July 16, 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:

Jasmine’s pick: Ruin Their Crops on the Ground: The Politics of Food in the United States, from the Trail of Tears to School Lunch by Andrea Freeman, Metropolitan Books

In 1789, to subjugate Indigenous tribes, George Washington ordered his troops to “ruin their crops on the ground and prevent them planting more.” Destroying the sources of food is just one way that the United States has used nourishment as a political tool. To prevent enslaved people from escaping or rising up, enslavers restricted their consumption, providing only the least desirable and nutritious foods. Since the Great Depression, school lunches have served as dumping grounds for unwanted agricultural surpluses.

From frybread to government cheese, Ruin Their Crops on the Ground draws on fifteen years of research to argue that American food law and policy have historically been used to create and maintain racial and cultural inequality. In an epic, sweeping account, Andrea Freeman, who pioneered the term "food oppression," moves from missions to Americanize immigrant food culture to the commodities supplied to Native reservations to USDA nutrition programs to milk as symbol of white nationalism. She traces the long-standing alliances between Washington and the food and agricultural industries that have produced gaping racial health disparities. And she shows how these practices continue to this day, in the form of marketing for unhealthy subsidized goods that target communities of color, causing diabetes, high blood pressure, and even premature death.

Marrying Michael Pollan’s insights into food psychology with Michelle Alexander’s new understanding of race in the United States, Ruin Their Crops on the Ground is a groundbreaking addition to the history and politics of food. It will permanently upend the notion that we freely and equally choose what we put on our plates.

Gabbi’s pick: Shy by Design: 12 Timeless Principles to Quietly Stand Out by Michael Thompson, Rowman & Littlefield

In Shy by Design, Michael Thompson shares his inspiring journey of moving from being riddled with self-doubt due to his shyness and debilitating stutter to becoming a sought-after career coach, university leadership lecturer, and strategic communication advisor for top global business executives and entrepreneurs.

Packed with actionable strategies and engaging stories, this transformative book will help you embrace the blessing of being underestimated, revolutionize your relationships, and amplify your impact without sacrificing your shy nature.

Thompson’s 12 principles teach you to: 

• Grow your confidence and strengthen communication skills on your own terms and at your own pace.
• Create meaningful connections and foster a close-knit community that supports personal growth.
• Lead with quiet conviction that uplifts others on the climb toward success. 

The author’s story of navigating the often loud world of sales and communication – while staying true to his shy way of being – will inspire you to embrace your unique strengths and see your “perceived” weaknesses through a more empowered lens. Whether you are a recent graduate, a seasoned executive, or someone seeking personal growth, Shy by Design will provide you with the motivation and action steps to embrace shyness as the superpower that it is.

Dylan’s pick: What the Wild Sea Can Be: The Future of the World’s Ocean by Helen Scales, Atlantic Monthly Press

No matter where we live, “we are all ocean people,” Helen Scales emphatically observes in her bracing yet hopeful exploration of the future of the ocean. Beginning with its fascinating deep history, Scales links past to present to show how the prehistoric ocean ecology was already working in ways similar to the ocean of today. In elegant, evocative prose, she takes readers into the realms of animals that epitomize today’s increasingly challenging conditions. Ocean life everywhere is on the move as seas warm, and warm waters are an existential threat to emperor penguins, whose mating grounds in Antarctica are collapsing. Shark populations—critical to balanced ecosystems—have shrunk by 71 per cent since the 1970s, largely the result of massive and oft-unregulated industrial fishing. Orcas—the apex predators—have also drastically declined, victims of toxic chemicals and plastics with long half-lives that disrupt the immune system and the ability to breed.

Yet despite these threats, many hopeful signs remain. Increasing numbers of no-fish zones around the world are restoring once-diminishing populations. Amazing seagrass meadows and giant kelp forests rivaling those on land are being regenerated and expanded. They may be our best defense against the storm surges caused by global warming, while efforts to reengineer coral reefs for a warmer world are growing.

Offering innovative ideas for protecting coastlines and cleaning the toxic seas, Scales insists we need more ethical and sustainable fisheries and must prevent the other existential threat of deep-sea mining, which could significantly alter life on earth. Inspiring us all to maintain a sense of awe and wonder at the majesty beneath the waves, she urges us to fight for the better future that still exists for the Anthropocene ocean.

Sally’s pick: Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Math Behind Modern AI by Anil Ananthaswamy, Dutton

Machine learning systems are making life-altering decisions for us: approving mortgage loans, determining whether a tumor is cancerous, or deciding whether someone gets bail. They now influence discoveries in chemistry, biology and physics -- the study of genomes, extra-solar planets, even the intricacies of quantum systems.

We are living through a revolution in artificial intelligence that is not slowing down. This major shift is based on simple mathematics, some of which goes back centuries: linear algebra and calculus, the stuff of eighteenth-century mathematics. Indeed by the mid-1850s, a lot of the groundwork was all done. It took the development of computer science and the kindling of 1990s computer chips designed for video games to ignite the explosion of AI that we see today. In this enlightening book, Anil Ananthaswamy explains the fundamental maths behind AI, which suggests that the basics of natural and artificial intelligence might follow the same mathematical rules.

As Ananthaswamy resonantly concludes, to make the most of our most wondrous technologies we need to understand their profound limitations, the clues to which lie in the math that makes AI possible.