How do we get from A to B? The entries below lend a sense of urgency to this basic question. These books present journeys—ongoing and historical, sometimes mythic, and often foundational. Some interrogate systems that led us to where we are, while others seek solutions to dilemmas before us. Within their pages are needless wars, societies desensitized to moral abuses, powerful cults of personalities, oppressive systems that shape identities, and distractions harnessed for profit. As Virgil reminds us, the descent into hell is easy.
But there is also light, literal and figurative. The sun can save, the earth can prevail—maybe—if we stop devouring it. Courage is a skill anyone can cultivate. Unforeseen wrongs are, often by their very design, amendable. And if all else fails, a bit of introspection—and a dose of nostalgia—might help us remember who we are and where we need to go. —gabriella gage
How to Be Bold: The Surprising Science of Everyday Courage, by Ranjay Gulati, Ph.D. ’93 (Harper Business, $32).
From the author’s opening account of his mother’s near-gunpoint encounter, the case studies in How to Be Bold epitomize feats of courage while grounding them in the attainable. An expert in organizational behavior, Gulati, the Lawrence MBA class of 1942 professor of business administration, provides a user-friendly playbook for cultivating boldness through researched, real-life examples. Within this framework, courage is learned behavior; fears can be recognized and mitigated; and wielders of this mindset become architects of their own destiny, able to act decisively in the face of risk.
We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution, by Jill Lepore (Liveright, $39.99).
“Brittle”—it’s not the first time Lepore has used this word to describe one of America’s oldest and most storied foundational documents. And it likely won’t be the last. We the People delivers an intro course on the origins of U.S. constitutional law, through the kind of compelling historical narrative that is characteristic of the Kemper professor of American history and New Yorker staff writer. She examines the enduring nature—and the limitations—of the ideas the nation was founded upon, showing how they’ve been reinterpreted to solve existing problems and exploring whether they can account for future ones. The concept of amendment is fundamental to the Constitution—and Lepore’s argument.
McNamara at War: A New History, by Philip Taubman and William Taubman ’62 (W.W. Norton, $39.99).
A war with oneself takes center stage in this psychological portrait of Robert McNamara, the controversial former U.S. secretary of defense who steered the escalation of the Vietnam War. The Taubman brothers argue that a better understanding of him—and his ability to gain considerable influence over two American presidents—makes this a worthwhile, timely study. What’s new: access to previously unexamined correspondence among McNamara’s inner circle, and a deeper exploration of his surprising friendship with Jacqueline Kennedy.
The Intellectual Origins of American Slavery: English Ideas in the Early Modern Atlantic World, by John Samuel Harpham, Ph.D. ’19 (Harvard, $35).
How does an immoral institution gain a foothold in a supposedly civilized society? What discourse and logic are used to embrace it? Harpham, a lecturer on social studies, explores the intellectual origins of American slavery, examining its often-overlooked grounding in ancient traditions like Roman law that helped shape early modern English justifications. In Harpham’s telling, ideas weren’t the central motivation—economic interests still remain front and center—but they did help legitimize the practice in the eyes of its architects, despite clear evidence of its dehumanizing nature.
The Aeneid, by Virgil, translation by Scott McGill and Susannah Wright, Ph.D. ’24 (Liveright, $39.99).
One may ask: do we really need another translation of The Aeneid? Those asking are clearly not poets (and that’s OK, really!). They forget that to capture the ephemeral rhythm of the original is often a life’s work, as is the quest to channel the same muse invoked by Virgil in the epic’s opening lines. This first collaborative English translation utilizes unrhymed iambic pentameter, marrying accessibility with elevation while aiming to preserve the pace of Virgil’s Latin, similar to the way Emily Wilson approached Homer’s Greek in her groundbreaking translation of The Odyssey (2017). This latest vehicle for Aeneas’s journey includes new maps, extensive notes, and, fittingly, an introduction by Wilson.
Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization, by Bill McKibben ’82 (W.W. Norton, $29.99).
