Bookshelf

(Harvard Education Press, 2024).

Drawing on extensive research and case studies, the authors outline successful strategies for whole child and whole community support that can help school systems meet broader student needs in times of disruption. They focus on Integrated Student Support (ISS), an approach to education policy and practice in which schools focus on attending to students’ basic physical, social, and emotional needs before learning occurs.

According to the publisher, the book “highlights how the planning, flexibility, and wraparound services central to ISS improve the capacity of education systems to confront a wide variety of emergency situations, from natural disasters to longstanding socioeconomic pressures such as unemployment, addiction, food scarcity, homelessness, and poverty. … Distilling the ISS model into actionable steps, from assessing community needs through maintaining a cohesive network of community assets, the work prepares educational institutions to help students, families, and communities weather the turbulence of challenging events.”

 Levine is a clinical professor and director of the Education Policy Program in Drexel University’s School of Education, where he cofounded the online Community Schools Hub.

 (She Writes Press, 2024).

Klara Lieberman is 49, single, a professor of archaeology at a small college in Maine — a contained person living a contained life. That was before she receives an unexpected letter from her estranged mother, Bessie, with the long-overdue news that her father is dead. What prompts her mother’s timing? The Polish government is giving financial reparations for land it stole from its Jewish citizens during World War II, and Bessie wants the money. Klara, on the other hand, wants answers about her father. She flies to Warsaw, determined to learn more.

Thus begins a journey — a story of family and heritage and self-discovery, of family ties and friendship, of second chances and healing told by Friedman, a psychotherapist with a specialty in women’s issues, family therapy, and trauma-focused therapy. This is her first novel.

As one reviewer aptly notes: “In this page-turning novel, Susan Weissbach Friedman integrates her experience as a trauma therapist with her gifts as a storyteller to share a beautiful story of healing and transformation. Klara’s personal journey is embedded seamlessly into a background that captures the traumatic impact of the Holocaust on Polish Jewish families. Friedman guides the reader back and forth from the depths of Klara’s wounded heart to the history of Poland beyond World War II, instilling hope in the reader that both the individual and the nation are capable of moving beyond a past of devastation toward a more optimistic future.”

(Basic Books, 2024).

Founded in 1919, the Communist Party USA championed peace, justice, and fairness in society. Its members organized powerful industrial unions, took a stand against racism, and moved the nation left. At the same time, the author notes, communists “maintained unwavering faith in the USSR’s claims to be a democratic workers’ state and came to be regarded as agents of a hostile foreign power.”

 In Reds, Isserman focuses on the contradictory nature of the history of the Communist movement that attracted egalitarian idealists and bred authoritarian zealots. Simply put, one reviewer described his book as “vital reading for anyone who wants to understand the promise and agony of the American left in the twentieth century.”

The author describes how he attempts to tell the story of American Communism “not as an encyclopedic, esoteric, or antiquarian dive into ‘Party history,’ but rather as an integral part of twentieth-century American history. Communists were an important part of that history, as social critics and agents of much-needed social change, and, for much of that time, as targets of official repression and mass hysteria. Understanding the causes for their triumphs and their failures might provide a measure of insight into the political challenges of our own era.”

(Cambridge University Press, 2024).

According to the publisher, “The study of gesture — the movements people make with their hands when talking — has grown into a well-established field, and research is still being pushed into exciting new directions. Bringing together a team of leading scholars, this handbook provides a comprehensive overview of gesture studies, combining historical overviews as well as current, concise snapshots of state-of-the-art, multidisciplinary research. … Attention is given to different theoretical and methodological frameworks for studying gesture, including semiotic, linguistic, cognitive, developmental, and phenomenological theories and observational, experimental, corpus linguistic, ethnographic, and computational methods. It also contains practical guidelines for gesture analysis along with surveys of empirical research. Wide ranging yet accessible, it is essential reading for academic researchers and students in linguistics and cognitive sciences.”

(Business Expert Press, 2024).

“Both our work and private lives require us to build new institutions or renovate old ones, from launching a business in your home to creating a new corporate division at work, from establishing a local charter school to organizing an athletic club with friends,” notes the publisher. But how does one ensure that all the resources necessary for a successful building project are within reach?

In The Institution Builder’s Toolbox, the author expertly advises readers on how to negotiate each of seven developmental phases necessary to build a robust institution, from articulating a clear vision to securing the resources to make it happen. 

 Salacuse is dean emeritus and distinguished professor emeritus of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. The author of 20 books, he has served as dean of two university graduate schools, president of three national professional organizations, and chair or lead director of 15 companies. 

(Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2024).

The author explores the psychology and philosophical significance of the ubiquitous social phenomenon known as awkwardness. “Our aversion to awkwardness mirrors our desire for inclusion. This explains its power to influence and silence us: as social creatures, we don’t want to mark ourselves as outsiders,” the publisher notes. “As a result, our fear of awkwardness inhibits critique and conversation, acting as an impediment to moral and social progress. Even the act of describing people as ‘awkward’ exacerbates existing inequities, by consigning them to a social status that gives them less access to the social goods (knowledge, confidence, social esteem) needed to navigate potentially awkward situations.”

(New York: Hachette Go, 2024).

 “How do I build a brand in today’s social media world?” That’s the question the author, the real estate broker and star of Bravo network’s Million Dollar Listing New York, answers in this, his third book. While the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has estimated that 50% of the workforce will be the gig economy by 2027, Serhant says no one is being taught the skills or ideas to be successful in this new marketplace. “They are being trained for the jobs of a decade ago or a world where there weren’t personal brands or so many small businesses that need to brand and market themselves,” he says.

(Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2024).

This book discusses the continuous spontaneous localization theory (CSL) the author created more than 30 years ago, saying it “changes quantum theory.” According to Pearle, when an experiment is performed, the apparatus registers one of a number of possible results. A repetition of the experiment will likely give another result. Each result occurs randomly, he says, and many repetitions of the same experiment reveal that each result has a definite probability of occurring. Though quantum theory allows one to predict the probability of occurrence for each result, it does not describe what actually happens — the occurrence of an individual result. Pearle maintains his CSL theory is an alteration of quantum theory that not only describes the occurrence of an individual result, but also explains that occurrence.

(Albany, N.Y.: King Jesus Press, 2024).

This book asks the question: “If you’re invited to the party and it’s not jumping, do you leave or stay and make the party?” Breland, the former longtime director of Hamilton’s Opportunities Programs, offers lessons for those seeking positive change to “embrace themselves, create new habits, and live the new behaviors that bring them incremental change they can believe in.” In other words, this book is a compilation of lessons to keep the party going.

(Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Special Publications, 2024).

The author, trustee professor of English emeritus at Ohio University, explores his life as a champion of the Bard and a fan of the Detroit Tigers. According to the publisher, “He saw his first Tigers game in the summer of 1950 (Hal Newhouser beat the Chicago White Sox) and his first Shakespeare play in 1953 (Alec Guinness as Richard III at Ontario’s Stratford Festival) and has spent almost 75 years enjoying and writing about the pleasures of play that each provides.