100 Books Like Carly's Voice

By the time our children reach middle school their choice of friends (for better or worse) becomes increasingly beyond our reach. Queen Bees and Wannabes (a non-fiction book that inspired the feature film Mean Girls), was the first to blast wide open the dark, dirty secret of girls’ relational aggression.

This book offers a deep dive into what many of our daughters have experienced or are currently in the thick of. Rosalind Wiseman, a parenting educator and NY Times best-selling author, helps parents better understand the queen bees in their kids’ lives – why these girls manipulate their peers and how we can help our daughters manage their emotions and social expectations in healthy ways so they neither fall victim to a queen bee nor put on the crown themselves and victimize others.

Written by Salome Thomas-El, a parent and a nationally acclaimed educator, The Immortality of Influence nails a parent’s job description: We’re here to help kids recognize and realize their full potential. Simply put, that’s our legacy to our kids, grandkids, and any young person we take under our wing. I loved how the personal stories throughout this book demonstrated, again and again, the positive and lasting impact a consistently caring and responsible adult can have on a child’s life. Having had the honor of visiting Principal El’s school, I can attest to the fact that he walks the walk in a special way that’s immediately apparent to every child he encounters.

Dealing with disappointment and rejection is part of growing up. But our kids also face unique challenges and social stressors that did not exist when we were their age. That’s why it can be hard to give them the kind of help they really need in those moments when they feel particularly vulnerable. Dr. G, a family physician, international speaker and mom of four boys, has written a book to help us help our kids in compassionate and practical ways. Her goal ought to be a top parenting goal for everyone: Teach kids resilience – i.e., the ability to move through and beyond your emotions and figure out what your next best move will be. With resilience as a life skill, kids have what they need to rebound in the face of any setback.

Katherine Ellison is a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter. When she and her pre-teen son were both diagnosed with ADHD in the same year it became her personal and professional mission to find out as much as she could about this increasingly common diagnosis. Anyone who knows and loves someone who’s been diagnosed with ADHD would do well to read this book as a guide through the often bewildering landscape of ADHD treatments. As serious and personal as Buzz is, Ellison is a great writer and her memoir is equal parts science, expert interviews and analysis, parenting angst, and humor.

Raymond Gibbs is a leading psycholinguist with deep familiarity with theories of conceptual metaphor and their critics. Drawing on evidence from cognitive linguistics and other fields, this book provides a valuable account of the contributions of metaphor to language, thought, action, and culture. Metaphors operate in multimodal experience s well as language. 

This classic book, which has been recently updated, is a must-read for all parents or people who work with children. Tatum does an excellent job of describing how children think about race and the role race plays in their lives. She describes how racial identity develops for Black children, for White children, and for mixed-race children and clearly identifies why it is important for all children. By using lots of quotes and conversations with children and teens, this accessible read leads to “Aha!” moments in every chapter. 

Even if you have the best intentions heading into a conversation, powerful emotions can easily derail the entire interaction. You headed in wanting to stay calm, but something your spouse, co-worker, or fellow church member said triggered your hot button surfacing powerful emotions. Soon, voices are raised and feelings are hurt. How do you manage powerful emotions when they surface? If you’ve never read a book by the creators of the Harvard Negotiation Project—the leading experts in mediation—this is a must-read by experts who have had to manage the most difficult and potentially explosive conversations imaginable. They remind us that emotions are “powerful, always present, and hard to handle.” Yet, the authors offer practical ways to recognize the emotions you have heading into a conversation with someone you care about and how to deal with them once they surface. 

All the books being recommended on this topic see memory and remembering as being structured and directed by the views and perspectives of the social groups to which people belong. Ever since Bartlett and Halbwachs, we have come to see memory as in many ways moulded by particular mental schemata and configurations associated with the various groups that exist within a social whole, yet the notion of collective memory is beset with problems: problems of exaggeration, reification, functionalism, and more. It is therefore fitting that in this edited collection the work of Halbwach in particular is regarded critically, and extended historically, while also being recognised as providing the necessary starting point: "social groups construct their own images of the world by constantly shaping and reshaping versions of the past" (p. 3).

As we saw with Danziger, the social frameworks of memory as well as the kinds of memory being actively… show more.

Black software, McIlwain writes, “refers to the programs we desire and design computers to run. It refers to who designs the program, for what purposes, and what or who becomes its object and data.” The book is a much needed examination of the role that Black entrepreneurs, engineers, designers, and users contributed in building the internet.

Bill Isaacs offers a pioneering approach to communicating in business and in life. His book starts with the assumption that people don’t know how to talk in a way that will make it easier for them to work together with others to solve shared problems. His company, DIAlogos, has organized dialogues in a wide variety of public and private settings. In the book, his discussion of “the architecture of the invisible” makes clear why better communication begins with listening, respect, suspending our own opinions, and finding our voice. I’m particularly taken with his discussion of how we can “cultivate organizational and system dialogue.” He also has some important ideas about how we can return to civility in our public discourse in the current time when “Red” and “Blue” have forgotten how to communicate at all.