Followers of McKibben’s work have come to expect a thoughtfully delivered dose of reality when it comes to our climate prospects. Amid U.S. policy regressions and the hottest temperatures on record, Here Comes the Sun gives us a look at the bright side, literally: the solar revolution. Recently, solar and wind have scaled faster than previous technologies. The costs have fallen, and China is leading the charge, generating record-producing amounts of clean energy. McKibben reports on a moment when humanity potentially “took a decisive turn towards the sun” and calls us to embrace it as the planet’s best fighting chance.
We Are Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate, by Michael Grunwald ’92 (Simon & Schuster, $29.99).
A soccer field’s worth of carbon-absorbing tropical forest. That’s what’s lost every six seconds thanks to mostly agriculturally driven deforestation, according to journalist Michael Grunwald. In We Are Eating the Earth, agricultural interests, technology, and those fighting uphill battles against “bad science and bad politics” all converge on our dinner plates. Grunwald looks beyond the toll of fossil fuels to another segment of Earth’s existential dilemma, one that is decades behind the clean energy movement in solution-seeking: the relentless expansion of farmland into nature and the simultaneous need to feed humanity.
As a Jew: Reclaiming Our Story from Those Who Blame, Shame, and Try to Erase Us by Sarah Hurwitz ’99, J.D. ’04 (HarperOne, $32).
What does it mean to be Jewish, and how has antisemitism shaped and refracted that identity? These questions underlie As a Jew, a memoir-meets-reclamation of Judaism in a modern world where attempts at its erasure persist alongside the resiliency of its traditions. Hurwitz, a former White House speechwriter, takes the reader on her hard-fought spiritual awakening, tracing the historical roots of antisemitism and interrogating its reverberations today in everything from the rise of secular, cultural Judaism to the rhetoric of anti-Zionism.
The Disturbing Profane: Hip Hop, Blackness, and the Sacred, by Joseph R. Winters ’99 (Duke, $25.95).
From an early scene in which 2Pac’s “Dear Mama” plays at a nightclub during an impromptu homecoming for a Black man recently released from prison, The Disturbing Profane unpacks visceral and contextual elements of hip hop, capturing its “interplay between agony and excitement.” We learn how the genre aligns with commodifying paradigms in the music industry as it also disrupts them, part of what the author describes as its “volatile sacrality.” Winters, an associate professor of religious studies and African and African American studies at Duke University, explores these tensions through the “sacred-profane” dichotomy and looks at society’s urges to oversimplify and disempower the genre.
Every Screen on the Planet: The War Over TikTok, by Emily Baker-White, J.D. ’15 (W.W. Norton, $31.99).
How did the Chinese company ByteDance build the video platform that’s become a generation’s companion of choice —one “trained meticulously” by the user’s interests—and in the process become the world’s most valuable start-up? Baker-White, a lawyer turned investigative journalist, reports on TikTok’s rise, unleashing a propulsive narrative that feels dangerous (as an ongoing federal investigation digs into allegations that TikTok spied on journalists, including Baker-White) and disquieting as it reveals the lengths world leaders have gone to harness its power. “It’s inevitable that strongmen would come for a tool that could seize and hold so much human attention,” writes Baker-White. Cue: shudder.
The Master of Eliot House: John H. Finley, Jr.’s Life, Times, and Legacy at Harvard, by Constantine A. Valhouli and (the late) Nelson W. Aldrich Jr. ’57 (privately printed, $85).
There’s something both fancifully nostalgic and surprisingly timely about a book profiling the one-time embodiment of Harvard, at a time when that identity—and its value—is contested. This is the first in-depth portrait of John H. Finley, Jr., the influential Eliot House leader (1941-1968) at a time when faculty deans were called “house masters.” From navigating clashes with McCarthyism and attacks on Harvard’s autonomy to spearheading its General Education program and establishing Eliot House as a who’s who of literature and culture, Finley becomes the microcosm of Eliot House, and Eliot the microcosm of Harvard. While regaling the memory of a bygone era can feel distant or dated, especially to those who wouldn’t embody the “Harvard Man” of Finley’s world, there are relevant, vivid connections between the zeitgeist captured in its pages and the modern University as we know it.
