Graduation Gift Guide: 2018 Edition
May 25, 2018
Graduates across the country are heading off to new adventures and new stages of their education or careers. If you’re looking for the perfect book this season for the graduate in your life, check out our graduation gift guide with recommendations from our catalog. Remember that you can always browse our website for more inspirational titles.
For Graduates Going to Med School
Singular Intimacies: Becoming a Doctor at Bellevue
Danielle Ofri
“Danielle Ofri is a finely gifted writer, a born storyteller as well as a born physician, and through these fifteen brilliantly written episodes covering the years from studenthood to the end of her medical residency, we get not only a deep sense of the high drama of life and death, which must face anyone working in a great hospital, but also a feeling for the making of a physician’s mind and soul.”
—Oliver Sacks, MD, author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
The Good Doctor: A Father, a Son, and the Evolution of Medical Ethics
Barron H. Lerner
“This is one of the most thoughtful and provocative books that I have read in a long time, and I suspect that generations of doctors and patients will find it just as thought provoking.”
—Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Emperor of All Maladies
For Graduates Heading to Law School
Becoming Gentlemen: Women, Law School, and Institutional Change
Lani Guinier
“Hugely persuasive . . . An important and startling work by a provocative national figure.”
—Kirkus Reviews
In Defense of Women: Memoirs of an Unrepentant Advocate
Nancy Gertner
“This is a fascinating memoir of a life lived in the law with passion, guts, humor, and great skill.”
—Linda Greenhouse, author of Becoming Justice Blackmun
For Graduates Heading into Teaching
The Passionate Teacher: A Practical Guide
Robert L. Fried
“A deeply felt meditation on the vital role of passion in good teaching . . . stuffed with . . . samples, stories, interviews with good teachers, lists of things to try.”
—Anthony Rotundo, The Washington Post
For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood . . . and the Rest of Y’all Too
Christopher Emdin
“If you’re looking for the revolutionary meaning, and imaginative transformation, of teaching for the real America, you’re holding it in your hands! Christopher Emdin is Jonathan Kozol with swag!”
—Michael Eric Dyson, author of The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race in America
For Women in Science
Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong—and the New Research That’s Rewriting the Story
Angela Saini
“This is an important book that I hope will be widely read.”
—Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, author of The Woman That Never Evolved
The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science Is Still a Boys’ Club
Eileen Pollack
“In Eileen Pollack’s vivid description of the issues facing women in science, I immediately saw the truth of what I have lived.”
—Carol Greider, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
For the Environmentalist
The Wasting of Borneo: Dispatches from a Vanishing World
Alex Shoumatoff
“As often in his long and valuable career, Alex Shoumatoff has made visible a part of the world that too few of us pay attention to.”
—Bill McKibben, author of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet
Junk Raft: An Ocean Voyage and a Rising Tide of Activism to Fight Plastic Pollution
Marcus Eriksen
Junk Raft serves as a reflection of the choices and journeys that each of us makes and helps us understand how plastic in the oceans is deeply intertwined with the future of human life. Eriksen gets at the heart of what it means to respond to environmental catastrophe on our imperiled planet.”
—Céline Cousteau, documentary filmmaker, artist, and environmental activist
For Graduates Entering Public Service
History Teaches Us to Resist: How Progressive Movements Have Succeeded in Challenging Times
Mary Frances Berry
“History Teaches Us to Resist is an encouraging reminder that, with strategic discipline, progressives have always found creative ways to advance the work of justice and equality—even in the worst of times.”
—Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel, NAACP Legal Defense Fund
Daring Democracy: Igniting Power, Meaning, and Connection for the America We Want
Frances Moore Lappé and Adam Eichen
“As someone who has been on the opposite side of anti-democracy forces, I can say firsthand that Lappé and Eichen speak to the problems plaguing our elections, while also offering compelling solutions.”
—Zephyr Teachout, Associate Professor of Law at Fordham University
For Graduates Committed to Understanding “Bottom-Up” History
An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
“This may well be the most important US history book you will read in your lifetime. . . . Dunbar-Ortiz radically reframes US history, destroying all foundation myths to reveal a brutal settler-colonial structure and ideology designed to cover its bloody tracks.”
—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams
An African American and Latinx History of the United States
Paul Ortiz
“An African American and Latinx History of the United States is a gift.”
—Ibram X. Kendi, National Book Award–winning author of Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America