What are you reading this summer? Several LMU School of Education faculty members share what they recommend for summer reading. Here are their top picks:
Sheri A. Atwater
Director & Professor, Counseling Program
Daniel Deronda by George Eliot
“In each of Eliot’s novels, she intersperses quick-witted English dialogue with philosophical conundrums popular during the 19th century, and portrays her protagonists with a richness of mixed emotion and feeling. Daniel Deronda is as worthy a novel now – perhaps more so given our political climate—as it was when it was written 140 years ago, as it follows Daniel’s quest for understanding his unknown (and hitherto secret) Jewish lineage and the oppression and strength of a cultural and religious minority in an era where overt anti-Semitic references were accepted and normalized within upper-class English society. I recommend it to all those who aim to study multicultural counseling, as Daniel ponders the ways in which best to help those closest to him through the intersectionality of multiple identities in order to uncover a truer sense of being. Overall, this novel conveys the joy, shame, frustration, and exhilaration that comes with ultimately ‘knowing thyself’.”
Ernesto Colín
Associate Professor, Specialized Programs in Urban Education
Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann
“It is a captivating, deeply researched non-fiction that fits into a long chain of tragic American racism, greed, and murder on Native American lands and the nascence of the FBI.”
The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit by Michael Finkel
“I first heard the author tell the abridged tale on the Snap Judgment storytelling podcast and am excited about getting into the non-fiction details of a person who chose to live alone and survive in the woods of Maine for 25 years in modern times with no human contact nor fire, perfectly content.”
Brian Leung
Professor & Director, School Psychology
Wealth, Poverty, and Politics by Thomas Sowell
“An economist’s perspective on these topics from an international context – a different angle and thought provoking.”
William D. Parham
Chair, Department of Educational Support Services
Professor, Counseling Program
Tears We Cannot Stop: A White Sermon to White America by Michael Eric Dyson
“An emotionally evocative, straight-forward, vivid, haunting and poignant treatise on race-relations in America. The juxtaposition of America’s racial legacy to current social, political, economic and educational practices is quite compelling and positions the readership to ask, ‘0Has America failed at leveling the playing field or has it succeeded at keeping the field not level?’”
The Price of the Ticket by James Baldwin
“Personal, prophetic, illuminating, no-nonsense, searing, stinging and factual are just a few of the descriptors that define this wonderful collection of works by James Baldwin. This is a must-have volume of intellectually stimulating perspectives on race in America that should be required reading within all academic programs claiming to prepare their graduates as advocates for social justice.
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coats
“This brilliant piece of work is written in the form of a letter from a father to his son wherein the father shares perspectives about the world his son has inherited and will be tasked to navigate. This book is a deeply personal expression of love and protectiveness of a father for his son an also doubles as an invitation for honest self-reflection and to commit to discovering the treasures that are hidden in every trial.”
Francisco Ramos
Professor, Department of Elementary and Secondary Education
The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds by Michael Lewis
“A fascinating account of the friendship between Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, and the extraordinary impact of their investigations about individuals’ decision-making process.”