Book List

Spring 2025 Book List

*Deadline to sign up is January 24, 2025

Non-Fiction

The Apothecary's Wife: The Hidden History of Medicine and How It Became a Commodity by Karen Bloom Gevirtz (Medical/ Women's History)

A groundbreaking genealogy of for-profit healthcare and an urgent reminder that centering women's history offers vital opportunities for shaping the future.

The running joke in Europe for centuries was that anyone in a hurry to die should call the doctor. As far back as ancient Greece, physicians were notorious for administering painful and often fatal treatments—and charging for the privilege. For the most effective treatment, the ill and injured went to the women in their lives. This system lasted hundreds of years. It was gone in less than a century.

Contrary to the familiar story, medication did not improve during the Scientific Revolution. Yet somehow, between 1650 and 1740, the domestic female and the physician switched places in the cultural consciousness: she became the ineffective, potentially dangerous quack, he the knowledgeable, trustworthy expert. The professionals normalized the idea of paying them for what people already got at home without charge, laying the foundation for Big Pharma and today’s global for-profit medication system. A revelatory history of medicine, The Apothecary’s Wife challenges the myths of the triumph of science and instead uncovers the fascinating truth. Drawing on a vast body of archival material, Karen Bloom Gevirtz depicts the extraordinary cast of characters who brought about this transformation. She also explores domestic medicine’s values in responses to modern health crises, such as the eradication of smallpox, and what benefits we can learn from these events.

346 pages

Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High by Joseph Grenny, et al (Communication Skills)

The book that revolutionized business communications has been updated for today’s workplace. Crucial Conversations provides powerful skills to ensure every conversation―especially difficult ones―leads to the results you want. Written in an engaging and witty style, it teaches readers how to be persuasive rather than abrasive, how to get back to productive dialogue when others blow up or clam up, and it offers powerful skills for mastering high-stakes conversations, regardless of the topic or person.

This new edition addresses issues that have arisen in recent years. You’ll learn how to:

Respond when someone initiates a Crucial Conversation with you
Identify and address the lag time between identifying a problem and discussing it
Communicate more effectively across digital mediums

When stakes are high, opinions vary, and emotions run strong, you have three choices: Avoid a crucial conversation and suffer the consequences; handle the conversation poorly and suffer the consequences; or apply the lessons and strategies of Crucial Conversations and improve relationships and results. Whether they take place at work or at home, with your coworkers or your spouse, Crucial Conversations have a profound impact on your career, your happiness, and your future. With the skills you learn in this book, you'll never have to worry about the outcome of a Crucial Conversation again.

304 pages

A Pedagogy of Kindness by Catherine J. Denial (Higher Education)

Academia is not, by and large, a kind place. Individualism and competition are what count. But without kindness at its core, Catherine Denial suggests, higher education fails students and instructors—and its mission—in critical ways.

Part manifesto, part teaching memoir, part how-to guide, A Pedagogy of Kindness urges higher education to get aggressive about instituting kindness, which Denial distinguishes from niceness. Having suffered beneath the weight of just “getting along,” instructors need to shift every part of what they do to prioritizing care and compassion—for students as well as for themselves.

A Pedagogy of Kindness articulates a fresh vision for teaching, one that focuses on ensuring justice, believing people, and believing in people. Offering evidence-based insights and drawing from her own rich experiences as a professor, Denial offers practical tips for reshaping syllabi, assessing student performance, and creating trust and belonging in the classroom. Her suggestions for concrete, scalable actions outline nothing less than a transformational discipline—one in which, together, we create bright new spaces, rooted in compassion, in which all engaged in teaching and learning might thrive.

164 pages

The Small and the Mighty: Twelve Unsung Americans Who Changed the Course of History, from the Founding to the Civil Rights Movement by Sharon McMahon (History)

In The Small and the Mighty, Sharon McMahon proves that the most remarkable Americans are often ordinary people who didn’t make it into the textbooks. Not the presidents, but the telephone operators. Not the aristocrats, but the school teachers. Through meticulous research, she discovers history’s unsung characters and brings their rich, riveting stories to light for the first time.

You’ll meet a woman astride a white horse riding down Pennsylvania Ave, a young boy detained at a Japanese incarceration camp, a formerly enslaved woman on a mission to reunite with her daughter, a poet on a train, and a teacher who learns to work with her enemies. More than one thing is bombed, and multiple people surprisingly become rich. Some rich with money, and some wealthy with things that matter more.

This is a book about what really made America – and Americans – great. McMahon’s cast of improbable champions will become familiar friends, lighting the path we journey in our quest to make the world more just, peaceful, good, and free.

