Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike by Phil Knight
"A fresh historical prospective on one of the most profiled companies in the world...[Shoe Dog] builds characters of the people behind the brand, many of whom we've never heard of."
Adam Hochschild is both a gifted historian and a man of the left. In Spain in Our Hearts, he retells this familiar tale in an unfamiliar and convincing way—as a collective biography that strongly sympathizes with the Americans who fought for and wrote about Republican Spain but refuses to spare them from criticism. By assembling a well-chosen set of individual narratives, many about figures who are relatively unknown, he captures why so many people thought the fate of the world might be decided by who won the conflict in a poor, mostly rural country on the edge of Europe…Hochschild narrates such tales with prose that is consistently vivid yet emotionally restrained.
American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers by Nancy Jo Sales
"Sales painstakingly draws on scholarly research and numerous interviews with girls from New Jersey to California to offer a harrowing glimpse into a world where self-esteem, friendships and sexuality play out, and are defined by the parameters of social media."
Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond
"The poverty of others brings up terrible questions of there-but-for-the-grace-of-God and what if, were your circumstances or skin color or gender different, that could be you. Your gaze pulls away. But Desmond writes so powerfully and with such persuasive math that he turns your head back and keeps it there: Yes, it could be you. But if home is so crucial a place that its loss causes this much pain, Evicted argues, making it possible for more of us might change everything.”
Eligible: A modern retelling of Pride and Prejudice by Curtis Sittenfeld
It's a pleasure to find out how Sittenfeld has updated classic Austen scenes to fit this new milieu…No one writes with Austen's particular sensibility, and no one would really want to; she was perfectly of her time. But Sittenfeld…is the ideal modern-day reinterpreter. Her special skill lies not just in her clear, clean writing, but in her general amusement about the world, her arch, pithy, dropped-mike observations about behavior, character and motivation. She can spot hypocrisy, cant, self-contradiction and absurdity 10 miles away. She's the one you want to leave the party with, so she can explain what really happened…Taking the story out of England and bringing it to America has allowed Sittenfeld to draw back the curtains, throw open the windows, and let the air in…The characters can be raucous and the situations ungenteel, but not since Clueless, which transported Emma to Beverly Hills, has Austen been so delightedly interpreted.
Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble by Dan Lyons
As the writer behind the satirical blog Fake Steve Jobs, [Lyons] could not have imagined a place so ripe for parody as HubSpot. Every detail of the hip office space, incompetent management, and delusional workforce described by Lyons in his hilarious and unsettling exposé is like something out of a scripted comedy (the author writes for HBO's Silicon Valley) ... An exacting, excoriating takedown of the current startup 'bubble' and the juvenile corporate culture it engenders."
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