Here are 13 books that Shortchanged fans have personally recommended if you like
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I never really thought much about how limited and exclusionary our society’s ideas about intelligence are until my daughter, who has Down syndrome, was required to take her first IQ test before she started kindergarten. That experience led me to research the history of the IQ test and how it has shaped our culture’s ideas about intelligence in pernicious ways. I am a college professor who is working to change the educational and employment opportunities available to people with intellectual disabilities. I hope you enjoy the books on this list. May they lead you to reconsider what you think it means to be smart.
I love Sack’s empathy toward his patients and his commitment to telling a different and highly unique narrative about the human experience. His classic collection of essays is not about intelligence, but each patient he writes about knows and understands the world differently than what is considered normal.
Sacks makes room for the challenges and brilliance of all ways of being in the world.
If a man has lost a leg or an eye, he knows he has lost a leg or an eye; but if he has lost a self - himself - he cannot know it, because he is no longer there to know it.
In this extraordinary book, Dr. Oliver Sacks recounts the stories of patients struggling to adapt to often bizarre worlds of neurological disorder. Here are people who can no longer recognize everyday objects or those they love; who are stricken with violent tics or shout involuntary obscenities, and yet are gifted with…
I never really thought much about how limited and exclusionary our society’s ideas about intelligence are until my daughter, who has Down syndrome, was required to take her first IQ test before she started kindergarten. That experience led me to research the history of the IQ test and how it has shaped our culture’s ideas about intelligence in pernicious ways. I am a college professor who is working to change the educational and employment opportunities available to people with intellectual disabilities. I hope you enjoy the books on this list. May they lead you to reconsider what you think it means to be smart.
Gould was an evolutionary biologist, and he understood the importance of recognizing that science has a history. Science, I have personally come to realize in my own book, is impacted by bias and flawed human decisions. Race and intelligence were once constructed as science in ways that led our society to make catastrophic decisions about human worth. And those decisions are still with us today.
This is a book about the history of science, but I also found it personal in that I see how this history still impacts the lives of people of color and people with intellectual disabilities today.
When published in 1981, The Mismeasure of Man was immediately hailed as a masterwork, the ringing answer to those who would classify people, rank them according to their supposed genetic gifts and limits.
And yet the idea of innate limits-of biology as destiny-dies hard, as witness the attention devoted to The Bell Curve, whose arguments are here so effectively anticipated and thoroughly undermined by Stephen Jay Gould. In this edition Dr. Gould has written a substantial new introduction telling how and why he wrote the book and tracing the subsequent history of the controversy on innateness right through The Bell…
I never really thought much about how limited and exclusionary our society’s ideas about intelligence are until my daughter, who has Down syndrome, was required to take her first IQ test before she started kindergarten. That experience led me to research the history of the IQ test and how it has shaped our culture’s ideas about intelligence in pernicious ways. I am a college professor who is working to change the educational and employment opportunities available to people with intellectual disabilities. I hope you enjoy the books on this list. May they lead you to reconsider what you think it means to be smart.
This book completely flipped the way that I think about “bad kids” in a classroom. I am a highly obedient person, to my own detriment, and I remember very clearly being a rule-follower in school and never wanting to get in trouble and be labeled a “bad kid.”
Shalaby helped me work through all the engrained biases I have about kids labeled as troublemakers and see that it’s actually the educational expectations (sit down, be quiet) that we need to interrogate.
Despite decades of research on classroom management and school discipline, so-called bad behaviour nevertheless persists in every kind of classroom in every kind of school. Even as the harsh disciplining of adolescent behaviour has been called out as part of the school-to-prison pipeline, the diverse 'problem children' in Troublemakers - Zora, Lucas, Sean, and Marcus - reveal how a child's path to excessive punishment and exclusion in fact begins at a much younger age.
I never really thought much about how limited and exclusionary our society’s ideas about intelligence are until my daughter, who has Down syndrome, was required to take her first IQ test before she started kindergarten. That experience led me to research the history of the IQ test and how it has shaped our culture’s ideas about intelligence in pernicious ways. I am a college professor who is working to change the educational and employment opportunities available to people with intellectual disabilities. I hope you enjoy the books on this list. May they lead you to reconsider what you think it means to be smart.
