New Book Releases for the Week of April 22, 2025
Discovering your next great read just got easier with our weekly curated list of new book releases.
Choosing the right book at the right moment can change your life or benefit your organization. We help you find your next great read by highlighting 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.)
Our Recommended Books This Week
Sally’s pick: Click: How to Make What People Want by Jake Knapp with John Zeratsky, Avid Reader Press
Every big project—whether it’s creating new technology, developing a fresh line of sneakers, or opening a neighborhood café—requires a major investment to get off the ground. Unfortunately, most big projects flop with customers. Too many teams waste time, money, and opportunity because they follow the wrong strategy and lose sight of what really matters: Do people want what you’re making? Does your solution click with customers?
Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky—two brilliant product designers who spent years at Google Ventures and elsewhere before founding a venture capital firm together—have helped hundreds of teams bring new products and services into the world. As designers and investors, they have a front-row seat to some of the world’s most successful startups. Click introduces the Foundation Sprint—a proven system for starting projects the right way, to make better decisions and move quickly toward a solution.
Inside are ten important lessons, a step-by-step playbook for the Foundation Sprint, and memorable stories from Nike, Google, Slack, and the frontiers of artificial intelligence research. Building on their bestselling book, Sprint, Knapp and Zeratsky introduce new recipes that teams can use to quickly and confidently start projects. For anyone who has ever had a good idea but didn’t know how to start, this book is for you.
Dylan’s pick: More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity by Adam Becker, Basic Books
Tech billionaires have decided that they should determine our futures for us. According to Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, and more, the only good future for humanity is one powered by technology: trillions of humans living in space, functionally immortal, served by superintelligent AIs.
In More Everything Forever, science journalist Adam Becker investigates these wildly implausible and often profoundly immoral visions of tomorrow—and shows why, in reality, there is no good evidence that they will, or should, come to pass. Nevertheless, these obsessions fuel fears that overwhelm reason—for example, that a rogue AI will exterminate humanity—at the expense of essential work on solving crucial problems like climate change. What’s more, these futuristic visions cloak a hunger for power under dreams of space colonies and digital immortality. The giants of Silicon Valley claim that their ideas are based on science, but the reality is darker: they come from a jumbled mix of shallow futurism and racist pseudoscience.
More Everything Forever exposes the powerful and sinister ideas that dominate Silicon Valley, challenging us to see how foolish, and dangerous, these visions of the future are.
Jasmine’s pick: On Muscle: The Stuff That Moves Us and Why It Matters by Bonnie Tsui, Algonquin Books
In On Muscle, Bonnie Tsui brings her signature blend of science, culture, immersive reporting, and personal narrative to examine not just what muscles are but what they mean to us. Cardiac, smooth, skeletal—these three different types of muscle in our bodies make our hearts beat; push food through our intestines, blood through our vessels, babies out the uterus; attach to our bones and allow for motion. Tsui also traces how muscles have defined beauty—and how they have distorted it—through the ages, and how they play an essential role in our physical and mental health.
Tsui introduces us to the first female weightlifter to pick up the famed Scottish Dinnie Stones, then takes us on a 50-mile run through the Nevada desert that follows the path of escape from a Native boarding school—and gives the concept of endurance new meaning. She travels to Oslo, where cutting-edge research reveals how muscles help us bounce back after injury and illness, an important aspect of longevity. She jumps into the action with a historic Double Dutch club in Washington, D.C., to explain anew what Charles Darwin meant by the brain-body connection. Woven throughout are stories of Tsui’s childhood with her Chinese immigrant artist dad—a black belt in karate—who schools her from a young age in a kind of quirky, in-house Muscle Academy.
On Muscle shows us the poetry in the physical, and the surprising ways muscle can reveal what we’re capable of.
Gabbi’s pick: Sustainable Success: How Businesses Win as a Force for Good by Paul Marushka, Rivertowns Books
Business leaders today face a challenging mandate: to address the needs of People and Planet while optimizing Performance (and profit). And while sustainability is now the subject of greater scrutiny, Paul Marushka, Sphera CEO and founder, strongly believes that, when applied in a balanced way, sustainability can transcend compliance and drive long-term success.
In Sustainable Success, Marushka explains why organizations must take a strategic approach that advances sustainability regardless of shifting political winds and changing regulations. As history shows us, policy changes based on shifts in governance are often reversed in due course. Meanwhile, the businesses that embed sustainability within the enterprise and its operations win public favor in the short term and emerge as clear leaders in the long term. They also gain cost-saving innovations and a stronger ability to manage climate-related risks in the process.
With fascinating anecdotes and sage advice, Marushka builds a compelling blueprint for sustainable business success that satisfies the needs of customers, employees, shareholders, and the environment. His examples illustrate why sustainability offers not only a way to combat climate change and preserve our environment, but also a path to innovation, reduced costs, and enhanced customer loyalty.
Sustainable Success is a must-read for any business leader seeking to make a profit while shaping a legacy they can be proud of.
Buy these recommended new book releases and more directly from Porchlight Book Company.
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