Staff Picks Book Reviews
Porchlight is a company filled with voracious readers—talented, creative individuals who know books, and who excel at moving them. Whenever we can, we like to do that by telling you about the books we’re reading.
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Blog / Staff Picks
How To Communicate Effectively with Anyone, Anywhere: Your Passport to Connecting Globally
Book Review by Gabbi Cisneros
This book makes it clear that "effective communication" and "inclusivity" are one-and-the-same. The more we understand those we communicate with, the easier it will be to treat them respectfully and with an open mind.
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Blog / Staff Picks
Upright Women Wanted
Book Review by Lauren Kohlenberg
This near-future novella highlights an American Southwest that is riddled with bandits, fascists, and queer librarian spies.
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Blog / Staff Picks
White Fright: The Sexual Panic at the Heart of America's Racist History
Book Review by Gabbi Cisneros
The importance of learning the real, often racist history of America is clear these days, and Jane Dailey’s book examines the many layers of post-Civil War society to clearly reveal the political grip of whites in America, holding racism in place through the policing of bodies.
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Blog / Staff Picks
Cookbook Roundup: Grilling and Barbecuing
Book Review by Blyth Meier
If your garden harvest is overflowing, here are seven cookbooks to help when the only wise option is to throw everything on the grill.
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Blog / Staff Picks
Cookbook Roundup: Bread
Book Review by Blyth Meier
Ten of the best recent-ish bread cookbooks feature choices for every level of baker, from the very new to the most experienced.
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Blog / Staff Picks
This Town Sleeps
Book Review by Roy Normington
Dennis E. Staples blends history, native culture, family secrets, and personal identity seamlessly while keeping readers guessing in this new novel.
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Blog / Staff Picks
The Undocumented Americans
Book Review by Lauren Kohlenberg
Cornejo Villavicencio hands us a portrait of the continuous fight to exist in an America that thinks you are anything but American.
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Blog / Staff Picks
May 2020 Cookbook Roundup
Book Review by Blyth Meier
“Cooking in” is the new “going out,” so let’s take a look at the new cookbooks that were giving life to our kitchen routines in May.
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Blog / Staff Picks
Resistance: A Songwriter's Story of Hope, Change, and Courage
Book Review by Roy Normington
Resistance (the book and the act) is not just about standing up for yourself in the world, and the need to take control and continue to have your voice. It’s also about the need to cultivate resistance inwardly, and to resist temptation.
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Blog / Staff Picks
Passing
Book Review by Roy Normington
Our Senior Customer Service Specialist, Roy Normington, reviews Nella Larsen's Harlem Renaissance novel, finding it still speaks powerfully to issues of identity, race, class, gender, and sexuality today.
Categories: staff-picks