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How often do you stop to think about commonplace urban sights like traffic lights, fire escapes, and manhole covers? After you read this book, your answer will probably be “all the time”. Written by the creators of the podcast '99% Invisible', The 99% Invisible City (2020) explores the history and purpose of frequently overlooked objects in the urban landscape.

The Curious Nature Guide by Clare Walker Leslie is a short and sweet read full of eye-catching illustration.

This thoughtful poetic writer is applicable for our times, opening the reader to compassion and a system understanding of oppressive systems. Their approach to social activism is inviting and ingenious. 

-Teen Reviewer

In 2021, poet, scholar, and Atlantic Magazine staff writer Clint Smith published his first major work of nonfiction,

Yes, or dying, would be Metaxas' answer to the title of his book Is Atheism Dead? (2021). 

What a powerful read. That this book exists is a miracle: originally written for a contest in 1930s Eastern Europe (in what is now Poland and Lithuania), these six essays were among hundreds hidden from the Nazis multiple times and eventually discovered in a church in 2017.

In A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson undertakes to hike the 2,200 mile Appalachian Trail that runs from Georgia to Maine. Bryson enlists the help of an unfit friend, Katz, who can barely tackle a staircase. Together they meander along the trail meeting other people with the same goal. Statistics are clearly against them.

Michael Lewis’ classic sports book holds up almost twenty years later. Scott Brick does a fantastic job narrating Moneyball (2003), keeping the pace moving and the subject engaging.

An immigrant memoir that will pull at your heart strings, House of Sticks is an eye-opening tale of suffering and survival. 

The stories shared by comedian Amber Ruffin and her sister Lacey Lamar are hilarious and heartbreaking, unbelievable and yet unsurprising. Their personal and professional experiences and those of their parents demonstrate systemic racism experienced from Omaha to Chicago and New York City. Yes, this book is funny. More importantly, it provides valuable insight on the experiences of Black women in modern America–the daily injustices, the casual ignorance, and the obstacles faced.

In My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies (2017),  New York Times best-selling author and trauma specialist Resmaa Menakem explores, according to the publisher, “the damage caused by racism in America from the perspective of trauma

Mo Rocca expands on his podcast of the same name in this engaging and wryly humorous collection of biographies. In Mobituaries (2019), Rocca writes obituaries for those who were not appropriately celebrated upon their death—or whose actions have been forgotten by history.