Here are 74 books that Preparing For Power fans have personally recommended if you like
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I am passionate about talent development and college access. I started my journey as a researcher when I learned that high school valedictorians’ adult success depends in large part on their race, social class, and gender. This work led me to life-long questions. How do we recognize talent and give young people opportunities without requiring their total assimilation into the dominant culture? How do we change our schools and colleges to welcome everyone and to benefit from the viewpoints and voices of all of our students? Answering these questions is imperative for our collective well-being in our changing society and world.
What is it really like to work at the top echelons of science research? Go no further than this book, a riveting collective biography of women scientists at MIT who conducted world-class research in departments with more Nobel Prize winners than women.
Even though I knew how the story turned out, I was riveted by the hardships, brilliant tactics, and eventual triumph of the women researchers who fought and won the battle for equal treatment at “The Institute.” Written by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who originally reported the story as it unfolded.
'Outstanding' Bonnie Garmus, bestselling author of Lessons in Chemistry
The remarkable untold story of how a group of sixteen determined women used the power of the collective and the tools of science to inspire ongoing radical change. This is a triumphant account of progress, whilst reminding us that further action is needed.
These women scientists entered the work force in the 1960s during a push for affirmative action. Embarking on their careers they thought that discrimination against women was a thing of the past and that science was a pure meritocracy. Women were marginalized and minimized, especially as they grew…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
I am passionate about talent development and college access. I started my journey as a researcher when I learned that high school valedictorians’ adult success depends in large part on their race, social class, and gender. This work led me to life-long questions. How do we recognize talent and give young people opportunities without requiring their total assimilation into the dominant culture? How do we change our schools and colleges to welcome everyone and to benefit from the viewpoints and voices of all of our students? Answering these questions is imperative for our collective well-being in our changing society and world.
This book opened my eyes to how higher education actually works to advance social mobility for a few while primarily reproducing social inequality. I was amazed to learn that the way that today’s elite universities select among applicants started as a solution for limiting the enrollment of “outsiders.”
Top universities feared that having too many of these outsiders would lower the status of the institution and make it less attractive to the ruling class. Beginning with Jewish students, continuing with Black students, and now emerging with Asian and low-income students, this pattern continues and affects our entire society.
A landmark, revelatory history of admissions from 1900 to today—and how it shaped a nation
The competition for a spot in the Ivy League—widely considered the ticket to success—is fierce and getting fiercer. But the admissions policies of elite universities have long been both tightly controlled and shrouded in secrecy. In The Chosen, the Berkeley sociologist Jerome Karabel lifts the veil on a century of admission and exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. How did the policies of our elite schools evolve? Whom have they let in and why? And what do those policies say about America?
I am passionate about talent development and college access. I started my journey as a researcher when I learned that high school valedictorians’ adult success depends in large part on their race, social class, and gender. This work led me to life-long questions. How do we recognize talent and give young people opportunities without requiring their total assimilation into the dominant culture? How do we change our schools and colleges to welcome everyone and to benefit from the viewpoints and voices of all of our students? Answering these questions is imperative for our collective well-being in our changing society and world.
Lorene Cary tells her own story of attending an elite boarding school through a talent-search program for low-income students of color. Lorene’s experience shows vividly the costs of being a token in a setting of privilege.
This vivid memoir was dismaying to me as someone who wants students to have opportunities to realize their potential by having access to top-quality schools.
In 1972 Lorene Cary, a bright, ambitious black teenager from Philadelphia, was transplanted into the formerly all-white, all-male environs of the elite St. Paul's School in New Hampshire, where she became a scholarship student in a "boot camp" for future American leaders. Like any good student, she was determined to succeed. But Cary was also determined to succeed without selling out. This wonderfully frank and perceptive memoir describes the perils and ambiguities of that double role, in which failing calculus and winning a student election could both be interpreted as betrayals of one's skin. Black Ice is also a universally…
A poisonous maiden, a Daoist sex cult, and a violent insurgency.
The polyandrous Yan family in China's rural Shaanxi Province takes in two carpenter brothers. When one brother is convicted of murder after killing their neighbor in a dispute, a constable threatens to expose the family's rumored polyandry and extorts…
I am passionate about talent development and college access. I started my journey as a researcher when I learned that high school valedictorians’ adult success depends in large part on their race, social class, and gender. This work led me to life-long questions. How do we recognize talent and give young people opportunities without requiring their total assimilation into the dominant culture? How do we change our schools and colleges to welcome everyone and to benefit from the viewpoints and voices of all of our students? Answering these questions is imperative for our collective well-being in our changing society and world.
I loved this novel, in which a former Princeton admission officer actually made me feel sorry for the staff members who have to choose who gets into the Ivy League!
The protagonist winds up in the kinds of ethical and practical tangles that ensnare would-be do-gooders as we try to “help the disadvantaged.” And it’s a rollicking good read!
