying the destruction of tree-covered habitats as an act of environmental vandalism. Although forest losses are alarming, broader trends are bending in the direction of forest recovery. In this book, Brent Sohngen and Douglas Southgate address the long-term recovery of forests in Latin America. The authors synthesize trends in demography, agricultural development, and technological change, and argue that slower population growth and increasing crop and tree yields—in conjunction with protecting local ownership of natural resources—have encouraged forest transition. This book explores how market forces, ownership arrangements, and the enforcement of property rights have influenced this shift from net deforestation to net afforestation. 

Forest transitions have happened before, such as the recovery of tree-covered habitats in Europe and the United States. Signs of a similar transformation in land use are now present in Latin America. Ending deforestation requires a strengthening of forest dwellers' property rights while ensuring that biodiversity conservation is no longer treated as a value-less externality. The resulting forest landscape, actively managed for ecosystem services, will be more resilient, as is needed to overcome climate change.