Recent Reads. Books of the Month.

Today marks a new post that will occur on a monthly basis. Recent Reads. Books that I have recently read that you may also find interesting. If you have suggestions and reviews, I would love to hear them – see the end of this article for more information.

Join the Club

Tina Rosenburg has written several books, but she may have saved her best for this most recent release. Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World looks at the power of positive peer pressure – what Rosenburg refers to as “the social cure” – on problems such as teen smoking, poor math scores among minorities, and the AIDS epidemic in South Africa among others.

The premise is that people in general do a better job at overcoming social problems as a group. There does seem to be a pattern to what works best, which Rosenberg explores in detail. I honestly am a little over half way through the book, but look forward to dissecting it more in the near future.

Refer Madness

Fast Food Nation undoubtedly is the more famous title from this author; Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market explores the impact that the black market is having on the American economy. Eric Schlosser overviews the scope of the black market in his introduction and then breaks the book into 3 essays. The three sections look at the marijuana underground, illegal immigrants and the porn industry.

Though each was interesting, I ended up skimming them because they weren’t cohesively tied together as to why they were hurting the economy. In several reviews I’ve read suggested that the book be broken into three separate books, and I agree that the book needed better editing.

Ultimately the book had a very interesting premise, but it left me unsatisfied.

Townie

Andre Dubus is the author of the highly acclaimed novel House of Sand and Fog (selected to the coveted Oprah’s Book of the Month Club). Townie: A Memoir is his story of growing up in a poor Massachusetts mill town as one of 4 kids in a broken home.

I heard an interview with Dubus on NPR not to long ago; I was gripped with a couple of passages that he read from the book. Those passages and most of the book focus on Dubus figuring out how to deal with the father he felt like had abandoned both he and his entire family.

The book details the authors transformation from a childhood of being picked on and beat by neighborhood kids to a body building enforcer to a mature writer. As a child from a broken home growing up in the same time period, I read it both with a sense of familiarity and utter shock at the same time. I recommend it.