Fall 2024 Book List

*Deadline to sign up is September 13, 2024

Non-Fiction

Becoming a Changemaker: An Actionable, Inclusive Guide to Leading Positive Change at Any Level by Alex Budak (Organizational Change)

Hailed by CNBC as a “top 5 non-fiction book everyone should be reading about work,” Becoming a Changemaker is a call to action, showing how leading change from where you are can transform your career, community and even the world. Alex Budak, a celebrated UC Berkeley faculty member, distills the essence of successful changemakers in this accessible guide, unveiling the essential mindsets and leadership skills needed to spark change and create impact across roles, sectors, and hierarchies. Through a powerful blend of data-driven insights and diverse, relatable case studies, Budak builds a compelling case, one that frames being a changemaker as an inclusive, aspirational identity for everyone.

Inspired by the lessons and philosophies from Budak’s wildly popular course of the same name, which he created at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, Becoming a Changemaker will show you how to:

Develop your own unique voice as a changemaker, to lead effectively, empathetically, and authentically in any setting.
Transform setbacks into stepping stones and uncover the art and science of turning failures into powerful catalysts for growth and innovation.
Influence without authority to inspire and mobilize others towards your vision – even when you're not in charge.
Create a sustainable action plan to turn your aspirations for change into reality with the Changemaker Canvas tool and its tangible, manageable steps.
Pursue Your Purpose and learn to harness your individual strengths and passions to drive meaningful change from wherever you are, in a way that’s true to who you are.

304 pages

Fostering International Student Success in Higher Education by Shawna Shapiro & Zuzana Tomas (Higher Education)

Co-published by TESOL and NAFSA

The increase in the number of international students attending English-dominant schools brings benefits as well as challenges for institutions. Shapiro, Farrelly, and Tomaš provide a lively, informative discussion that answers the questions instructors commonly ask when seeking to ensure success for these students: What do I do to help students be successful in U.S. academic culture? How can I ensure that the content for my course is comprehensible to students who are still learning English? How do I design assignments and assessments that are fair while still acknowledging the difficulty of doing academic work in a second or foreign language? How might I treat international students as a linguistic and cultural asset in the classroom, and help them to become institutionally integrated?

The second edition of this best-selling book is filled with anecdotes, reflection questions, strategies, resources, and activities that can easily be adapted to curricula in various disciplines and provide instructors, as well as academic advisors and administrators, with tools for responding to common classroom challenges.

152 pages

Great College Teaching: Where It Happens and How to Foster It Everywhere by Corbin Campbell (Higher Education)

Great College Teaching highlights where and how exemplary teaching is practiced in U.S. higher education and charts a course for cultivating teaching improvement throughout all types of institutions.

As Corbin M. Campbell reveals in this incisive work, although teaching quality is rarely reflected in college rankings such as those produced by U.S. News and World Report, this metric has implications not only for student outcomes such as subject-matter knowledge and preparation for careers but also for college prestige, educational equity, and even democracy.

Campbell draws from a multi-institutional observational study that covered more than 700 higher education courses in a range of contexts, from regional public universities to highly ranked private universities, from small liberal arts colleges to large flagship universities. She examines what each type of institution typically excels at and where they often fall short.

In mapping the terrain of teaching quality in higher education today, Campbell parses out the best practices of exemplary teaching institutions, in which evidenced-based practices such as equity-based and culturally relevant teaching support student learning, and teaching-supportive institutions, in which policies and cultures prioritize teaching and promote faculty development.

This clear-eyed work provides options for enacting real, sustainable teaching improvements by using individual, collegial, and organizational levers to shift perceptions and priorities around teaching. The actionable practices and policies suggested in Great College Teaching can be adopted by academic leaders, administrators, and faculty developers to improve teaching within a spectrum of academic contexts, across multiple disciplines, and for various course settings.

200 pages

Master of Change: How to Excel When Everything Is Changing – Including You by Brad Stulberg (Success and Leadership)

From social disruptions like economic recessions, pandemics, and new technologies to individual disruptions like getting married, career transitions, and becoming a parent, we undergo change and transformation—both good and bad—regularly. Change is not the exception, it’s the rule. Yet we endlessly fight it, often viewing it as a threat to our stability and sense of self. Master of Change flips this script on its head and offers a path for embracing and even growing from life’s constant instability. Brad Stulberg, sustainable excellence expert, coach, and bestselling author of The Practice of Groundedness, offers a new model that describes change as an ongoing cycle of order, disorder, and reorder—yes, we return to stability, but that stability is somewhere new. Drawing on modern science, ancient wisdom, and daily practice, Stulberg offers concrete principles for developing a mindset called rugged flexibility, along with habits and practices to implement it. Along the way, Stulberg reveals: How to be in conversation with change instead of it happening to you. The importance of expectations Why cultivating a rugged yet flexible sense of self is key to a strong identity. How to take productive action during a challenge. The paradox of both making meaning and moving forward. In the end, Stulberg reshapes our entire perception of change and shows us how to grow in its midst—ultimately helping us move forward better, stronger, and wiser than we were before.

