November 12, 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: The Apothecary's Wife: The Hidden History of Medicine and How It Became a Commodity by Karen Bloom Gevirtz, University of California Press

The running joke in Europe for centuries was that anyone in a hurry to die should call the doctor. As far back as ancient Greece, physicians were notorious for administering painful and often fatal treatments—and charging for the privilege. For the most effective treatment, the ill and injured went to the women in their lives. This system lasted hundreds of years. It was gone in less than a century.

Contrary to the familiar story, medication did not improve during the Scientific Revolution. Yet somehow, between 1650 and 1740, the domestic female and the physician switched places in the cultural consciousness: she became the ineffective, potentially dangerous quack, he the knowledgeable, trustworthy expert. The professionals normalized the idea of paying them for what people already got at home without charge, laying the foundation for Big Pharma and today’s global for-profit medication system.

A revelatory history of medicine, The Apothecary’s Wife challenges the myths of the triumph of science and instead uncovers the fascinating truth. Drawing on a vast body of archival material, Karen Bloom Gevirtz depicts the extraordinary cast of characters who brought about this transformation. She also explores domestic medicine’s values in responses to modern health crises, such as the eradication of smallpox, and what benefits we can learn from these events.

Gabbi’s pick: Beyond Equality: Women Leaders in Higher Education by Savanah N. Landerholm, Fortress Press

This phenomenological study of the experiences of women leaders in higher education emphasizes that the pursuit of gender equity has not delivered the anticipated cultural shifts for women. The lenses of structure, culture, and nurture serve as a conceptual framework to better understand the expectations and experiences of women leaders. Women in this study face intersectional identities (like race and gender but also as a working woman and a mother). Three archetypes of women's leadership orientation emerged from the study of women academic leaders' experiences: Passers, Pushers, and Peacekeepers. The three archetypes provide helpful distinction to the leadership orientations of women. Yet across all three archetypes, women endure and ultimately succeed by exercising responsive agency--rejecting structural and relational passivity, embracing the nuances of the environment, and capitalizing on the leader's strengths. As an alternative to equality, this book proposes responsive agency--an embodied theological response to gender oppression--as a way forward for women looking to advance in the workplace.

The analysis into the three profiles reveals that equality is simply not enough. Each of the chapters shows equality to be necessary but insufficient, and invites women academics pursuing leadership to embrace responsive agency.

Sally’s pick: Never Lead Alone: 10 Shifts from Leadership to Teamship by Keith Ferrazzi, Harper Business

The world’s best teams don’t win because of leadership alone. They win because of teamship. Yet when it comes to success, it is leaders who are lauded; too little attention is given to the transformation of the team itself.

We’ve all but ignored how to extract billions of dollars of shareholder value from the interdependency of talent in teams, Keith Ferrazzi argues. Upgrading teams is one of the least curated and under-leveraged opportunities for success. It is time to focus on teamship.

But first we must reinvent our understanding of what teamship is and how it functions in a work world that is significantly more volatile, networked, hybrid, diverse, and inclusive than even a decade ago. New thinking about the false and debilitative assumptions that drive teams to underperform is overdue. We need to capture the bold spirit of co-creation and human ingenuity that drives teams like Astro Teller’s Google X to strive for and sustain innovation.

In Never Lead Alone, Ferrazzi shares the approach that drives his coaching practice—the playbook he has used to reboot team performance at major brands, including Mastercard, Intel, Starbucks, and General Motors, along with fast-growth unicorns like MongoDB, and Scopley and governments like Bhutan and NGOs like the World Bank.

Drawing on more than two decades of deep study with colleagues from the Ferrazzi Greenlight Research Institute, he identifies ten key shifts to unlock the potential of any team, accompanied with 20 High Return Practices that quickly turn each shift into a new team habit. Using the tools that have successfully rebooted team performance at Fortune 500 companies and unicorn brands, Never Lead Alone can help any organization experience innovation and exponential growth.

Dylan's pick: The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World...: Essays by David Graeber, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

"The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently," wrote David Graeber. A renowned anthropologist, activist, and author of such classic books as Debt and the breakout New York Times bestseller The Dawn of Everything (with David Wengrow), Graeber was as well-known for his sharp, lively essays as he was for his iconic role in the Occupy movement and his paradigm-shifting tomes.

There are converging political, economic, and ecological crises, and yet our politics is dominated by either business as usual or nostalgia for a mythical past. Graeber was one of the few who dared to imagine a new understanding of the past and a liberatory vision of the future. In essays published over three decades and ranging across the biggest issues of our time—inequality, technology, the identity of “the West,” democracy, art, power, anger, mutual aid, and protest—he challenges the old assumptions about political life. Driven by a bold imagination and a passionate commitment to human freedom, he offers hope that our world can be different.

The incisive, playful, and urgent essays collected in The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World . . . , edited and with an introduction by Nika Dubrovksy and with a foreword by Rebecca Solnit, are a profound reminder of Graeber’s enduring significance as an iconic thinker.