From the New York Times bestselling author of You Should Have Known (adapted as The Undoing on HBO), comes a page-turner about a college admissions officer with a secret—now a major motion picture starring Tina Fey and Paul Rudd.
For years, 38-year-old Portia Nathan has avoided the past, hiding behind her busy (and sometimes punishing) career as a Princeton University admissions officer and her dependable domestic life. Her reluctance to confront the truth is suddenly overwhelmed by the resurfacing of a life-altering decision, and Portia is faced with an extraordinary test. Just as thousands of the nation's brightest students await…
I'm the multiple, award-winning author of 4 novels and one novella, raised in Memphis, Tennessee, and now living in Southern California. The geographical distance gives me a laser-sharp, appreciative perspective of the South, and I celebrate the literary greats from the region. The South is known as the last romantic place in America, and I believe this to be true. The South’s culture, history, and social mores are part and parcel to its fascinating characters, and nothing is more important in the South than the telling of a good story. As a writer, I'm in love with language. I love Southern turns of phrase and applaud those writers who capture Southern nuance. It is well worth writing about Southern sensibilities.
Peachtree Road is considered a modern-day Gone with The Wind, in that it is set in the pivotal, changing times of 1960’s Atlanta, and concerns the opulent area of Buckhead, where the privileged who built modern-day Atlanta live. The story is narrated in lyrical language by Shep Bondurant, an insightful young man born to privilege, who tells the coming-of-age story of Southern traditions and hypocrisy, and the impact of growing up alongside his troubled cousin, Lucy. A deeply probing story on multiple levels concerning society and the impact of family.
“A blockbuster of a novel. . . . Peachtree Road is the meaty and absorbing story of a city turned on to power and of the privileged inhabitants who led it to its current station as a mecca of business, culture, and progress. . . . To say this book is potent does not come close to doing it justice. More than merely powerful, it is mesmerizing, enthralling, and totally unforgettable.” — Chattanooga Free Press
A masterful tale of love, hate, and rebellion set in an elite world of class and wealth, New York Times bestselling author Anne Rivers Siddons's…
There are many big problems in the world today–racism, war, climate change, unaccountable governments, exploitative corporations, and so on. But when you scratch the surface of almost any serious problem, what you find is that the root of the problem is inequality: a minority of people are rich and powerful, while those who suffer the most are typically poor and powerless. I’m so passionate about inequality because, in my eyes, it constitutes the heart and soul of what’s wrong with our world and the key to making things better.
Although many people intuitively recognize that inequality is a serious problem, there is widespread doubt that anything can realistically be done about it. Saez and Zucman–perhaps the two most famous tax economists in the world–demolish this pessimism. In a clear, no-nonsense manner, they demonstrate that tax systems can easily fail but they can also be made to work.
The authors describe how rich people and corporations currently avoid tax, how tax havens function, and, most importantly of all, how an evidence-based tax system can be successfully built to prevent evasion and thereby meaningfully reduce inequality.
Even as they became fabulously wealthy, the rich have seen their taxes collapse to levels last seen in the 1920s. Meanwhile working-class Americans have been asked to pay more. The Triumph of Injustice is a forensic investigation into this dramatic transformation. Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, economists who revolutionised the study of inequality, demonstrate how the super-rich pay a lower tax rate than everybody else. In crystalline prose they dissect the deliberate choices and the sins of indecision that have fuelled this trend: the gradual exemption of capital owners; the surge of a new tax-avoidance industry and, most critically, tax…
Big Ideas... For Small Businesses
by
John Lamerton,
Big Ideas… for Small Businesses is a straight-talking, no-nonsense guide to growing a small business without sacrificing your lifestyle. Written by a former civil servant turned entrepreneur, the book challenges hustle culture and instead champions the idea of an "ambitious lifestyle business" - one that provides freedom and financial stability,…
I started my career writing about rock music. Rock stars dated models, and I soon started writing about them, too, which led me to cover the fashion world, where I was often seated near the rich and famous at runway shows in London, Paris, Milan, and New York, and began to study them. Thus began years of reading and writing about Society, first for The New York Times and New York magazine, and later in a series of books on the worlds of the rich and the famous. The latest, Flight of the WASP: The Rise, Fall, and Future of America's Original Ruling Class, will be published this fall.
This one is a bit of an obscurity. Another roman a clef from the 1980s, it’s a murder mystery set in Manhattan Society, only this time, it’s about the ways the high and mighty get down and dirty—and at the time, it was said to be based on several very real Upper East Side New York gentleman whose behavior was anything but gentle. At the time, many knew but no one talked about the sleaze and moral corruption that lurked in the dark corners of the world of wealth. I heard enough and saw enough to think that Stewart knew a lot.
