New Book Releases for the Week of April 8, 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 team at Porchlight, including Managing Director Sally Haldorson and marketing members Dylan Schleicher, Gabbi Cisneros, and Jasmine Gonzalez, carefully sorts through the numerous books released each month to provide their recommendations. (Book descriptions are provided by the publisher unless noted otherwise.)
Here are our choices:
Gabbi’s pick: Every Purchase Matters: How Fair Trade Farmers, Companies, and Consumers Are Changing the World by Paul Rice, PublicAffairs
We all have the power to change the world through the products we buy. This simple premise has driven the growth of the conscious consumer movement for decades. Indeed, what started with a handful of niche sustainability brands has exploded into the mainstream with labels like Organic, Non-GMO, and Fair Trade Certified now adorning products in major retailers across the country.
Yet the true promise of ethical sourcing and conscious consumerism has not been fully realized. Paul Rice has dedicated his career to helping consumers and businesses embrace the power they have to protect the environment and improve the lives of farmers and workers on the far side of our global supply chains.
In Every Purchase Matters, Rice reveals the untold story of the Fair Trade movement and its significance for us all. Calling on the close relationships he cultivated over the last forty years with the pioneers of ethical sourcing—CEOs, activists, grassroots farmer leaders, and consumer advocates—Rice gives voice to the visionaries and practitioners who are making sustainable business the new normal. These protagonists share successes and failures, lessons learned, and their extraordinary impact in communities around the world. Their stories illuminate how sustainability is good not only for people and planet but also for business.
Whether you’re a consumer, a business leader, or an investor, Every Purchase Matters offers a rich and persuasive case for conscious capitalism—the change it has brought and the potential it still has to create a more just, equitable, and sustainable world.
Sally’s pick: Generation Care: The New Culture of Caregiving by Jennifer N. Levin, Hachette Go
More than 10 million Millennials are caring for aging parents before they've been able to fully launch their own careers and consider starting their own families, and that's not including the incalculable numbers of people affected by long COVID. Yet no one is naming this problem, talking about how it feels, or offering resources to ease the pressure of Millennial caregiver burnout.
Jennifer N. Levin was 32 when her father was diagnosed with a rare degenerative illness. As she struggled with few resources and little support, she created Caregiver Collective, a national online support group for Millennial caregivers. Now Levin brings the wisdom from her own experience and that of her support group to Generation Care, a comprehensive look at this generation's culture of care. Filled with the voices of caregivers, expert commentary and research, and a roadmap to the solutions that can begin helping people now as well as build the policies of the future, Generation Care addresses the financial costs, the ambiguous sense of loss for millennials grieving the lives they thought they'd have, the impact of COVID and Long Covid, and strategies for getting help on the individual level and in relation to policy.
Caregiving is an increasingly urgent crisis, with more than 10 million millennials caring for their aging parents before they're prepared for it. Generation Care brings this crisis to the fore, illuminates the real stories and people who are most affected, underscores the need for shifts in policy and giving support where it is most needed, and sounds a clarion call for change.
Jasmine’s pick: No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson by Gardiner Harris, Random House
One day in 2004, Gardiner Harris, a pharmaceutical reporter for The New York Times, was early for a flight and sat down at an airport bar. He struck up a conversation with the woman on the barstool next to him, who happened to be a drug sales rep for Johnson & Johnson. Her horrific story about unethical sales practices and the devastating impact they’d had on her family fundamentally changed the nature of how Harris would cover the company—and the entire pharmaceutical industry—for the Times. His subsequent investigations and ongoing research since that very first conversation led to this book—a blistering exposé of a trusted American institution and the largest healthcare conglomerate in the world.
Harris takes us light-years away from the company’s image as the child-friendly “baby company” as he uncovers reams of evidence showing decades of deceitful and dangerous corporate practices that have threatened the lives of millions. He covers multiple disasters: lies and cover-ups regarding the link of Johnson’s Baby Powder to cancer, the surprising dangers of Tylenol, a criminal campaign to sell antipsychotics that have cost countless lives, a popular drug used to support cancer patients that actually increases the risk that cancer tumors will grow, and deceptive marketing that accelerated opioid addictions through their product Duragesic (fentanyl) that rival even those of the Sacklers and Purdue Pharma.
Filled with shocking and infuriating but utterly necessary revelations, No More Tears is a landmark work of investigative journalism that lays bare the deeply rooted corruption behind the image of babies bathing with a smile.
Dylan’s pick: Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age by Vauhini Vara, Pantheon
When it was released to the public in November 2022, ChatGPT awakened the world to a secretive project: teaching AI-powered machines to write. Its creators had a sweeping ambition—to build machines that could not only communicate, but could do all kinds of other activities, better than humans ever could. But was this goal actually achievable? And if reached, would it lead to our liberation or our subjugation?
Vauhini Vara, an award-winning tech journalist and editor, had long been grappling with these questions. In 2021, she asked a predecessor of ChatGPT to write about her sister’s death, resulting in an essay that was both more moving and more disturbing than she could have imagined. It quickly went viral.
The experience, revealing both the power and the danger of corporate-owned technologies, forced Vara to interrogate how these technologies have influenced her understanding of her self and the world around her, from discovering online chat rooms as a preteen, to using social media as the Wall Street Journal’s first Facebook reporter, to asking ChatGPT for writing advice—while compelling her to add to the trove of human-created material exploited for corporations’ financial gain.
Interspersed throughout this investigation are her own Google searches, Amazon reviews, and the other raw material of internet life—including the viral AI experiment that started it all. Searches illuminates how technological capitalism is both shaping and exploiting human existence, while proposing that by harnessing the collective creativity that makes humans unique, we might imagine a freer, more empowered relationship with our machines and, ultimately, with one another.
You can buy any of these recommended new book releases directly from Porchlight Book Company. If you’re interested in purchasing a large quantity of books, we offer attractive discounts on bulk orders and flexible shipping options tailored for book clubs, employee resource groups, and other reading groups. Happy reading!
