January 7, 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:

Sally’s pick: 99% Perspiration: A New Working History of the American Way of Life by Adam Chandler, Pantheon

“Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” This phrase, arguably Thomas Edison’s most famous quote, has been drilled into the minds of generations of Americans. A fairly straightforward iteration of the idea that innovation, discovery, and ingenuity are the result of drive and grit above all, it has also come to represent much darker myths: that hard work always leads to success and that achievement is the product of individuals and not communities. In this model, those who come out on top are there because they earned it, and everyone else needs to buckle down, glove up, and, maybe one day, they’ll get there too.

As the wealth gap widens, communities crumble, and Americans work more for less, Adam Chandler raises the question: What happens when perspiration isn’t enough? To answer it, he crisscrosses the country interviewing mayors, teachers, generals, pastors, construction workers, and entrepreneurs, to reveal just how untenable relying on “perspiration” as a strategy has truly become. He also delves into America’s past to reveal how our government, education system, and culture at large have woven the idea of meritocracy deep into the fabric of American society and how some of history’s most famous so-called bootstrappers really built their wealth. From George Washington to Seattle, Washington, Jay Gatsby to Bill Gates, 99% Perspiration unpacks the misguided obsession with hard work that has come to define both the American dream and nightmare, offering insight into how we got here and hope for where we may go.

Gabbi’s pick: Beyond Anxiety: Curiosity, Creativity, and Finding Your Life's Purpose by Martha Beck, The Open Field

We live in an epidemic of anxiety. Most of us assume that the key to overcoming it is to think our way out. And for a while it works. But there is always something that sends us back into the anxious spiral we’ve been trying to climb out of.

In Beyond Anxiety, Dr. Martha Beck explains why anxiety is skyrocketing around you, and likely within you. She also tells you how to not only reduce your anxiety but use it to propel you into a life filled with peace, meaning, and joy.

Using a combination of the latest neuroscience as well as her background in sociology and coaching, Beck explains how our brains tend to get stuck in an “anxiety spiral,” a feedback system that can increase anxiety indefinitely. To climb out, we must engage different parts of our nervous system—the parts involved in creativity. Beck provides instructions for engaging the “creativity spiral,” in a process that not only shuts down anxiety but leads to innovative problem solving, a sense of meaning and purpose, and joyful, intimate connection with others—and with the world.

The opposite of anxiety, it turns out, is a wonderful new way of life—one that can calm and inspire us as individuals and help us become a source of healing for everything around us.

Dylan’s pick: The Corporation in the Twenty-First Century: Why (Almost) Everything We Are Told About Business Is Wrong by John Kay, Yale University Press

In the world of Adam Smith and Karl Marx, capitalists built and controlled mills and factories. That relationship between capital and labor continued in the automobile assembly lines and petrochemical plants of the twentieth century.

But no longer: products and production have dematerialized. The goods and services provided by the leading companies of the twenty-first century appear on your screen, fit in your pocket, or occupy your head. Ownership of the means of production is a redundant concept. Workers are the means of production; increasingly, they take the plant home. Capital is a service bought from a specialist supplier with little influence over customer businesses. The professional managers who run modern corporations do not exert authority because they are wealthy; they are wealthy because they exert authority.

John Kay’s incisive overhaul of our ideas about business redefines our understanding of successful commercial activity and the corporation—and describes how we have come to “love the product” as we “hate the producer.” This is a brilliant and original work from one of the greatest economists.

Jasmine’s pick: Turned On: A Creative’s Guide to Awakening Presence, Pleasure, and Possibility by Brie Stoner, Broadleaf Books

For far too long we have relegated the erotic to the bedroom, when in reality it is a fundamental energy that helps us connect more deeply with ourselves, each other, the earth, and the creative potential within us. We also live in a world that equates our productivity with our worth, leaving us feeling overtaxed, exhausted, burned out, and completely disconnected from ourselves and others. In Turned On, artist and musician Brie Stoner redefines the erotic, stating that it is more than just human intimacy; it can be the antidote to feeling anxious, disconnected, and uninspired. By reframing Eros as the energy of life and creativity itself, Stoner invites us to reawaken presence, playfulness, and possibility as the gateways to transformation.

Just as physical relationships are contingent upon the right context, good communication, and embodied presence, Stoner offers a similar contextual shift and the tools needed for us to access creativity through the body and in the present moment. Fittingly, she explores how the erotic has been minimized and misunderstood in modern life. She then offers practical applications of how an erotically enlivened life is a creatively fulfilling one, in which our relationships, parenting, work, and creativity flourish. For those of us who yearn for life to be more inspired, adventurous, and sensual, Turned On is our guide to relighting the spark within us.