233 pages

The Power of the Positive No by William Ury (Interpersonal Relations)

No is perhaps the most important and certainly the most powerful word in the language. Every day we find ourselves in situations where we need to say No–to people at work, at home, and in our communities–because No is the word we must use to protect ourselves and to stand up for everything and everyone that matters to us.

But as we all know, the wrong No can also destroy what we most value by alienating and angering people. That’s why saying No the right way is crucial. The secret to saying No without destroying relationships lies in the art of the Positive No, a proven technique that anyone can learn.

This indispensable book gives you a simple three-step method for saying a Positive No. It will show you how to assert and defend your key interests; how to make your No firm and strong; how to resist the other side’s aggression and manipulation; and how to do all this while still getting to Yes. In the end, the Positive No will help you get not just to any Yes but to the right Yes, the one that truly serves your interests.

Based on William Ury’s celebrated Harvard University course for managers and professionals, The Power of a Positive No offers concrete advice and practical examples for saying No in virtually any situation. Whether you need to say No to your customer or your coworker, your employee or your CEO, your child or your spouse, you will find in this book the secret to saying No clearly, respectfully, and effectively. In today’s world of high stress and limitless choices, the pressure to give in and say Yes grows greater every day, producing overload and overwork, expanding e-mail and eroding ethics. Never has No been more needed. A Positive No has the power to profoundly transform our lives by enabling us to say Yes to what counts–our own needs, values, and priorities. Understood this way, No is the new Yes. And the Positive No may be the most valuable life skill you’ll ever learn.

272 pages

Regeneration : Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation by Joy Buolamwini (Climate Change/Environmental Science)

Regeneration offers a visionary new approach to climate change, one that weaves justice, climate, biodiversity, equity, and human dignity into a seamless tapestry of action, policy, and transformation that can end the climate crisis in one generation. It is the first book to describe and define the burgeoning regeneration movement spreading rapidly throughout the world.

Regeneration describes how an inclusive movement can engage the majority of humanity to save the world from the threat of global warming, with climate solutions that directly serve our children, the poor, and the excluded. This means we must address current human needs, not future existential threats, real as they are, with initiatives that include but go well beyond solar, electric vehicles, and tree planting to include such solutions as the fifteen-minute city, bioregions, azolla fern, food localization, fire ecology, decommodification, forests as farms, and the number one solution for the world: electrifying everything.

Paul Hawken and the nonprofit Regeneration Organization are launching a series of initiatives to accompany the book, including a streaming video series, curriculum, podcasts, teaching videos, and climate action software. Regeneration is the inspiring and necessary guide to inform the rapidly spreading climate movement.

256 pages

Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class by Rob Henderson (Memoir)

Rob Henderson was born to a drug-addicted mother and a father he never met, ultimately shuttling between ten different foster homes in California. When he was adopted into a loving family, he hoped that life would finally be stable and safe. But divorce, tragedy, poverty, and violence marked his adolescent and teen years, propelling Henderson to join the military upon completing high school.

A “vivid, insightful, poignant, and powerful” (Nicholas A. Christakis, author of Blueprint) portrait of shattered families, desperation, and determination, Troubled recounts Henderson’s expectation-defying young life and juxtaposes his story with those of his friends who wound up incarcerated or killed.

As he navigates the peaks and valleys of social class, Henderson finds that he remains on the outside looking in. His greatest achievements—a military career, an undergraduate education from Yale, a PhD from Cambridge—feel like hollow measures of success. He argues that stability at home is more important than external accomplishments, and he illustrates the ways the most privileged among us benefit from a set of social standards that actively harm the most vulnerable.

336 pages

Fiction

El murmullo de las abejas / The Murmur of Bees (Spanish Edition) by Sofia Segovia (Hispanic American Literature)

From a beguiling voice in Mexican fiction comes an astonishing novel—her first to be translated into English—about a mysterious child with the power to change a family’s history in a country on the verge of revolution.

From the day that old Nana Reja found a baby abandoned under a bridge, the life of a small Mexican town forever changed. Disfigured and covered in a blanket of bees, little Simonopio is for some locals the stuff of superstition, a child kissed by the devil. But he is welcomed by landowners Francisco and Beatriz Morales, who adopt him and care for him as if he were their own. As he grows up, Simonopio becomes a cause for wonder to the Morales family, because when the uncannily gifted child closes his eyes, he can see what no one else can—visions of all that’s yet to come, both beautiful and dangerous. Followed by his protective swarm of bees and living to deliver his adoptive family from threats—both human and those of nature—Simonopio’s purpose in Linares will, in time, be divined.

