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.
-
Blog / Staff Picks
L.A. Weather
Book Review by Gabbi Cisneros
As everyone in the novel finds their own way of working through (or avoiding) their own difficulties, the family drama gets more tense.
Categories: staff-picks
-
Blog / Staff Picks
The Social Instinct: How Cooperation Shaped the World
Book Review by Dylan Schleicher
We face both urgent crises and profound, existential challenges as a species, but we have the ability to cooperate—and to change and evolve the ways in which we do. Nichola Raihani explains how important that ability has been to our success in the past, and how likely it is to determine our fate.
Categories: staff-picks
-
Blog / Staff Picks
Three Rooms
Book Review by Emily Porter
It tells a universal story that so many of us experience in our own lives when finding our footing: the struggle of making it on our own for the first time, meeting strangers that become good acquaintances—if not a friendship of sorts—and finding ourselves throughout the journey.
Categories: staff-picks
-
Blog / Staff Picks
The Secret History of Food: Strange But True Stories about the Origins of Everything We Eat
Book Review by Gabbi Cisneros
The Secret History of Food is a wild ride through history and the human body—how food has impacted them both and, in turn, how food has been impacted by both.
Categories: staff-picks
-
Blog / Staff Picks
Seeing Ghosts: A Memoir
Book Review by Emily Porter
Seeing Ghosts unravels her family’s generational grief and reveals how it followed her mother’s life as well as her own.
Categories: staff-picks
-
Blog / Staff Picks
Flux: 8 Superpowers for Thriving in Constant Change
Book Review by Dylan Schleicher
We live in a world in flux, but the word “flux” is also a verb, and an ability we can all develop to help us navigate the profound changes we’re living through.
Categories: staff-picks
-
Blog / Staff Picks
Still Mad: American Women Writers and the Feminist Imagination
Book Review by Gabbi Cisneros
Second-wave feminism may have been guided by the women's liberation movement of the seventies, but its continuation is sustained and shaped by each of us.
Categories: staff-picks
-
Blog / Staff Picks
The Awakened Brain: The New Science of Spirituality and Our Quest for an Inspired Life
Book Review by Emily Porter
In her new book, The Awakened Brain, Miller shares the results of the scientific research she has conducted finding that individuals with a spiritual or religious belief or practice have happier and healthier lives, as well as healthier brains.
Categories: staff-picks
-
Blog / Staff Picks
I Left My Homework in the Hamptons: What I Learned Teaching the Children of the One Percent
Book Review by Dylan Schleicher
The pressures associated with poverty and discrimination are more widespread, and more urgent, but that doesn’t mean that the pressures placed on more privileged children aren’t a problem or that they don’t have societal consequences—or that they shouldn't be talked about.
Categories: staff-picks
-
Blog / Staff Picks
Paradise : One Town's Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire
Book Review by Emily Porter
When the fires cease and the ash settles, the towns and those who have survived pick up the pieces and look to a future after surviving an American wildfire. Johnson shows the destruction, trauma, and the stress these fires put on the land, and on the families who live in areas that come within the fire’s path.
Categories: staff-picks