Book Girl

Sarah Clarkson

Clarkson wants everyone to learn the pleasures of the reading life. In this memoir she describes how she inherited a love of books from her parents, especially her mother. She explains how reading introduced her to ideas and characters crucial in her formation. After making a case for reading, she offers practical suggestions for developing the habits and skills to read well. She also offers annotated book lists in different categories, made up of her favorites. Think of it as an adult version of Honey for a Child’s Heart.

Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown

Lauren Hilgers

Hilgers tells the gripping story of Zhuang Liehong, a democracy activist from a village in southern China who escapes with his wife to Flushing, N.Y. The book recounts Zhuang’s life in China and then his struggle to find a foothold in America. Hilgers has a unique vantage point from which to tell the story: She was a journalist in China covering the events in Zhuang’s village—and he sought her out in New York when he arrived. The book offers a closely observed account of life for newly arrived Chinese immigrants and the institutions, including church, that help them thrive.

Uncensored: My Life and Uncomfortable Conversations at the Intersection of Black and White America

Zachary R. Wood

Recent Williams College graduate Zachary Wood achieved some fame when he joined an organization that challenged liberal shibboleths by inviting conservative speakers to campus. That’s not the interesting part of this book. What’s interesting is his back story: a mentally ill and emotionally abusive mother, a self-sacrificing father who lived in another state, and both parents’ desires for their bright son to have the best education they could provide. He writes frankly—and with unfiltered language—of challenges both at home and at elite private schools in Michigan and D.C.

The Class: A Life-Changing Teacher, His World-Changing Kids, and the Most Inventive Classroom in America

Heather Won Tesoriero

Industrial scientist Andy Bramante decided to chuck that career to teach high-school science in Greenwich, Conn.—and this book traces a school year with his science research students, the smart, creative kids who enter and win elite, national science fairs. The book focuses on six such students, drawing the reader into their lives as they pursue big projects while navigating ordinary high-school life. Tesoriero had incredible access and uses it to showcase Bramante’s energy and dedication and the way these kids (many of them children of immigrants) use their privilege to achieve success. Warning: some obscenities and profanities.

AFTERWORD

Merve Emre’s The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing (Doubleday, 2018) is the engaging biography of a mother/daughter team, Katharine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers. If those names seem familiar it’s because they developed the personality test that came to be known as the Myers-Briggs. Emre also tells the history of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), beginning with Briggs’ infatuation with Carl Jung and her amateur efforts to devise a personality typing system using his ideas.

Isabel Briggs Myers embraced her mother’s system, developing, testing, and refining it. She, like her mother, believed personality type was fixed: Her test, she believed, could unlock essential truths about individuals. Untrained in statistics, dowdy in dress, and suspicious, she exasperated her colleagues at Princeton’s Educational Testing Service, which hoped to verify its scientific validity. They failed, but the test took off anyway. A fascinating, well-told story. —S.O.