320 pages

Fiction

Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez (Hispanic American Literature)

1985. Anita de Monte, a rising star in the art world, is found dead in New York City; her tragic death is the talk of the town. Until it isn’t. By 1998 Anita’s name has been all but forgotten―certainly by the time Raquel, a third-year art history student is preparing her final thesis. On College Hill, surrounded by privileged students whose futures are already paved out for them, Raquel feels like an outsider. Students of color, like her, are the minority there, and the pressure to work twice as hard for the same opportunities is no secret.

But when Raquel becomes romantically involved with a well-connected older art student, she finds herself unexpectedly rising up the social ranks. As she attempts to straddle both worlds, she stumbles upon Anita’s story, raising questions about the dynamics of her own relationship, which eerily mirrors that of the forgotten artist.

Moving back and forth through time and told from the perspectives of both women, Anita de Monte Laughs Last is a propulsive, witty examination of power, love, and art, daring to ask who gets to be remembered and who is left behind in the rarefied world of the elite.

352 pages

The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon (Historical Fiction/Mystery)

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • GMA BOOK CLUB PICK • AN NPR BOOK OF THE YEAR • From the New York Times bestselling author of I Was Anastasia and Code Name Hélène comes a gripping historical mystery inspired by the life and diary of Martha Ballard, a renowned 18th-century midwife who defied the legal system and wrote herself into American history.

"Fans of Outlander’s Claire Fraser will enjoy Lawhon’s Martha, who is brave and outspoken when it comes to protecting the innocent. . . impressive."—The Washington Post

"Once again, Lawhon works storytelling magic with a real-life heroine." —People Magazine

Maine, 1789: When the Kennebec River freezes, entombing a man in the ice, Martha Ballard is summoned to examine the body and determine cause of death. As a midwife and healer, she is privy to much of what goes on behind closed doors in Hallowell. Her diary is a record of every birth and death, crime and debacle that unfolds in the close-knit community. Months earlier, Martha documented the details of an alleged rape committed by two of the town’s most respected gentlemen—one of whom has now been found dead in the ice. But when a local physician undermines her conclusion, declaring the death to be an accident, Martha is forced to investigate the shocking murder on her own.

Over the course of one winter, as the trial nears, and whispers and prejudices mount, Martha doggedly pursues the truth. Her diary soon lands at the center of the scandal, implicating those she loves, and compelling Martha to decide where her own loyalties lie.

Clever, layered, and subversive, Ariel Lawhon’s newest offering introduces an unsung heroine who refused to accept anything less than justice at a time when women were considered best seen and not heard. The Frozen River is a thrilling, tense, and tender story about a remarkable woman who left an unparalleled legacy yet remains nearly forgotten to this day.

448 pages

Marina by Carlos Ruiz Zafón (Hispanic Literature)

En la Barcelona de 1980 Óscar Drai sueña despierto, deslumbrado por los palacetes modernistas cercanos al internado en el que estudia. En una de sus escapadas conoce a Marina, que comparte con Óscar la aventura de adentrarse en un enigma doloroso del pasado de la ciudad. Un misterioso personaje de la posguerra se propuso el mayor desafío imaginable, pero su ambición lo arrastró por sendas siniestras cuyas consecuencias debe pagar alguien todavía hoy.

«Quince años más tarde, la memoria de aquel día ha vuelto a mí. He visto a aquel muchacho vagando entre las brumas de la estación de Francia y el nombre de Marina se ha encendido de nuevo como una herida fresca. Todos tenemos un secreto encerrado bajo llave en el ático del alma. Éste es el mío.»

304 pages

We Burn Daylight by Bret Anthony Johnston (Historical Fiction)

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • An epic novel of star-crossed lovers set in a doomsday cult on the Texas prairie that asks: What would you sacrifice for the person you love?

“Symphonic and suspenseful . . . In an epic act of empathy, Bret Anthony Johnston inhabits every point of view, from doomed devotees to perplexed law enforcement.”—Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of March

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice

Waco, Texas, 1993. People from all walks of life have arrived to follow the Lamb’s gospel—signing over savings and pensions, selling their homes and shedding marriages. They’ve come here to worship at the feet of a former landscaper turned prophet who is preparing for the End Times with a staggering cache of weapons. Jaye’s mother is one of his newest and most devout followers, though Jaye herself has suspicions about the Lamb’s methods—and his motives.

Roy is the youngest son of the local sheriff, a fourteen-year-old boy with a heart of gold and a nose for trouble who falls for Jaye without knowing of her mother’s attachment to the man who is currently making his father’s life hell. The two teenagers are drawn to each other immediately and completely, but their love may have dire consequences for their families. The Lamb has plans for them all—especially Jaye—and as his preaching and scheming move them closer and closer to unthinkable violence, Roy risks everything to save Jaye.

Based on the true events that unfolded thirty years ago during the siege of the Branch Davidian compound, Bret Anthony Johnston’s We Burn Daylight is an unforgettable love story, a heart-pounding literary page turner, and a profound exploration of faith, family, and what it means to truly be saved.