This book broke my heart. It forced me to really interrogate why we push kids to be smart in a particular way to the detriment of their mental health. By the time I was done, I was angry with all the ways that our culture of parenting and childhood pulled us away from finding true happiness and mattering to each other.
It drove me to see how the most widespread habits of our achievement culture are alarmingly exclusionary and ableist, making those who can’t live up to narrow standards of achievement feel lost and without purpose.
The definitive book on the rise of “toxic achievement culture” overtaking our kids' and parents' lives, and a new framework for fighting back
In the ever more competitive race to secure the best possible future, today’s students face unprecedented pressure to succeed. They jam-pack their schedules with AP classes, fill every waking hour with resume-padding activities, and even sabotage relationships with friends to “get ahead.” Family incomes and schedules are stretched to the breaking point by tutoring fees and athletic schedules. Yet this drive to optimize performance has only resulted in skyrocketing rates of…
Life well-being has many domains beyond finances, including family, friends, health, work, education, religion, and more. I know that financial well-being is necessary for life well being but it is not sufficient. Our older daughter lives with bipolar illness. Our life well-being was decimated years ago when my daughter’s illness was diagnosed. But we’ve learned to alleviate well-being injuries in one domain from well-being medicine from the same domain and from other domains. Our younger daughter loves her sister and cares for her, and our ample finances domain lets us support our older daughter without constraining our own budget.
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.
An illuminating, in-depth look at competition in diverse suburban high schools, where parents are often determined to ensure that their children remain at the head of the class.
The American suburb conjures an image of picturesque privilege: manicured lawns, quiet streets, and-most important to parents-high-quality schools. These elite enclaves are also historically white, allowing many white Americans to safeguard their privileges by using public schools to help their children enter top colleges. That's changing, however, as Asian professionals increasingly move into wealthy suburban areas to give their kids that same leg up for their college applications and future careers.
I’ve been working with words for over 25 years, as a writer and editor in publishing houses, design studios, and now as a freelance. I help everyone from big brands and small businesses through to academics and consultants get their ideas out of their heads and on to the page. I was an original co-founder of ProCopywriters, the UK alliance for commercial writers. I’ve written and self-published four books, the most recent of which is How to Write Clearly. The books I’ve chosen all helped me to write as clearly as I can—not least when writing about writing itself. I hope they help you too!
I bought this when I saw it recommended online by a famous writer—and I’m very glad I did.
The title is apposite, since this is less of an all-encompassing writing guide, more of a toolbox of 55 practical ideas to help you write better. Some are about the basics, while others are ways to give your text a compelling structure or a touch of extra polish. Away from the actual hands-on craft, Clark also recommends 11 useful habits to help you become a better writer.
Buy it, keep it on your shelf, and dip in whenever you need a new direction or a dose of inspiration.
Tools Not Rules' says Roy Peter Clark, vice president and senior scholar at the Poynter Institute, the esteemed school for journalists and teachers of journalists. Clark believes that everyone can write well with the help of a handful of useful tools that he has developed over decades of writing and teaching. If you google 'Roy Peter Clark, Writing Tools', you'll get an astonishing 1.25 million hits. That's because journalists everywhere rely on his tips to help them write well every day - in fact he fields emails from around the world from grateful writers.
I’m a historian who wants to understand the big picture as best I can. And while occasionally I can clear my schedule enough to read a 1,000pp book, realistically that won’t happen often so I am always on the alert for short books that aim to provide what I am looking for: a coherent vision of the whole of human history. That’s asking a lot of an author, but these five do it well.
This is the briefest of all on my list, at 92 pages. It doesn’t so much narrate world history for you, but structures it. Christian is a pioneer of what is called Big History, which situates human history inside the history of life on earth, inside earth history, inside the history of the Universe. He gives a taste of that approach here, but the main message is his organization of human historical experience into three main eras: the era of foragers, the agrarian era, and the modern era. What separates one from the next, above all else, is the way humans got energy from their surroundings. Very easy to read.
