Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (2015) is a non-fiction work by Sherry Turkle. A clinical psychologist and professor of Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT, Turkle specializes in human-technology interaction and has decades of experience writing on technology’s problematic effects on human connection. In Reclaiming Conversation, the book’s premise is in the title: Turkle believes that technology has detrimentally taken over human conversation and that we ought to... Read Reclaiming Conversation Summary

Regarding the Pain of Others is a book-length essay by Susan Sontag published in 2003. Sontag initially addresses a question posed to writer and anti-war activist Virginia Woolf: “How in your opinion are we to prevent war?” but then, deducing that war is perennial, Sontag uses the remainder of her book to examine the relation between photography and feelings and ideas about war. She insists on discussing specific wars and specific photographers because each work... Read Regarding the Pain of Others Summary

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Modris Eksteins’s 1989 nonfiction book, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, takes its title from a scandalous 1913 Russian ballet. Critics believed that the ballet’s complex, atonal score, stomping choreography, and the feature of a virginal sacrifice mocked classical ballet conventions. Eksteins—a Canadian historian and author—argues that the juxtaposition of violence and creativity in the ballet echoed in both World War I—“The Great War”—and its aftermath.Eksteins focuses on... Read Rites of Spring Summary

Rooftops of Tehran (2009) is a historical fiction novel written by Iranian-American writer Mahbod Seraji. It follows a 17-year-old boy, Pasha, and his friends as they come of age during an era of political oppression and turmoil in Iran. The novel was selected as one of the books in the Outstanding Debut Category by the American Booksellers Association, and it was one of the San Francisco Chronicle’s 50 Notable Books of the Bay Area. Rooftops... Read Rooftops of Tehran Summary

Same Sun Here, co-written by Silas House and Neela Vaswani, details a year in the lives of two young people: an Indian immigrant living in New York City, and a small-town boy from Kentucky. Written as a series of letters between the two main characters, this middle grade novel is narrated by each author writing from the perspective of a separate character. Published in 2011, the book received the Nautilus Book Award, the E.B. White... Read Same Sun Here Summary

Save Me a Seat (2016) is a young adult fiction novel written by Gita Varadarajan and children’s author Sarah Weeks (who is also the author of Pie and So B. It). The novel centers around two main characters, Joe and Ravi, who have both started their first week in the fifth grade at Albert Einstein Elementary School. Ravi and his family have just moved to Hamilton, New Jersey from Bangalore, India, but he believes that school... Read Save Me a Seat Summary

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Scorpions is a young adult, coming-of-age novel written by best-selling children’s author Walter Dean Myers. Like many of Myers’s works, the book is based on his experience of growing up in New York City’s historically African American Harlem neighborhood. Exploring themes of brotherhood and masculinity, love and loyalty, race, class, and curtailed opportunity, the narrative follows 12-year-old Jamal Hicks as he is confronted with a life-changing dilemma: whether or not to step into the shoes... Read Scorpions Summary

Secret Daughter (2010) is the debut novel of Canadian-Indian author Shilpi Somaya Gowda. Spanning twenty years, it follows two families who are mysteriously connected by an adopted daughter. A New York Times Bestseller, the novel has been translated into more than thirty languages and has sold more than a million copies. Godwa formed the idea for Secret Daughter while volunteering at an Indian orphanage as an undergraduate. Secret Daughter received much critical praise for its... Read Secret Daughter Summary

Paul Fleischman’s multi-perspective young adult novella Seedfolks presents a modern parable for community-building over 13 chapters, each narrated by a different character in monologue. Fleischman first published the work in 1997; the 2002 HarperCollins edition, which this study guide references, includes the author’s note “From seeds to Seedfolks.” Son of children’s book writer Sid Fleischman, Paul Fleischman began his career as a writer in college. Inspired by folklore, music, and verse, Fleischman soon found success... Read Seedfolks Summary

Shanghai Girls (May 2009) is a New York Times bestselling historical novel by Lisa See. It is the first of a two-book series that concludes with Dreams of Joy (2011). The author’s paternal great-grandfather emigrated from China, and many of See’s books examine the Chinese immigrant experience in America. Other titles that cover similar subject matter are Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (2005), Peony in Love (2007), China Dolls (2014), The Tea Girl of... Read Shanghai Girls Summary

Shooting Kabul is a middle-grade novel published in 2010 by American author N. H. Senzai. In July 2001, 11-year-old Fadi Nurzai and his family flee Afghanistan, where the Taliban are taking power, to live in San Francisco. While boarding the truck in Kabul that will take them across the Pakistani border, Fadi loses his six-year-old sister, Mariam, in the melee, and she is left behind. The novel focuses on Fadi’s struggle with his conscience over losing... Read Shooting Kabul Summary

Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, published in 2009, is an often personal and meditative pitch for a cultural recommitment to the vocational arts. As a mechanic with a doctorate in philosophy, author Matthew B. Crawford has lived both lives—that of the “knowledge worker” of white-collar culture and that of the manual laborer who solves the problems society faces on a daily basis. He uses the space of the book... Read Shop Class as Soulcraft Summary

First published in 1990, the creative memoir Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood explores the childhood and adolescence of author Judith Ortiz Cofer. This study guide uses the second edition published in 1991 by Arte Público Press.Born in Puerto Rico, Cofer grew up moving between a Puerto Rican village and Paterson, New Jersey, where her father was stationed with the US Navy. Through a series of essays and poems, Cofer examines... Read Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance Of A Puerto Rican Childhood Summary

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Slouching Towards Bethlehem is Joan Didion’s 1968 collection of essays that document her experiences living in California from 1961 to 1967. It is her first collection of nonfiction (many of the pieces originally appeared in The Saturday Evening Post) and is hailed as a seminal document of culture and counterculture in 1960s California. Didion’s style was part of what Tom Wolfe called “New Journalism,” which emphasized the search for meaning over the reporting of facts... Read Slouching Towards Bethlehem Summary

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