October 8, 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:

Sally’s pick: Dear Unknown Friend: The Remarkable Correspondence between American and Soviet Women by Alexis Peri, Harvard University Press

In a compelling new perspective on the early Cold War, prizewinning historian Alexis Peri explores correspondence between American and Soviet women begun in the last years of World War II and continuing into the 1950s. Previously unexamined, the women’s letters movingly demonstrate the power of the personal, as the pen pals engaged in a “diplomacy of the heart” that led them to question why their countries were so divided.

Both Soviet and American women faced a patriarchal backlash after World War II that marginalized them professionally and politically. The pen pals discussed common challenges they faced, such as unequal pay and the difficulties of balancing motherhood with a career. Each side evinced curiosity about the other’s world, asking questions about family and marriage, work conditions, educational opportunities, and religion. The women advocated peace and cooperation but at times disagreed strongly over social and economic issues, such as racial segregation in the United States and mandatory labor in the Soviet Union. At first both governments saw no risk in the communications, as women were presumed to have little influence and no knowledge of state secrets, but eventually Cold War paranoia set in. Amid the Red Scare, the House Un-American Activities Committee even accused some of the American women of being communist agents.

A rare and poignant tale, Dear Unknown Friend offers a glimpse of the Cold War through the perspectives of women who tried to move beyond the label of “enemy” and understand, even befriend, people across increasingly bitter political divides.

Jasmine’s pick: Get What's Yours for Medicare - Revised and Updated: Maximize Your Coverage, Minimize Your Costs by Philip Moeller, Simon & Schuster

Medicare is the primary insurance plan for 70 million retired and disabled Americans. Understanding how Medicare works is essential to their health and well-being. However, Medicare has become more complicated—and more confusing. Get What’s Yours for Medicare is the authoritative consumer Medicare guide. It includes detailed chapters on when to enroll in Medicare, how to evaluate the often-bewildering choice of Medicare insurance plans, and, most importantly, how to use Medicare to find high-quality, affordable health care. The book also explains important upcoming changes to Medicare so consumers will know what to expect.

Medicare in 2024 is far different from the program described in the first edition of Get What’s Yours. The first part of this book discusses Medicare policies that affect the medical care you need now. The second part examines how Medicare is changing. These changes are part of the shift toward what is called managed care, which includes private Medicare Advantage plans. The newly updated Get What’s Yours for Medicare explains managed care in detail to clarify any questions about these programs.

Get What’s Yours for Medicare is the definitive guide to help you get the most out of your healthcare and ultimately alleviate the stress surrounding the complicated world of Medicare.

Gabbi’s pick: Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts by Oliver Burkeman, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Meditations for Mortals takes us on a liberating, invigorating journey toward a more meaningful life—a journey that begins not with fantasies of the ideal existence but with the reality in which we actually find ourselves. It brings themes at the heart of Oliver Burkeman’s bestselling Four Thousand Weeks—our finite time, the lure of distraction, the productivity trap—into our daily lives. Looking beyond the challenges of time management to the most fundamental questions about how to live, he offers here a powerful new way to take action on what counts: a guiding philosophy of life that he calls “imperfectionism.”

How can we embrace our nonnegotiable limitations? Or make good decisions when there’s always too much to do? How to shed the illusion that life will really begin as soon as we can “get on top of everything”?

Reflecting on quotations drawn from philosophy, religion, literature, psychology, and self-help, Burkeman explores a combination of practical tools and daily shifts in perspective. The result is a life-enhancing and surprising challenge to much familiar advice—and a profound yet entertaining crash course in living more fully. Designed either as a four-week “retreat of the mind” or to be devoured in one or two sittings, Meditations for Mortals will be a source of solace and inspiration and an aid to a saner, freer, and more enchantment-filled life. In our anxiety-inducing times, it is rich in truths we have never needed more.

Dylan’s pick: Mindless: The Human Condition in the Machine Age by Robert Skidelsky, Other Press

Faith in technological fixes for our problems is waning. Automation, which promised relief from toil, has reactivated the long-standing fear of job redundancy. Information technology, meant to liberate us from traditional authority, is placing unprecedented powers of surveillance and control in the hands of a purely secular Big Brother. And for the first time, artificial intelligence threatens anthropogenic disaster—disaster caused by our own activities. Scientists join imaginative writers in warning us of the fate of Icarus, whose wings melted because he flew too close to the sun.

This book tells the story of our fractured relationship with machines from humanity’s first tools down to the present and into the future. It raises the crucial question of why some parts of the world developed a “machine civilization” and not others, and traces the interactions between capitalism and technology, and between science and religion, in the making of the modern world.

Taking in the peaks of philosophy and triumphs of science, the foundation of economics and speculations of fiction, Robert Skidelsky embarks on a bold intellectual journey through the evolution of our understanding of technology and what this means for our lives and politics.