100 Books Like Cut Adrift

Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas’ book helped me understand the financial and life well-being of the poor as it compares the marriage and childrearing norms among them to those of the elite.

Elite mothers raise their children as “hothouse plants” and measure their success by their children’s educational and career accomplishments. Poor mothers raise their children as “field plants,” expected to grow naturally, expecting few educational and career accomplishments.

Poor women know that marriage is fragile, and so they make their primary emotional investments in their relationships with their children. A poor mother of a four-year-old son described him as her heart. She’ll have her son even if her marriage goes sour. She’ll say to her husband, ‘You leave! This boy is mine.’”

Rachel Sherman’s book let me peek into the lives of people much richer than me, people whose annual income is in the millions and whose wealth is many multiples of their income.

They enjoy high financial well-being, yet many suffer diminished life well-being because they compare themselves to those even richer. One wealthy woman said that she does not feel wealthy because she knows many wealthier people with drivers and private planes. 

Natasha Warikoo’s book made me understand why so many people in my Silicon Valley neighborhood drive their children so hard to get into Ivy League and other prestigious colleges.

Graduating from prestigious colleges adds little financial well-being over graduating from less prestigious colleges, but it adds much life well-being in high social status. In the past, white upper-middle-class and wealthy families were almost always successful in placing their children into prestigious colleges, but in the last few decades, their children encountered competition from children of families who immigrated from China and India.

A white woman said that her children are very bright and very motivated but feel like average students because there were so many children of Chinese and Indian families who are even brighter and more motivated.

Viviana Zelizer’s book told me the fascinating story of the cultural transition from a time when children provide to parents mostly financial well-being to a time when children provide only life well-being.

In the 18th century, in America, parents welcomed the arrival of their children mostly as workers when children were young and as security when parents were old. By the mid-19th century, however, parents of the urban elite welcomed their children mostly for their life well-being benefits in love, smiles, and successes that make parents proud.

Children, in Zelizer’s language, became ‘sacralized,’ economically worthless but emotionally priceless. By the early 20th century, working-class and poor parents joined elite parents in sacralizing their children. 

Another book (1958 edition) from my father’s fascinating library. 

When I began penning my first book, I wanted to be as true as I could to a rainforest and bring forth the actual characteristics and legends of the jungles. On the Track of… gave me ideas for unusual creatures, instead of the normal elves and dwarves and fairies of fantasies. I came to know about the less-known local legends, ‘hidden’ animals, and strange creatures from the remote wild corners of our planet, be it tatzulwurms or Kongamato, the last flying dragon.  

The author has combined zoology and cultural anthropology in a captivating account.

This book tells the tech-business story of algorithms and data exhaust and the companies who have implemented the dystopian future prophesized by Boorstin, Toffler, Postman, and others. While the book is large, Zuboff’s writing draws you into a world you know and, paradoxically, don’t know.

The work is the final stop of our story about information and knowledge, its chaotic meandering through amusing images and the shock of the future. 

Anna Badkhen, a writer of creative non-fiction and fiction, publishes lyrical descriptions of people, place, and character. She has written about social life in Afghanistan as well as the challenging lifeways of people in Mali and Senegal. 

Fisherman’s Blues, which is situated in the artisan fishing village of Joal, Senegal, is an inspiring story that describes how Senegalese fishermen employ practical wisdom, passed down from generation to generation, to maintain their way of life in environmentally challenging times.

In what I do and how I feel, I cannot avoid confronting the times we all live, called the “end times.” What they name is the end of an epoch of total planetary domination by Homo sapiens.

A moment of nemesis has arrived. What has been discovered, if unevenly, is that our collective world-making has revealed itself to be an unmaking. The history and the future of climate change, literally and metaphorically, stand for this moment.

The Brazilian anthropologists Deborah and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro powerfully capture not just the causes of this planetary crisis but, in my view, present ways of thinking and working toward affirmative futures.

Superior by science journalist Angela Saini is based on source materials. In addition, it is animated by interviews with key scientists involved in the struggle to end race science. Saini weaves together stories that get at the more intimate details of, on the one hand, the persistence and continual reinvention of race and race science, and on the other, the work of individuals including Jonathan Marks and Jay Kaufman to move us all to better understanding why racism, not biological race, is the cause of inequalities in health and wealth. Superior is the most readable of all the books that focus on race and human variation.  

This is a fantastic introduction to the history of smell. Despite being willing to read most anything written about smell, I usually balk at historical texts as often these have a soporific effect on me. However, this historical coverage kept me engaged from start to finish.

The chapters on early religious incense practices and the perfume trade throughout the Middle East and Europe are edifying. I learned a great deal about the impact of the economics of perfume on shifting trade routes, which is something I hadn’t come across in other books on smell. What truly grabbed my attention and formed the basis for many conversations when reading Past Scents were the chapters relating smell to race, gender, and class throughout recent American history. 

Since the historical focus is predominantly Western, you might also want to consider reading Sandalwood and Carrion: Smell in Indian Religion and Culture by James McHugh.