Late Summer Reading — Five Books I’m Loving
Between my work at Akilah Institute, my family, and finishing the final proofs on my forthcoming book, I haven’t had a lot of time for reading lately. But I wanted to share the wonderful stack of books I’ve been making my way through this summer. As a first-time author, I have newfound respect for writers! These are all wildly different, fantastic reads.
Navigating Life: Things I Wish My Mother Had Told Me. Margaux Bergen started writing this down-to-earth, funny and fiercely honest guide to being a successful adult when her daughter, Charlotte, was nine. She gave it to her the day she left for college. As a mom with two boys in college and another on his way soon, I heartily recommend it for both young people and us older ones, too.
21 Lessons for the 21st Century Yuval Noah Harari offers a profound and thought-provoking set of essays that examine our world today and how we think about the future. He covers everything from artificial intelligence to big data and privacy to terrorism to liberal democracy to religion and so much more. As someone that is constantly striving to meet the needs of current and future learners, workers, and leaders, I loved his chapter on our future workforce and how we should ready ourselves for it.
The Moment of Lift — How Empowering Women Changes the World. Melinda Gates had me at the title :) We are clearly on the same wavelength — when you lift up women, you lift up everyone — their families, their communities, their countries, the world. Her book is a call to “arms” of a sort — to empower others, to be courageous, to be generous. She punctuates the stories of women she’s met with statistics that prove her point and simply cannot be ignored.
Red Notice. Bill Browder was an investment guru who made his fortune in the New Russia following the break-up of the Soviet Union (my old stomping grounds!) He became Russia’s largest foreign investor and witnessed the sordid underbelly of Putin’s regime. After his Russian lawyer was tortured and murdered in prison, Browder became an inadvertent activist, dedicating himself to exposing Putin’s human rights violations and corruption. It’s a political and business memoir that reads like a thriller because it is one.
Love, Africa — A Memoir of Romance, War and Survival is written by Jeffrey Gettleman, a Pullitzer prize winning journalist who ran the East Africa bureau for the New York Times for many years. This memoir chronicles his experiences as a thrill-seeking foreign correspondent while attempting to reconcile his dual loves: his girlfriend/wife Courtenay and his passion for East Africa.
