Well Read These books and authors have been featured in recent campus book groups or at university events.
Lives in Limbo: Undocumented and Coming of Age in America By Roberto G. Gonzales
Between the World and Me By Ta-Nehisi Coates
The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future By Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway
Chasing Relevance: 6 Steps to Understand, Engage, and Maximize Next-Generation Leaders in the Workplace By Dan Negroni
Higher education is seen as the path to success in America. But what about for undocumented immigrants? Although the U.S. integrates child immigrants into K-12 schools, the students face an uncertain future after graduation. In his groundbreaking 12-year ethnographic study, Gonzales followed 150 undocumented young adults in Los Angeles. Whether they dropped out of school or made it to college, many of them ended up in the same place — dead-end jobs and a life on the outskirts of legality. Legislative efforts such as the Development, Relief, and Education of Alien Minors (DREAM) Act and the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program have tried to reform the U.S. immigration system. But, as “Lives in Limbo” shows, for many immigrant children, the American Dream becomes a nightmare.
What does the “single best writer on the subject of race in the United States” think about this complex and seemingly intractable social issue? Coates shared his insights most recently in “Between the World and Me,” which earned the National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His memoir takes the form of a series of letters to his teenage son, who witnessed through the media “Eric Garner choked to death for selling cigarettes, … Renisha McBride … shot for seeking help, … and men in uniform drive by and murder Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old child whom they were oathbound to protect.” Through this profound meditation on both personal and historic events, Coates examines how the manmade concept of race exacts a terrible price from black Americans.
Writing from the year 2393, a scholar from the Second People’s Republic of China looks back on the aftermath of the Great Collapse three centuries previously — when soaring temperatures, rising seas and prolonged drought wiped out whole continents of humans and irrevocably changed the global order. It may sound like science fiction, but the authors — Oreskes, a Harvard professor of the history of science, and Conway, a NASA historian — base their futuristic work on scientific fact. Their imaginative, provocative essay examines the potential catastrophic results if today’s advanced industrial nations continue to ignore — and politicize —the evidence for climate change.
By 2025, millennials — that enormous group of people born since 1980 — are expected to make up 75 percent of the workforce. That’s not good news for managers who perceive this new generation as high-maintenance and selfabsorbed. Management coach and consultant Negroni offers this advice: Don’t think of millennials as a problem to be fixed — see them as an opportunity to be embraced. To bridge the damaging generational gap caused by misunderstanding and miscommunication, Negroni urges managers to become better mentors in order to build better employees. The secret, he says, is to create authentic relationships, build a workplace culture of openness and shared values, ditch the “oldschool command-and-control attitude” and care enough to connect with millennials.
Selected by the MLK Book Club
Ta-Nehisi Coates was the speaker at the university’s spring 2017 Atkinson Lecture
Selected by the book club of the Dempsey Lecture, which featured Oreskes in March
Selected by the Willamette MBA Book Club
Illustration by Jane Mount 38
SPRING 2017