Set against the backdrop of the Mexican Revolution and the devastating influenza of 1918, The Murmur of Bees captures both the fate of a country in flux and the destiny of one family that has put their love, faith, and future in the unbelievable.

496 pages

The Keeper of Stars by Buck Turner (Southern Fiction)

Who says you can’t rewrite the stars? 1962—Twelve years removed from the summer when she first gave her heart away, Dr. Elizabeth (Ellie) Spencer, Professor of Astronomy at Indiana University, receives a mysterious package that has her asking that very question.

Inside the unmarked box is a novel written by Ellie’s first love, Jack Bennett. It tells the story of a young man and woman who meet at the water’s edge and fall madly in love, only to have their romance cut short by forces beyond their control. Ellie quickly realizes this is no ordinary story; it’s their story. Captivated by Jack’s words, she immerses herself in the pages, reliving the adventures they shared that magical summer. To her astonishment, hidden among the tales of star-gazing and stolen kisses is a detail that has her questioning everything.

Seeking answers, Ellie turns to her sister for help, but before they can get to the bottom of the mystery, news reaches them of their aunt’s death, sending Ellie back to the water’s edge with the hopes of finding the truth and rewriting the stars.

296 pages

Night Watch by Jayne Anne Phillips (Historical Fiction)

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN FICTION • A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

From one of our most accomplished novelists, a mesmerizing story about a mother and daughter seeking refuge in the chaotic aftermath of the Civil War—and a brilliant portrait of family endurance against all odds.

In 1874, in the wake of the War, erasure, trauma, and namelessness haunt civilians and veterans, renegades and wanderers, freedmen and runaways. Twelve-year-old ConaLee, the adult in her family for as long as she can remember, finds herself on a buckboard journey with her mother, Eliza, who hasn’t spoken in more than a year. They arrive at the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in West Virginia, delivered to the hospital’s entrance by a war veteran who has forced himself into their world. There, far from family, a beloved neighbor, and the mountain home they knew, they try to reclaim their lives.

The omnipresent vagaries of war and race rise to the surface as we learn their story: their flight to the highest mountain ridges of western Virginia; the disappearance of ConaLee’s father, who left for the War and never returned. Meanwhile, in the asylum, they begin to find a new path. ConaLee pretends to be her mother’s maid; Eliza responds slowly to treatment. They get swept up in the life of the facility—the mysterious man they call the Night Watch; the orphan child called Weed; the fearsome woman who runs the kitchen; the remarkable doctor at the head of the institution.

Epic, enthralling, and meticulously crafted, Night Watch is a stunning chronicle of surviving war and its aftermath.

304 pages

On Mystic Lake by Kristin Hannah (Contemporary Fiction)

Annie Colwater's only child has just left home for school abroad. On that same day, her husband of twenty years confesses that he's in love with a younger woman. Alone in the house that is no longer a home, Annie comes to the painful realization that for years she has been slowly disappearing. Lonely and afraid, she retreats to Mystic, the small Washington town where she grew up, hoping that there she can reclaim the woman she once was—the woman she is now desperate to become again.

In Mystic, she is reunited with her first love, Nick Delacroix, a recent widower unable to cope with his grieving, too-silent six-year-old daughter, Izzie. Together, the three of them begin to heal, and, at last, Annie learns that she can love without losing herself. But just when she has found a second chance at happiness, her life is turned upside down again, and Annie must make a choice no woman should have to make. . . .

448 pages

The Seventh Veil of Salome by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (New Literary Fiction)

1950s Hollywood: Every actress wants to play Salome, the star-making role in a big-budget movie about the legendary woman whose story has inspired artists since ancient times.

So when the film’s mercurial director casts Vera Larios, an unknown Mexican ingenue, in the lead role, she quickly becomes the talk of the town. Vera also becomes an object of envy for Nancy Hartley, a bit player whose career has stalled and who will do anything to win the fame she believes she richly deserves.

Two actresses, both determined to make it to the top in Golden Age Hollywood—a city overflowing with gossip, scandal, and intrigue—make for a sizzling combination.

But this is the tale of three women, for it is also the story of the princess Salome herself, consumed with desire for the fiery prophet who foretells the doom of her stepfather, Herod: a woman torn between the decree of duty and the yearning of her heart. Before the curtain comes down, there will be tears and tragedy aplenty in this sexy Technicolor saga. Silvia Moreno Garcia will be coming to WSU October 2.