Fans pick 76 books like The Immortality of Influence

By the time our children reach middle school their choice of friends (for better or worse) becomes increasingly beyond our reach. Queen Bees and Wannabes (a non-fiction book that inspired the feature film Mean Girls), was the first to blast wide open the dark, dirty secret of girls’ relational aggression.

This book offers a deep dive into what many of our daughters have experienced or are currently in the thick of. Rosalind Wiseman, a parenting educator and NY Times best-selling author, helps parents better understand the queen bees in their kids’ lives – why these girls manipulate their peers and how we can help our daughters manage their emotions and social expectations in healthy ways so they neither fall victim to a queen bee nor put on the crown themselves and victimize others.

Like the best memoirs, this one reads like a novel in that Arthur Fleischman and his wife and children are drawn with so much honesty and detail you’ll feel as if you know them, or know people like them. Daughter Carly, however, is less knowable, because her childhood diagnosis of autism, cognitive delay, and oral motor apraxia (difficulty easily coordinating and initiating movement of the jaw, lips, tongue, and soft palate) had left her unable to communicate.

Carly’s Voice was one of the early books to explore, first-hand, the challenges of living with autism for the autistic individual as well as her family. Through the determined efforts of her parents and therapists who refused to stop helping Carly reach her full potential, Carly learns to type! That changes everything. Readers are privileged to peek inside the thoughts, feelings, and quirky sense of humor of an inspiring young woman who… show more.

Dealing with disappointment and rejection is part of growing up. But our kids also face unique challenges and social stressors that did not exist when we were their age. That’s why it can be hard to give them the kind of help they really need in those moments when they feel particularly vulnerable. Dr. G, a family physician, international speaker and mom of four boys, has written a book to help us help our kids in compassionate and practical ways. Her goal ought to be a top parenting goal for everyone: Teach kids resilience – i.e., the ability to move through and beyond your emotions and figure out what your next best move will be. With resilience as a life skill, kids have what they need to rebound in the face of any setback.

Katherine Ellison is a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter. When she and her pre-teen son were both diagnosed with ADHD in the same year it became her personal and professional mission to find out as much as she could about this increasingly common diagnosis. Anyone who knows and loves someone who’s been diagnosed with ADHD would do well to read this book as a guide through the often bewildering landscape of ADHD treatments. As serious and personal as Buzz is, Ellison is a great writer and her memoir is equal parts science, expert interviews and analysis, parenting angst, and humor.

The brilliance of Shenk’s book is that even someone who didn’t know the basic rules of chess would be enthralled by the backdrops of the game he introduces to the reader. Chess is played around the world by hundreds of millions of people and Shenk delves into the reasons why the game has such perversely addictive appeal. 

Focused is a beautiful exploration of one girl’s experience coming to terms with an ADHD diagnosis. The writing is rich and filled with emotion, and I very much felt like I was living inside Clea’s head, which gave me incredible insights into her strengths and struggles. That she’s a gifted chess player perfectly illustrates for young readers that neurodiversity isn’t about being broken in any way, it’s not a reflection of intelligence or ability, but simply it’s another way of being in the world, one that requires finding the right tools. 

Harold Schonberg explores the nuances of what goes into creating a brilliant chess player across the vast history of chess. The characters he details within this gem of a book rival anything he assembled in his other breathtaking tomb on classical music, “The Lives Of Great Composers.” Schonberg’s backstories of the rogues gallery of chess great add such texture and nuance to the vast eccentricity at the heart of genius chess players and also highlights the times in which they lived so that they and it comes to life. Probably my favorite resource for my work with “The Grandmaster.”

Between 1920 and 1945, the strength of Soviet chess exploded, propelling Soviet players to the top of the chess world – a status held in a vice-like grip for many years after.

There was no more prestigious yearly event than the Soviet Championship, and its winner was of huge political importance: this player should demonstrate the superiority of the Soviet way of life to the decadent West.

Inevitably, the championships produced both amazing chess and great personal drama, and both aspects are beautifully documented by historian Sergey Voronkov in 3 volumes covering the period from 1920 to 1953, replete with photos, cartoons, and poems from the tournament reports of the era. 

On March 24, 1946, then-current world chess champion, Alexandre Alekhine, is supposed to be getting ready to defend his title against a Russian challenger. But, at age 53, Alekhine lies dead in his seaside hotel room in Estoril, Portugal. Alekhine appears to have been eating dinner alone in his room. A local doctor soon certifies he choked on a piece of meat.

Born in Moscow, handsome, married four times, master of multiple languages, widely travelled, Alekhine was caught behind enemy lines during World War II. To stay alive, he played for both Stalin and high-level Nazis. He drank to excess, smoked heavily, suffered from angina. Did he die of a heart attack, a stroke, choking on food, murder by the KGB, or partisans for his apparent sidling up to Nazis? Sceptics and chess fans have wondered. Maurensig recounts the chess master’s last days and summarizes the many aspects of a… show more.

Once you have some practice playing chess, studying endgames is one of the most important roads to improvement. Endgames are situations where many trades have already occurred, leaving few chessmen remaining on the board. In these positions the remaining pieces have a lot more room to roam, and since they have only a few teammates around them we can see more clearly how they operate, and what their strengths and weaknesses are. Famed New York coach Bruce Pandolfini, portrayed in the most famous chess film, Searching for Bobby Fischer, takes a subject mystifying to many and distills the essence of the most important endgames, with easy-to-understand diagrams and explanations. I was already a strong endgame player when I read this book, but I learned a lot and was so impressed, I’ve recommended it to students ever since.