February 11, 2025

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.)

Here are our choices:

Gabbi’s pick: Fewer Rules, Better People: The Case for Discretion by Barry Lam, W.W. Norton & Company

Wherever there’s a rule, there is someone with the power to apply or ignore it—or add to it, in the interest of justice. From enforcing chores to issuing life sentences, decision-makers deliver flawed and sometimes arbitrary outcomes. But is their use of discretion good or bad overall? As a society, should we seek to minimize or maximize discretion, with all its potential for bias and other kinds of human error?

Reframing our understanding of justice and ethics, philosopher Barry Lam argues that while use of discretion—whether by a sports referee, a parent, a police officer, or a judge—can never be perfect, removing it has even more problematic effects. Mandatory arrests and sentencing laws have not eliminated bias, but have corrupted the courtroom, institutionalized lying, and brought about even more unjust and arbitrary results. Fewer Rules, Better People is a bold, riveting treatise that sheds new light on political debates about law and justice while aiming to prepare us for the imminent threat of more “perfect,” discretion-less rule enforcement by AI.

Jasmine’s pick: Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism by Eve L. Ewing, One World

“When I teach courses on education policy and race, I always begin on the first day of class by asking my students a simple question: What is the purpose of schools?” 

If all children could just get an education, the logic goes, they would have the same opportunities later in life. But this historical tour-de-force makes it clear that the opposite is true: the educational system has played an instrumental role in creating racial hierarchies, preparing children to expect unequal treatment throughout their lives.

In Original Sins, Ewing demonstrates that schools were designed to propagate the idea of white intellectual superiority, to "civilize" Native students and to prepare Black students for menial labor. Schools were not an afterthought for the "founding fathers"; they were envisioned by Thomas Jefferson to fortify the country's racial hierarchy. And while those dynamics are less overt now than they were in centuries past, Ewing shows that they persist in a curriculum that continues to minimize the horrors of American history. Ewing argues that the most insidious aspects of the system are under the radar: standardized testing, tracking, school discipline, and access to resources.

By demonstrating that it's in the DNA of American schools to serve as an effective, and under-acknowledged, mechanism maintaining inequality in this country today, Ewing makes the case that there should be a profound re-evaluation of what schools are supposed to do, and for whom. This book will change the way people understand the place they send their children for eight hours a day.

Sally’s pick: The Social Biome: How Everyday Communication Connects and Shapes Us by Andy J. Merolla and Jeffrey A. Hall, Yale University Press

We spend much of our waking lives communicating with others. How does each moment of interaction shape not only our relationships but also our worldviews? And how can we create moments of connection that improve our health and well-being, particularly in a world in which people are feeling increasingly isolated?

Drawing from their extensive research, Andy J. Merolla and Jeffrey A. Hall establish a new way to think about our relational life: as existing within “social biomes”—complex ecosystems of moments of interaction with others. Each interaction we have, no matter how unimportant or mundane it might seem, is a building block of our identities and beliefs. Consequently, the choices we make about how we interact and who we interact with—and whether we interact at all—matter more than we might know. Merolla and Hall offer a sympathetic, practical guide to our vital yet complicated social lives and propose realistic ways to embrace and enhance connection and hope.

Dylan’s pick: The Stained Glass Window: A Family History as the American Story, 1790-1958 by David Levering Lewis, Penguin Press 

Sitting beneath a stained glass window dedicated to his grandmother in the Atlanta church where his family had prayed for generations, preeminent American historian David Levering Lewis was struck by the great lacunae in what he could know about his own ancestors. He vowed to excavate their past and tell their story.

There is no singular American story. Yet the Lewis family contains many defining ones. David Levering Lewis’s lineage leads him to the Kings and Belvinses, two white slaveholding families in Georgia; to the Bells, a free persons of color slaveholding family in South Carolina; and to the Lewises, an up-from-slavery black family in Georgia.

Lewis’s father, John Henry Lewis Sr., set Lewis on the path he pursues, introducing him to W. E. B. Du Bois and living by example as Thurgood Marshall’s collaborator in a key civil rights case in Little Rock. In The Stained Glass Window, Lewis reckons with his legacy in full, facing his ancestors and all that was lost, all the doors that were closed to them.

In this country, the bonds of kinship and the horrific fetters of slavery are bound up together. The fight for equity, the loud echoes of the antebellum period in our present, and narratives of exceptionalism are ever with us; in these pages, so, too, are the voices of Clarissa, Isaac, Hattie, Alice, and John. They shaped this nation, and their heir David Levering Lewis's chronicle of the antebellum project and the subsequent era of marginalization and resistance will transform our understanding of it.