I loved The Light We Carry because it delivers an honest and positive message during times that are rough for the United States.
I had read Michelle Obama’s first book – Becoming – and loved it as it inspired me to be a better person, to work harder on myself, and to give to the world. The Light We Carry also inspired me to look inward, to reassess my life, and to hold close to those experiences and people who I love.
I’m a professor, so I typically read non–fiction–heavy books about race and equity. Obama’s book was a welcome inspiration for how to create the life you want and how to let go of regret. Her deeply personal and honest style of engaging with readers is what I enjoy the most.
The powerful, inspiring follow-up to the critically acclaimed, multi-million #1 bestselling memoir Becoming
In The Light We Carry, former First Lady Michelle Obama shares practical wisdom and powerful strategies for staying hopeful and balanced in today's highly uncertain world.
She considers the questions many of us wrestle with: How do we build enduring and honest relationships? How can we discover strength and community inside our differences? What do we do when it all starts to feel like too much? Michelle Obama believes that we can all lean on a set of tools to help us better navigate change and remain…
I live in Philadelphia and have witnessed the extreme poverty, crime, and drug use in some parts of the city. I have also seen the Philadelphia public schools close up and the unevenness of opportunity in the city.
Goyal follows the lives of three Puerto Rican children living in the Kensington neighborhood of the city. Kensington is rough and plagued by drug use, crime, poverty, and failing public schools. Goyal writes with incredible empathy and care about the near-insurmountable challenges these children face.
Using ethnography, he details how the local, state, and federal policies fail these students and how our nation’s legacy of racism ensures that their children aren’t provided a childhood. I also grew up in another type of poverty – rural poverty – and remember feeling helpless as I watched people around me struggle, die, succumb to drugs, and end up in jail.
Although the environments are different, I could empathize with the three children in Goyal’s book and think it is essential that others understand the lives of children growing up in urban poverty.
An indelible portrait of three children struggling to survive in the poorest neighborhood of the poorest large city in America
Kensington, Philadelphia, is distinguished only by its poverty. It is home to Ryan, Giancarlos, and Emmanuel, three Puerto Rican children who live among the most marginalized families in the United States. This is the story of their coming-of-age, which is beset by violence―the violence of homelessness, hunger, incarceration, stray bullets, sexual and physical assault, the hypermasculine logic of the streets, and the drug trade. In Kensington, eighteenth birthdays are not rites of passage but statistical miracles.
I have been reading about W.E.B. Du Bois since graduate school. He’s a fascinating character in American history who is always surprising me.
In this book, Chad Williams finds an unpublished 800-page manuscript in the archives at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and gives the reader a peak into the complexities of Du Bois’s brain. Having read nearly everything Du Bois wrote as I use his work in my own historical writings, I had never seen this side of Du Bois.
For the first time, followers of Du Bois’s work can see how World War I shaped him, his political evolution, and his later work. Williams’ book tackles Du Bois’s notion of double consciousness (being Black and American) within the context of fighting for one’s country and demonstrates how Du Bois originally thought he could reconcile being Black and American during the war but eventually became disillusioned.
As a historian, I enjoyed this book for the writing, the historical method, and for the new window it gave me into Du Bois.
The dramatic story of W. E. B. Du Bois's reckoning with the betrayal of Black soldiers during World War I―and a new understanding of one of the great twentieth-century writers.
When W. E. B. Du Bois, believing in the possibility of full citizenship and democratic change, encouraged African Americans to “close ranks” and support the Allied cause in World War I, he made a decision that would haunt him for the rest of his life. Seeking both intellectual clarity and personal atonement, for more than two decades Du Bois attempted to write the definitive history of Black participation in World…
While colleges and universities have been lauded for increasing student diversity, these same institutions have failed to achieve any comparable diversity among their faculty. In 2017, of the nation’s full-time, tenure-track, and tenured faculty, only 3 percent each were Black men, Black women, Hispanic men, and Hispanic women. Only 6 percent were Asian/Pacific Islander men, 5 percent were Asian/Pacific Islander women, and 1 percent were American Indian/Alaska Native.
In Doing the Right Thing, Marybeth Gasman takes a hard, insightful look at the issues surrounding the recruitment and hiring of faculty of color. Relying on national data and interviews with provosts, deans, and department chairs from sixty major universities, Gasman documents the institutional forces stymieing faculty diversification, and she makes the case for how such deficiencies can and should be rectified.
