My Most Recent Reads - May 2016

With the semester ending the first week of the month, it gave me some extra time to enjoy some more books and not be inundated with articles for the program.  This month had several solid reads including ones I'd like to say more about but am unfortunately reviewing elsewhere.

Geeks Bearing Gifts: Imagining New Futures for News by Jeff Jarvis

I'm an admitted fanboy of Jeff Jarvis.  His previous book, Public Parts, changed my understand about social media in profound ways and has helped me think differently about the Internet as a whole.  Geeks Bearing Gifts follows as the ideological extension of Public Parts in that Jarvis lays out the challenges and the struggles of news media and how they should pivot towards newer strategies for considering what news is, how to deliver it, and how to maintain its legitimacy.  He certainly offers many nuggets of wisdom on how news can and should improve while also providing some provocative thoughts on how news media fails and will continue to do so unless we reinvent what it means.  People are likely to resist his message but in the face of a failed media landscape, they don't seem to offer other viable options.

Word cloud of this blog post.

Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom by bell hooks

It's a cliche to say that everyone should read a book.  But I do feel like I'm coming to the game late in reading this book as an educator.  I've always heard of hooks and her work with teaching and intersectionality but did not take the time to read her work.  I'm quite glad that has changed and Teaching to Transgress is a great book that makes me think so much about my presence, my position, and my interaction in the classroom.  Essentially, hooks gets the reader thinking about the nuance of student/faculty relations especially as it is constructed through social constructs such as race and gender.  Some of the essays in this collection on face value seem removed from thinking about teaching, but in hindsight, it all fits together as hooks brings together her work as a writer, scholar, and educator along with her experiences as a student, an African-American, and a woman.

Reframing Academic Leadership by Lee Bolman

No  surprise that I'm looking at another book on higher education, being in the program, right?  Bolman's work does a good job of highlighting the many different challenges to leading in higher education with accessible prose and good examples or anecdotes to illustrate his his points.  He succeeds that problematizing the role of leadership in higher education and the many different ways there are to fail.  What is provided is not a fool-proof guide, but a general map that shows readers where they are likely to fail and how best to recover.  Additionally, a strong value that Bolman addresses that many other texts leave out is how to lead upward.  Many texts focus solely on leadership from the top of the hierarchy but he spends a reasonable amount of time, guiding people moving upward.  


Monthly reads for 2016 (and you can always look at all of my books that I've read on GoodReads)

BOOKS


  • Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom by bell hooks
  • Dirty Hands by Jean-Paul Sartre


AUDIOBOOKS


  • Who Rules the World? by Noam Chomsky
  • Hamilton: The Revolution by Lin-Manuel Miranda
  • Geeks Bearing Gifts: Imagining New Futures for News by Jeff Jarvis
  • Binti by Nnedi Okorafor
  • Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany
  • There Is Life After College: What Parents and Students Should Know About Navigating School to Prepare for the Jobs of Tomorrow by Jeff Selingo
  • Son of the Black Sword (Saga of the Forgotten Warrior, #1) by Larry Correia
  • Reframing Academic Leadership by Lee Bolman
  • Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond
  • Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits by David Wong


GRAPHIC NOVELS


  • The Lagoon Lilli Carré
  • Blizzards of Tweed by Glen Baxter
  • Atlas by Glen Baxter
  • Never Flirt with Puppy Killers: And Other Better Book Titles by Dan Wilbur
  • Star Wars: Vader Down by Jason Aaron
  • Star Wars: Lando by Charles Soule
  • Birthright, Vol. 3 by Joshua Williamson
  • Descender, Vol 2: Machine Moon by Jeff Lemire
  • Poor Sailor by Sammy Harkham



What about you reader?  What book recommendations do you have for me?

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By Any Other Nerd Blog by Lance Eaton is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

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