“Know thyself”—it’s one of the Delphic maxims inscribed on the Temple of Apollo and a sentiment that resurfaces over the centuries, in everything from philosophy and the self-help aisle to attempts to solve today’s problems by revisiting the patterns of history.
It’s also easier said than done. The self is evasive, shifting, never quite complete—and continuously informed by the structures that surround it.
Books like those gathered here serve as emissaries of self-reflection: a stark medical diagnosis, a democracy seemingly on the precipice of collapse, a motto carved above a university gate. Each offers a vantage point to what it means to live deliberately.
Only a Little While Here by María Ospina, Ph.D. ’09, translated by Heather Cleary (Scribner, $28)
Two dogs, a songbird, a beetle, and a porcupine—these are the intimate lives that Only a Little While Here bears witness to. Winner of Colombia’s National Novel Award, Ospina’s novel takes us on lyrical, interwoven journeys of migration and abandonment in this work of ecological fiction. Somewhere along the way, we start to see ourselves a little better, too.
Coding Capitalism: Computers and the Remaking of the Postwar US Economy by Devin Kennedy, Ph.D. ’19 (Columbia, $30 paperback)
Kennedy, who teaches history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, places the pursuit of economic order at the heart of early developments in computing. The book begins in the aftermath of World War II and the first attempts to stabilize the U.S. economy using computers and ends with the 1987 Black Monday stock market crash, recording many political, economic, and cultural shifts in how computers were viewed along the way. Coding Capitalism provides a complex but illuminating prologue to the digital age and the current entanglements of Big Tech, politics, and capitalism.
Gates of Harvard Yard, edited by Blair Kamin, NF ’13 (Harvard, $22.95)
“Enter to grow in wisdom.” “Depart to serve better thy country and thy kind.” The inscriptions on either side of Harvard Yard’s Dexter Gate feel equal parts aspiration and contractual obligation. Built between 1889 and 2020, the Yard’s 25 gates emerge here as time capsules of shifting architectural styles and ideologies that interact with the present around them. Kamin, a former Nieman fellow, supplements this new edition with an essay on the children’s literature-themed Peter J. Solomon Gate, erected in 2020, and a new afterword.
Ugly: A Letter to My Daughter by Stephanie Fairyington, Ed.M. ’01 (Pantheon, $28)
“What looks like agency is often sub--mission”—this subtle provocation permeates the pages of Ugly, where authenticity and identity remain fickle friends. Part cultural unpacking of “ugliness” throughout history, part memoir of queer motherhood, Ugly is still figuring it out, and that’s the point. Writing as much for herself as for the daughter whom she’s addressing, Fairyington invites readers to self-interrogate, but to do so with empathy.
Liar’s Dice: A Novel by Juliet Faithfull ’83, Ed.M. ’86 (Random House, $30)
This story of identical twins separated by circumstance unfolds against the vivid backdrop of 1970s Brazil under military dictator Emílio Garrastazu Médici. For Dolores, uncovering her sister Mita’s fate becomes inseparable from her own coming of age. Inspired in part by Faithfull’s own life, her debut novel beautifully captures the disorienting interplay of family secrets, memory, and identity.
Fed Up: What Evolution Reveals About Food, Diet, Health, and Eating Well by Daniel Lieberman (Knopf, $35)
“What should I eat?” It’s the eternal question that makes monsters of us all. Lieberman, Lerner professor of biological sciences and professor of human evolutionary biology, argues that evolution has not prepared us well to answer that question in an age of abundance. Rejecting prescriptive answers, he surveys dietary lifestyles and fads—from vegetarianism to paleo and intermittent fasting—equipping readers to navigate them with curiosity rather than dogma.
Catching Sight: How a Guide Dog Helped Me See Myself by Deni Elliott, Ed.D. ’84, with Graham Buck (Beacon, $30)
“This is a book about taking personal responsibility and about how people should treat other people and dogs,” Elliott writes, setting a broader expectation for a narrative that blends memoir with an introduction to the guide dog training world. Catching Sight’s narrative does not quite achieve the synergy that Elliott and her guide dog Alberta do. But its strength resides in the tensions between self-knowledge and authenticity: a scholar of ethics confronting her own blindness after years of adaptation and denial.
Reboot: AI and the Race to Save Democracy by Beth Simone Noveck ’92, A.M. ’92 (Yale, $32.50)
Intentional design helps separate democracy from, say, mob rule. According to Reboot, it’s also the key to harnessing AI to enhance information gathering, expand participation, and increase government transparency, strengthening collaborative democracy rather than accelerating its demise. Noveck, the former U.S. deputy chief technology officer and the first chief AI strategist for the state of New Jersey, offers a cautiously optimistic yet urgent blueprint.
Homesick for a World Unknown: The Life of George B. Schaller by Miriam Horn ’85 (Penguin, $40)
What possesses a 26-year-old graduate student to abandon the human world to study gorillas in the deepest wilderness? Access to field journals spanning 70 years and six years of subject interviews help illuminate the fascinating life of leading field biologist and naturalist George B. Schaller, who is now 93. Homesick reads like a well-executed magazine profile thanks to Horn’s ability to capture the quiet intensity of Schaller, a subject known for his “world-class taciturnity.”
The Making and Breaking of the American Constitution: A Thousand-Year History by Mark Peterson ’83, Ph.D. ’93 (Princeton, $29.95)
On the 250th anniversary of American independence, Peterson invites us to examine the roots of the nation and the ways it might persevere, tracing the Constitution’s ideas back to British political traditions and the “Domesday Book” (the eleventh-century manuscript record of the Great Survey of much of England and parts of Wales). His sweeping history reveals how inherited structures now sit uneasily within modern political realities, sharpening the sense of an ongoing constitutional dilemma.
The Mysterious World of the Bull Kelp Forest by Josie Iselin ’84, illustrated by Ellen Litwiller (Heyday, $26)
This book is dedicated to “the growing cadre of kelp forest enthusiasts.” If you don’t currently count yourself among them, fear not. Writer Iselin and illustrator Litwiller hope to capture the main-character energy of bull kelp, a fast-growing seaweed described as “surprising, opportunistic, undervalued, foundational, resilient, and vulnerable.” Through profiles of 13 interconnected species that live in these ecosystems, such as otters and urchins, Iselin establishes the rapid decline of bull kelp forests as an important piece of a broader ecological puzzle involving biodiversity and climate change.
Our Minds Were Always Free: A History of How Black Brilliance Was Exploited—and the Fight to Retake Control by Lisa E. Davis ’81 (Simon & Schuster, $29)
In this fascinating legal and cultural history, Davis, an attorney specializing in intellectual property law, confronts how the handling of copyrights and patents in the U.S. have
often both appropriated and devalued Black creativity. From household names such as Thelonious Monk to lesser-known innovators such as Onesimus, an enslaved West African who introduced Cotton Mather to smallpox inoculation in eighteenth-century Boston, Davis exposes how failures to acknowledge and compensate Black creators legally and historically have also sustained cultural myths of Black inferiority even as music, art, and technology have relied on Black ingenuity for profit and inspiration.
