February 21' Books

Books that I've been reading based on my bad habit of reading 10 books at a time and gradually finishing over an extended period of time without trying to finish one at a time. My reading interests are usually all over the place but if I were to narrow it down, I would say that I'm usually into the realm of more: education, psychology, and occasionally socio-political. Not too much into fiction and autobiographical, though there's an exception with Obama's book.

So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo  Straight, direct to the point about how to engage in a discussion about race just about with anybody. Oluo breaks down the various entry points to the discussion like affirmative action, school to prison pipeline and cultural appropriation so that we have a better understanding of how to navigate these potentially volatile, yet needed discussions. More thoughts about this book you can see here. #race

Distracted by James Lang As someone in higher education, I always appreciate information on ways to improve the day to day approaches to teaching. Big fan of his previous work like "Small Teachings" which blew open the doors on my understanding of teaching with very practical and doable tasks. His new book here was oddly published during the pandemic so Lang is able to update his content to align with this current remote online modality. "Distracted" goes into the historical and biological basis on how distractions are fundamental to humans, which is something that never crossed my mind. It's not trying to eliminate or reduce distraction, but harnessing the power of distraction so that students can be more engaged. To allow phones or not- what technology policy should we implement in the classroom? #teaching

Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know by Adam Grant  Interesting book that covers how we need to rewire our brains so that we can develop the natural instincts to constantly rethink everything that we know. He provides a healthy dose of empirical research studies to demonstrate the dangers of not reexamining our biases. His book is timely considering the current sociopolitical times where people in this country can fall into severe tribalism due to these echo chambers propagated by the narrow representation of information through various things like social media and other platforms. Really reminds me of the book "Thinking Fast, and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman. Adam Grant is not only a great writer, but as a speaker he is widely interesting to hear and you can check him out in various podcasts as of late (Armchair Experts and Psychology Podcastt) #psychology

A Promised Land by Barack Obama As someone who generally does not read autobiographies, one of the few people that I've developed a deep interest over the years is number 44. His past writings before serving as President like "Audacity of Hope" and "Dreams of my Father" made me think that he was going to be a career writer rather than a full time politician. His book here focuses mainly on his life from serving as senator, the various campaign grind, and then finally his first 4 years as President. Brutal honesty delivered here on the impact on his personal and family life. Just hearing his reservations and doubts about stepping into his role is reason enough to read this book. You don't have to really be a political head to enjoy this book. Whether you supported him or not, it's just interesting to be able to step inside the shoes of a person serving as the U.S. President experiencing in real time of the massive political decision making required as part of the job, but also navigating through the meteoric rise in fame, for good or bad. #politics

Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization by Scott Barry Kaufman Part self-help and part academic, Kaufman paints a picture on how inherently we have within ourselves the innate ability to achieve our highest potential based on anecdotal and recent research findings. The highlight of this book, which I will go into more details is what we know and don't know about Maslow and let me say that I was utterly shock. Kaufman pays homage to Maslow throughout this book, but I have a new perspective on his work that's very inspired to say the least. 

As a subscriber of his podcast, Kaufman provides excellent insights on various topics of psychology with the baseline goal of understanding the human condition and ways that we can best realize our fullest potential. #psychology