“I first became an avid student of David Christian by watching his course, Big History, on DVD, and so I am very happy to see his enlightening presentation of the world’s history captured in these essays. I hope it will introduce a wider audience to this gifted scientist and teacher.” —Bill Gates A great historian can make clear the connections between the first Homo sapiens and today’s version of the species, and a great storyteller can make those connections come alive. David Christian is both, and This Fleeting World: A Short History of Humanity, makes the journey—from the earliest foraging…
I'm passionate about understanding and fixing how we teach and learn for a simple reason: My own journey as a learner was very nearly cut short. While attending one of the most competitive universities in India, I witnessed firsthand what can happen when a once-promising student runs into learning roadblocks. I nearly gave up on my academic career, only to be saved by—of all things—a hands-on, corporate training program. As I moved back into academia, it became my goal, first as an educator and later as MIT’s Vice President for Open Learning, to empower how we teach and learn with findings from cutting-edge research. And to avail these possibilities to as many learners as possible.
There has lately been an unfortunate tendency among educational observers and policymakers to reduce the value proposition of higher ed to purely measurable metrics: money spent; time spent; money earned. In this sort of analysis, the hard-nosed science and technology subjects tend to come out on top. Those who would speak for the humanities and arts, meanwhile, make the valid but sometimes unsatisfying point that there are benefits—perhaps less readily measurable but still very real and of significant personal and social value—to softer-edged subjects. The goal of TheEvidence Liberal Arts Needsis simple: to correct this asymmetry by measuring what was previously obscure. By the end of this book, readers will be convinced of the true and lasting value of the liberal arts tradition in higher education.
Empirical evidence for the value of a liberal arts education: how and why it has a lasting impact on success, leadership, altruism, learning, and fulfillment.
In ongoing debates over the value of a college education, the role of the liberal arts in higher education has been blamed by some for making college expensive, impractical, and even worthless. Defenders argue that liberal arts education makes society innovative, creative, and civic-minded. But these qualities are hard to quantify, and many critics of higher education call for courses of study to be strictly job-specific. In this groundbreaking book, Richard Detweiler, drawing on interviews…
I began as an activist in high school, knocking on doors to enlist support for clean water and air, and more recently, for my favorite candidates for local, state, and federal office. Some of my most meaningful work was as a lawyer and volunteer on land conservation deals for an agricultural land trust. Fiction has an amazing power to recharge us and to shift our perspectives to imagine the world differently. My favorite books are always ones that teach me something interesting. My recent activism has been motivated by my frustration with our political process, including the 2010 Supreme Court case of Citizens United declaring corporations to be “persons” under the law.
This story about three restless college students at a liberal arts enclave in the southwestern desert who become embroiled in a protest to stop a pipeline reminded me of my days as a malcontent at the University of Colorado Boulder. When the FBI comes to town in pursuit of an alum wanted for “politically motivated crimes of property,” rumor has it that undercover agents are enrolled in classes, making the college dating scene that much stranger. The characters variously discover a passion for activism, the seduction of the unknown, and their own voices. This book is fun, interesting, and evocative.
In the tinder-dry Southwest, three roommates—students at Deep Canyon College, known for its radical politics—are looking for love, adventure, and the promise of a bigger life that led them West.
But when the FBI comes to town in pursuit of an alum wanted for “politically motivated crimes of property,” rumor has it that undercover agents are enrolled in classes, making the college dating scene just a bit more sketchy than usual.
Katie, an incoming freshman, will discover a passion for activism that will put her future in jeopardy; Jenna, in her second semester, will find herself seduced by deception; and…
As a wannabe rockstar studying philosophy and mathematics, never in my wildest nightmare did I imagine I would one day earn a living traveling the world, helping corporate managers become better bosses. But in unexpected ways, all the different strands of my interests and passions have woven together into a work-life well lived, with over two decades of experience and contemplation distilled down into this book I have co-written with my friend and business partner, Bjorn Billhardt, CEO of Abilitie.
This book is so many things at once. It’s a history of management education. It’s a damning indictment of the consulting world. It’s an acerbic memoir of life as a consultant that had me laughing out loud.
But what resonated most with me is that it’s also a profound and rigorous argument for why business schools are not the right place to learn about management and that the traditional liberal arts give you more skills and mental models for assuming responsibility for leading an organization.
Fresh from Oxford with a degree in philosophy and no particular interest in business, Matthew Stewart might not have seemed a likely candidate to become a consultant. But soon he was telling veteran managers how to run their companies.
In narrating his own ill-fated (and often hilarious) odyssey at a top-tier firm, Stewart turns the consultant's merciless, penetrating eye on the management industry itself. The Management Myth offers an insightful romp through the entire history of thinking about management, a withering critique of pseudoscience in management theory, and a clear explanation of why the MBA usually amounts to so much…
