Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
Quick Book Recommendations
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2020 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
A few timely book recommendations.
It's a book that makes scholarship accessible to a non-academic reader. It's a book that uses the author's experiences -- as a student, as an admissions sales rep, as a teacher, as a researcher, as a black woman, as a friend and daughter -- to vividly illustrate and bring the reader into theoretical understandings of systems, policy, and economic forces. It's sociology, it's investigative journalism, it's memoir, it's a lens on something I see every day (those subway/bus ads for education). It's witty and no-nonsense.
Wilkerson and McMillan Cottom are black; Einhorn is white.
Dreamwidth's "Writers of Color 50 Books Challenge" community crowdsources reviews of books by people of color, in case you want to diversify your reading along that dimension.