New York, its wealth, decadence and crime levels are the subject of this novel which tells the intertwining tales of a rich society queen's sudden recovery from coma and the discovery of a mutiliated corpse. When Lieutenant Vince Cordoza begins to investigate, he gradually finds links between the two seemingly unconnected events. What he finds is dirty, explosive and gruesome and involves not only the society queen's family, but the whole fabric of New York, rich and poor alike.
I read (and write) biography as much for history as for an individual life story. It’s a way of getting a personalized look at an historical period. When the book is a family biography, the history is amplified by different family members' perspectives, almost like a kaleidoscope, and it stretches over generations, allowing the historical story to blossom over time. The genre also opens a window into the ethos that animated this unique group of individuals who are bound together by blood. Whether it's a desire for wealth or power, the zeal for a cause, or the need to survive adversity, I found it in these family stories.
When Cornelius Vanderbilt died in 1877, he was the richest man in America. Two generations later, the family parlayed their wealth into social status in the city's newly defined class structure.
Anderson Cooper, CNN news anchor, and his co-author trace the city's social history, beginning with Anderson's ancestor who emigrated to the small Dutch colony at the tip of Manhattan as an indentured servant. The story ends with Anderson's mother Gloria, the last Vanderbilt to have known the family at the peak of its wealth and social clout before lavish spending took its toll.
Most affecting are Anderson’s memories of his mother that have nothing to do with money and everything to do with sharing life with someone we love.
New York Times bestselling author and journalist Anderson Cooper teams with New York Times bestselling historian and novelist Katherine Howe to chronicle the rise and fall of a legendary American dynasty-his mother's family, the Vanderbilts.
One of the Washington Post's Notable Works of Nonfiction of 2021
When eleven-year-old Cornelius Vanderbilt began to work on his father's small boat ferrying supplies in New York Harbor at the beginning of the nineteenth century, no one could have imagined that one day he would, through ruthlessness, cunning, and a pathological desire for money, build two empires-one in shipping and another in railroads-that would…
My own collusion with white supremacy and anti-Blackness is a lifelong journey I mitigate for my soul’s redemption. I am a Mississippi-born redneck, alcoholic, psychotherapist, San Francisco Bay Area queer, higher education administrator with a Critical Race Theory doctorate. I first learned democracy by watching my Mississippi parents risk their lives and mine in the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. Three-Fifths Magazine recently published “My First English: The Vernacular of the KKK.” My book, “Twelve Steps for White America” won the BookFest 1st Place Gold Medal for “Society and Social Sciences: Race Culture Class and Religion.” I work to live in a USA where race no longer predicts outcomes.
Heather Richardson is one of our best historians. I love her brilliance, and I love that she knows the material well enough to explain it simply to the novice.
I read her previous book, and this next one didn't disappoint. If I could only read one book on how the USA has come to this, Democracy Awakening would be it. I recommend it for anyone who would finally like to try democracy in a USA where race no longer predicts outcomes!
In Democracy Awakening, American historian Heather Cox Richardson examines how, over the decades, an elite minority have made war on American ideals. By weaponising language and promoting false history, they are leading Americans into authoritarianism and creating a disaffected population.
Many books tell us what has happened over the last five years. In Democracy Awakening, Richardson wrangles America's meandering and confusing news feed into a coherent story to explain how America got to this perilous point, what we should pay attention to, and what the future of democracy holds.
The problem is not with the actions young women take but with the toxic, sexist conditions they are responding to.
Tanenbaum found, based on six years of interviews with young people ages 14-30, that young women are navigating a culture littered with gendered dress codes, revenge porn, and sexually explicit…
I am Professor Emeritus of Economics, University of Munich. I also taught as a visitor at Duke University, Harvard, University of North Carolina, as well as the University of Vienna, the Vienna School of Economics, and the University of St. Gallen. Since the financial crisis of 2008, I have been writing about current economic issues and the need for new paradigms in economics. I have been advocating a humanistic approach to economics in which people and their quality of life count more than the output of the economy. I have also formulated the need for capitalism with a human face. I have also blogged for PBS.
If anyone has not yet realized the ephemeral nature of American democracy, this is the book to start.
The authors present extensive data to show that decades of dysfunctional government left many millions of low-skilled workers behind, exacerbating inequality, and supporting policies that enriched corporations while the wealthy became super-wealthy.
America faces daunting problems stagnant wages, high health care costs, neglected schools, deteriorating public services. Yet the government consistently ignores the needs of its citizens, paying attention instead to donors and organized interests. Real issues are held hostage to demagoguery, partisanship beats practicality, and trust in government withers along with the social safety net. How did we get here? Through decades of dysfunctional government. In Democracy in America? veteran political observers Benjamin I. Page and Martin Gilens marshal an unprecedented array of evidence to show that while other countries have responded to a rapidly changing economy by helping people who've…
