Do You Teach Comparative Literature?

Todd Rogers and Jessica Lasky-Fink offer the most valuable practical writing advice today. Building on their own research in behavioral science, they outline cognitive facts about how people actually read and distill them into six principles that will transform the power of one’s writing: Less is more Make reading easy Design for easy navigation Use

After his father’s death, Esau McCaulley went back through his family history, seeking to understand the community that shaped him: someone who, through hard work, faith, and determination, overcame childhood poverty, anti-Black racism, and an absent father to earn a job as a university professor and a life in the middle class. With profound honesty

The Last Colony is the moving, inspiring David-and-Goliath true story of freedom and justice involving one tiny nation in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Africa, and the extraordinary woman, a descendant of enslaved people, who dared to take on the Crown and the United Kingdom—and win a historic victory.   Part One 1945

From The Revenge of Geography author Robert D. Kaplan, The Loom of Time is a stunning exploration of the Greater Middle East, where lasting stability has often seemed just out of reach but may hold the key to the shifting world order of the twenty-first century.   Chapter 1 Time and Terrain Between Europe and the

Quiet Street is a bold and moving exploration of the American elite that exposes how the ruling class perpetuates cycles of wealth, power, and injustice. Searing and precise yet always deeply human, Quiet Street examines the problem of America’s one-percenters, whose vision of a more just world never materializes. Who are these people, how do they hold

The crack epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s is arguably the least examined crisis in American history. Beginning with the myths inspired by Reagan’s war on drugs, journalist Donovan X. Ramsey’s exacting analysis in When Crack Was King traces the path from the last triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement to the devastating realities we

Goodbye, Eastern Europe is a crucial, elucidative read, a sweeping epic chronicling a thousand years that illuminates the remarkable cultural significance and richness of a place perpetually lost to the margins of history.   Part I Faiths 1 Pagans and Christians A great forest, bristling with dangers and the occasional gleam of treasure: that is

Waiting to Be Arrested at Night is a poet’s account of one of the world’s most urgent humanitarian crises, and a harrowing tale of a family’s escape from genocide.   One A Phone Call from Beijing I keep returning to the first day of 2013. That evening, I received an unexpected call from Ilham Tohti,

In Solito, a young poet tells the inspiring story of his migration from El Salvador to the United States at the age of nine.   Winner of the Los Angeles Times Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiography Winner of the American Library Association Alex Award Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence and the PEN/Open Book Award Finalist

Fire Weather is a stunning account of a colossal wildfire and a panoramic exploration of the rapidly changing relationship between fire and humankind. With masterly prose and a cinematic eye, Vaillant takes us on a riveting journey through the intertwined histories of North America’s oil industry and the birth of climate science, to the unprecedented devastation wrought by modern forest

Built from the Fire is a multigenerational saga of a family and a community in Tulsa’s Greenwood district, known as “Black Wall Street,” that in one century survived the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, urban renewal, and gentrification.   Prologue Jim Goodwin remembers the symphony of the old Greenwood well. The blues mingling with smoke as

Two-time world champion debater and former coach of the Harvard debate team, Bo Seo tells the inspiring story of his life in competitive debating and reveals the timeless secrets of effective communication and persuasion. 1. Topic How to find the debate On a Monday morning in January 2007, a couple of months after my graduation from