Summer Reading is a series that asks Haverford’s librarians and library staff for book recommendations that will enlighten, entertain, and educate you during this vacation season. Take these titles to the beach, on a plane, or just enjoy them indoors with the fan on.
This week: Social Science Librarian Brie Gettleson suggests three non-fiction titles that will help expand your worldview:
Teeth: The Story of Beauty, Inequality, and the Struggle for Oral Health in America by Mary Otto:
If eyes are the windows to the soul, then teeth may be the windows into class. This insightful and easy to read book examines teeth’s extraction (haha) from healthcare coverage and the perpetuation of stereotypes and inequality through ideals of beauty.
Tell Me How it Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions by Valeria Luiselli:
Valeria Luiselli is a Mexican novelist who worked as an interpreter for unaccompanied minors migrating from Central America into the United States. She structures this deceptively slim volume around the 40 questions that constitute the formal immigration interview, weaving the children’s hard-to-take narratives together with her own, creating an important and moving portrait of contemporary migration.
Three Roads to Magdalena: Coming of Age in a Southwest Borderland, 1890-1990 by David Wallace Adams:
Based on hundreds of interviews, archival research, and personal memory, this book gently probes the geographic, historical, and racial borderlands of Magdalena, N.M., in a classic coming-of-age narrative structure.