Books to Watch | September 3, 2019

Each and every week, our marketing team—Marketing Director Blyth Meier (BRM), Digital Marketing Specialist Gabbi Cisneros (GMC), and Editorial Director Dylan Schleicher (DJJS)—hightlight the five books being released that we are most excited about.

This week, our choices are:

Cook When You Can, Eat When You Want: Prep Once for Delicious Meals All Week by Caroline Pessin, Black Dog & Leventhal (BRM) | If back-to-school time has you wondering where your days  and nights are going, Cook When You Can, Eat When You Want is the present you need to give yourself. French food writer and stylist Caroline Pessin’s 2018 meal prep (or “batch cooking”) book is now available in English. Featuring five main dishes and two appetizers for each week (helpfully divided by the seasons), the author walks  you through how to approach the entirety of your weeknight meals as one big recipe with interlocking pieces—all tackled in two hours. It is a mind-blowing feat of culinary planning. And while the book’s weekly menus can be a bit tricky for vegetarians, Pessin helpfully includes pork-free adjustments.

Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion--and the Future of Clothes by Dana Thomas, Penguin Press (GMC) | “It is time to get dressed with intention.” For people with aversions to second-hand clothes, Dana Thomas highlights the many possibilities for less wasteful, less dangerous, less exhausting processes of clothes production. She also devotes a good chunk of the book to convince you why these alternatives are necessary. Clothing is a necessity, but its destructive methods of production are not. 

The Geography of Risk: Epic Storms, Rising Seas, and the Cost of America's Coasts by Gilbert M. Gau, Sarah Crichton Books (DJJS) | Gilbert Gau’s new book could not be more timely, or more uncomfortable. As Hurricane Dorian skims the southeastern coastal floodplains of the country, Gau’s investigation shows the “seemingly endless loop of government payouts” that allowed, and even encouraged, development there. The destruction is getting worse, and more costly, with the vast majority of the most expensive disasters in U.S. history occurring along those coasts in the last two decades. It is not just because the storms are getting larger, but because the communities being built along the coasts are getting larger as well—the result of “billions in government subsidies and bailouts that normalize risks and encourage building in harm’s way after hurricanes and floods.” The Geography of Risk examines what to do now, “with so much at stake and so few good choices.”

The Nature of Life and Death: Every Body Leaves a Trace by Patricia Wiltshire, Putnam (GMC) | This isn’t your usual fast-paced forensics novel. Instead, Patricia Wiltshire focuses on her exploration of pollen spores and the deduced crime scenes based on nature’s microscopic fingerprints. She is a forensic ecologist. Wiltshire’s work is intensive and, because she explains her thought processes in depth, it is something that takes years of study and perhaps a lot of natural talent. See death in a different way and never think about the microscopic world the same way again!

Race, Work, and Leadership: New Perspectives on the Black Experience by Laura Morgan Roberts, Anthony J. Mayo, David A. Thomas, Harvard Business Review Press (DJJS) | The work of black Americans has been central to the U.S. economy since their involuntary arrival on these shores in 1619. The U.S. economy was built in large part on the abduction and enslavement of human beings—its foundation “forged on institutionalized inequality, which continues to have debilitating effects” today. To ignore that brutal history is to be blind to its present repercussions. This new volume of essays explores those repercussions head-on, showing the continued importance of race in corporate America and higher education, and on the lives of black professionals in those institutions. Race, Work, and Leadership shows how black leaders positively affect the organizations they head and how to “successfully navigate the tightrope of tenuous engagement, constrained authenticity, and contested authority” they are likely to encounter along the way.

What we're reading away from work:

I’m about half way through Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous and just started The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film, which is a series of conversations between the author Michael Ondaatje and Murch, who is a genius film editor and the person who created 5.1 surround sound when he was editing Apocalypse Now. —Blyth Meier, Marketing Director