Books like The New Noir — picked by fans

Before I’m a scholar, author, or policy wonk, I’m a Christian who believes that God has shown us that our highest and greatest call after loving God is to love each other—and thus we are to value people’s and communities’ well-being above profit, wealth, and status. Thus, I come to sociology with a sense of mission: to use the tools of social science to understand the mechanisms creating inequitable resource access and, with that insight, to imagine and work alongside like-minded others to build economic and political systems that foster communal and individual prosperity. By studying the Black middle class, specifically, I gain traction for understanding how racial status distorts our economic and political systems.

Before I’m a scholar, author, or policy wonk, I’m a Christian who believes that God has shown us that our highest and greatest call after loving God is to love each other—and thus we are to value people’s and communities’ well-being above profit, wealth, and status. Thus, I come to sociology with a sense of mission: to use the tools of social science to understand the mechanisms creating inequitable resource access and, with that insight, to imagine and work alongside like-minded others to build economic and political systems that foster communal and individual prosperity. By studying the Black middle class, specifically, I gain traction for understanding how racial status distorts our economic and political systems.

Before I’m a scholar, author, or policy wonk, I’m a Christian who believes that God has shown us that our highest and greatest call after loving God is to love each other—and thus we are to value people’s and communities’ well-being above profit, wealth, and status. Thus, I come to sociology with a sense of mission: to use the tools of social science to understand the mechanisms creating inequitable resource access and, with that insight, to imagine and work alongside like-minded others to build economic and political systems that foster communal and individual prosperity. By studying the Black middle class, specifically, I gain traction for understanding how racial status distorts our economic and political systems.

Before I’m a scholar, author, or policy wonk, I’m a Christian who believes that God has shown us that our highest and greatest call after loving God is to love each other—and thus we are to value people’s and communities’ well-being above profit, wealth, and status. Thus, I come to sociology with a sense of mission: to use the tools of social science to understand the mechanisms creating inequitable resource access and, with that insight, to imagine and work alongside like-minded others to build economic and political systems that foster communal and individual prosperity. By studying the Black middle class, specifically, I gain traction for understanding how racial status distorts our economic and political systems.

As an American, a Jew, and a novelist—though not necessarily in that order—I’ve always been interested in Jewish-American literature, and the Jewish-American experience in general. What was it like for the first Jews in America? What accounted for their success? What were the costs of assimilation? And where are they—we—headed? These books are a great starting point for anyone looking for answers to these questions. But be warned: in keeping with the Jewish tradition, they often answer those questions with more questions. Not, to quote the Jewish sage Jerry Seinfeld, that there’s anything wrong with that.

Two things are true about me: I’m fascinated by the early twentieth century and I'm a diehard feminist. My grandfather nurtured my love of the 1920s and 1930s by introducing me to Dorothy Parker, John O’Hara, Ella Fitzgerald, and The New Yorker. My mother, a petite woman who can wield a welder like few others, encouraged the development of my feminist sensibilities. These two parts came together when my father offhandedly mentioned that his grandmother had an unplanned pregnancy during the Great Depression. As I researched reproductive issues through the years, my fascination for the topic grew. Each of the books here takes a different view of how to deal with an unwanted pregnancy. 

My passion for stories began while I was still in elementary school. I was an avid reader, taking the tram to the library whenever I could. I read biographies, short stories, comic books, and novels of all kinds. In college I studied comparative literature focusing on novels of the 19th and 20th century in English and Spanish. I met many authors and was inspired to write my own stories. Eventually, this led to screenwriting as a career and then teaching and writing about screenwriting. I never abandoned my love of novels, publishing one of my first novels as a magazine for which I sold advertising to pay for printing. 

I want to live in a future where all life can thrive. Toward that end, I spend my days teaching and writing about how we can solve the problems we face in our communities and world and build such a future. No surprise then that I read extensively about solutions to problems, looking for those that are visionary while being practical and which truly strive to do the most good and least harm for everyone. As a systems thinker, I’m always looking for books that recognize how interconnected our political, economic, production, food, legal, energy, and other systems are and that offer ideas that will have the fewest unintended negative consequences. 

A summer with relatives in Belgium—a country divided by language and culture—inspired me to travel to Santo Domingo in 1988 to learn Spanish and study the fraught dynamics of two countries speaking different languages but sharing an island. My time in the Dominican Republic and Haiti inspired a lifelong exploration of complex issues using many lenses and stories. Today I write mainly about risk, drawing on psychology, culture, policy, and economics. The third book, The Gray Rhino, calls for a fresh look at obvious, looming threats. My fourth book, You Are What You Risk, explores risk perceptions and attitudes using a comparative, socio-cultural lens like the one I used in Why the Cocks Fight.

Growing up in Salt Lake City in the 1950s I was very soon aware that I was living in a world of borders, some permeable and negotiable, and some almost impossible to cross. It was a city of Mormons and a city of those who weren’t; a city of immigrants like my grandparents, and about whom my mother wrote (and wrote well); and a Jim Crow town where Black men and women couldn’t get into the ballroom to hear Duke Ellington play. Finally, it was a city haunted by its Indian past in a state keeping living Indians in its many bleak government reservations. What to make of those borders has been a life-long effort.