Fans pick 100 books like Black Ice

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.

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. 

It turns out that privilege, entitlement, and lofty ambition are baked into every aspect of the top private boarding schools in the United States. The authors are two sociologists who took me behind the scenes of an elite school whose graduates are subtly—and not so subtly—groomed for power and success.

On magnificent residential high school campuses, students are surrounded by wealthy peers, portraits of celebrated alumni on the walls, seminar-style academic debates, famous guest speakers, and more. The authors paint a convincing and readable account of how exclusive schools imbue their students with the habits, dispositions, and ambitions to join society’s elites.

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!

The writing is gorgeous, but it is the story – heartbreaking at first and then, as it closes, heartwarming – that grabs you.

Rebecca Carroll, marked as black, is adopted by white parents and raised in an all-white town. Determined to learn more about herself, she sets out to reconnect with her birth parents, but what she learns is a set of hard, painful truths. As the thread slowly unspools, her white birth mother is also revealed as abusive and controlling.

Still searching for a sense of who she is, Carroll discovers her own blackness through found family, and by doing so challenges her readers to cling tight to anyone who makes us whole. 

Speaking of outsiders, Around Harvard Square follows a superstar student-athlete from small-town USA who assumes he’s made it big when he’s admitted to Harvard University. However, as a young, Black man, Tosh Livingston soon discovers the ways in which he does not belong and finds that admissions committees aren’t the only gatekeepers. This novel really digs deep into issues of race and class, insiders and outsiders. And while the topics feel timely, they are also timeless—not only in the world at large but also in that microcosm, the campus. There have always been those who are kept out and always those with special access, such as legacies and athletes. The protagonist in this novel also comes up against a secret society, an underground facet of campus life and the epitome of exclusivity, which really set my own creative juices in motion. Funny and fast-paced, this novel epitomizes a protagonist’s struggle… show more.

It’s a beautiful book, from the cover to the notes. It’s a neo-slave narrative that follows various enslaved, then freed people. Through this book, I learned how poetry collections can be explorations of history based on fact.

Like any good collection, reading one poem compels you forward, but each poem can stand on its own. She is a master of form. For instance, her persona poetry is powerful. The first poem in the book, “The Trapper’s Boast,” devoid of empathy, shows the business of slavery from an undesirable point of view. 

But what is moving is the ability to fall in love and to care even in the worst conditions, as well as the will to live and strive towards freedom in spite of any threats.

I started writing neo-slave narrative poems about a woman escaping slavery. I imagined that the poems I was writing, like Suck on the Marrow… show more.

This book brilliantly tells the story of the guerilla warfare that Black people waged against the purveyors of slavery in the antebellum South. It belies the White establishment’s portrayal of the compliant, intellectually challenged Negro who was content to live under the necessary guidance and protection of his or her master.

In fact, a sprawling network of underground freedom fighters developed secret codes, signs, and escape routes that enabled them to thwart the system that strove to keep them in chains. The book’s protagonist, Liz Spocott, is a “dreamer” who is able to see the future.

This book helped me understand that fiction writers are also dreamers, capable of seeing worlds that do not yet exist, and pushed me to join their ranks.

Many have studied how in 1963 African Americans marched to gain equality, especially in southern towns, like Birmingham, Alabama. But I never knew that the first main march involved thousands of children and teens who marched so their parents wouldn’t lose their jobs. These brave youth found the courage to face their fears and the hatred of whites who fought to keep them separate and unequal. Their protest march encouraged adults to join them. Hateful efforts to stop the march were broadcast across the country, ultimately changing the direction of the civil rights movement. Bold pictures show everyday children and civil rights leaders finally gaining rights to playgrounds and diners and eventually better schooling. An important story, simply written—and about children who made a difference.

The most famous short story in this collection is about Cora, whose whole life is spent in drudgery first to her own family, and then to the locally prominent Studevants. In her own life, Cora is somewhat unconventional—she feels no shame for having an illegitimate child at a time when that was frowned upon, to say the least—but she’s quietly obedient to her difficult employers. Until, that is, one of them causes a tragedy, and Cora feels compelled to speak up very publicly. And, oh, when she does it is immensely satisfying! (TW: racially charged language and abortion)