Summer Reading 2021: Upper School

Trick Mirror is an enlightening, unforgettable trip through the river of self-delusion that surges just beneath the surface of our lives. This is a book about the incentives that shape us, and about how hard it is to see ourselves clearly through a culture that revolves around the self. In each essay, Tolentino writes about a cultural prism: the rise of the nightmare social internet; the advent of scamming as the definitive millennial ethos; the literary heroine's journey from brave to blank to bitter; the punitive dream of optimization, which insists that everything, including our bodies, should become more efficient and beautiful until we die. Gleaming with Tolentino's sense of humor and capacity to elucidate the impossibly complex in an instant, and marked by her desire to treat the reader with profound honesty, Trick Mirror is an instant classic.

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Young George Washington was raised by a struggling single mother, demanded military promotions, caused an international incident, and never backed down – even when his dysentery got so bad he had to ride with a cushion on his saddle. But after he married Martha, everything changed. Washington became the kind of man who named his dog Sweetlips and hated to leave home. After an unlikely victory in the Revolutionary War cast him as the nation's hero, he was desperate to retire, but the founders pressured him into the presidency – twice. He left the highest office heartbroken over the partisan nightmare his backstabbing cabinet had created. Back on his plantation, the man who fought for liberty had to confront his greatest hypocrisy: what to do with the men, women, and children he owns before he succumbs to death. With irresistible style and warm humor, You Never Forget Your First combines rigorous research and lively storytelling that will have readers – including those who thought presidential biographies were just for dads – inhaling every page.

The term "Apple" is a slur in Native communities across the country. It's for someone supposedly "red on the outside, white on the inside." Originally conceived as a series of paintings, this ambitious memoir in verse by Eric Gansworth, an enrolled member of the Onondaga Nation, explores intersectional identities alongside matters of generational and personal experience, erasure, and memory: “So much of my culture feels on the verge of vanishing. I wonder what part of that I’m contributing to with my own lack of knowledge.” He tells his story, the story of his family, of Onondaga among Tuscaroras, and of Native folks everywhere. From the horrible legacy of the government boarding schools, to a boy watching his siblings leave and return and leave again, to a young man fighting to be an artist who balances multiple worlds. Eric shatters that slur and reclaims it in verse and prose and imagery that truly lives up to the word "heartbreaking."

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From the iconic musicians and global LGBTQ icons Tegan and Sara comes a memoir about high school, detailing their first loves and first songs in a compelling look back at their humble beginnings. Identical twins from Calgary, Alberta, who grew up at the height of grunge and rave culture in the nineties, the two sisters grew up in distinct ways despite being just down the hall from one another. While grappling with their identity and sexuality, often alone, they also faced academic meltdown, their parents' divorce, and the looming pressure of what might come after high school. Written in alternating chapters from both Tegan's and Sara's points of view, the book is a raw account of the drugs, alcohol, love, music, and friendship they explored in their formative years.

In this bestselling and acclaimed memoir, Katharine Graham, the woman who piloted the Washington Post through the scandals of the Pentagon Papers and Watergate, tells her story. Here is the awkward child who grew up amid material wealth and emotional isolation; the young bride who watched her brilliant, charismatic husband – a confidant to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson – plunge into the mental illness that would culminate in his suicide. And the widow who shook off her grief and insecurity to take on a president and a pressman's union as she entered the profane boys' club of the newspaper business. As timely now as ever, Personal History is an exemplary record of our history and of the woman who helped shape it while discovering her own strength and sense of self.

In her motivational memoir, groundbreaking magazine editor Elaine Welteroth unpacks the lessons in her liberation from limiting labels, relationships, and beliefs – from her life as a confident child in California to being the first in her interracial family to graduate from college, from transforming the Teen Vogue brand into a revolutionary political vehicle to interviewing luminaries like Michelle Obama and Oprah. As Welteroth learns to rely on herself by looking both inward and upward, we're ultimately reminded that we're not only just enough, but more than enough.

"How brown is too brown?" "Can Indians be racist?" "What does real love between really different people look like?" Like many six-year-olds, Mira Jacob's half-Jewish, half-Indian son, Z, has questions about everything. At first they are innocuous enough, but as tensions from the 2016 election spread from the media into his own family, they become much, much more complicated. Trying to answer him honestly, Mira has to think back to where she's gotten her own answers: her most formative conversations about race, color, sexuality, and, of course, love. Written with humor and vulnerability, this deeply relatable graphic memoir is a love letter to the art of conversation – and to the hope that hovers in our most difficult questions.

After living in America for over a decade, Eun Ji Koh's parents return to South Korea for work, leaving fifteen-year-old Eun Ji and her brother behind in California. Overnight, Eun Ji finds herself abandoned and adrift in a world made strange by her mother's absence. Her mother writes letters in Korean over the years seeking forgiveness and love – letters Eun Ji cannot fully understand until she finds them years later hidden in a box. As Eun Ji translates the letters, she looks to history and to poetry, as well as her own lived experience to answer questions inside all of us. Where do the stories of our mothers and grandmothers end and ours begin? How do we find words – in Korean, Japanese, English, or any language– to articulate the profound ways that distance can shape love?

In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up one of the few Asian American kids at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother's particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother's tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food. As she grew up, moving to the East Coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, and performing gigs with her fledgling band – and meeting the man who would become her husband – her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live. It was her mother's diagnosis of terminal cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her. Vivacious and plainspoken, lyrical and honest, Zauner's voice is as radiantly alive on the page as it is onstage.

In 1992, Amra was a teen in Bihac, Bosnia, when her best friend said they couldn't speak anymore. Her friend didn't say why, but Amra knew the reason: Amra was Muslim. It was the first sign her world was changing. Then Muslim refugees from other Bosnian cities started arriving, fleeing Serbian persecution. When the tanks rolled into Bihac, bringing her own city under seige, Amra's happy life in her peaceful city vanished. But there is light even in the darkest of times, and she discovered that light in the warm, bonfire eyes of a stray cat. The little calico had followed the refugees into the city and lost her own family. At first, Amra doesn't want to bother with a stray; her family doesn't have the money to keep a pet. But with gentle charm this kitty finds her way into everyone's heart, and after a few near miracles when she seems to save the family, how could they turn her away? Here is the stunning true story of a teen who, even in the brutality of war, never wavered in her determination to obtain an education, maintain friendships, and even find a first love – and the cat who gave comfort, hope, and maybe even served as the family's guardian spirit.

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Jeremy Ivester is a transgender man. Thirty years ago, his parents welcomed him into the world as what they thought was their daughter. As a child, they called him a tomboy. By high school, when he showed no interest in flirting, his parents thought he might be lesbian. At twenty, he wondered if he was asexual. At twenty-four, he began taking the hormones that would lower his voice and give him a beard – and he announced his new name and pronouns. Once a Girl, Always a Boy is Jeremy's journey from childhood through coming out as transgender and eventually emerging as an advocate for the transgender community. This is not only Jeremy's story but also that of his family, told from multiple perspectives--those of the siblings who struggled to understand the brother they once saw as a sister, and of the parents who ultimately joined him in the battle against discrimination. This is a story of acceptance in a world not quite ready to accept.

If you think sexism thrives only on Wall Street or in Hollywood, you haven't visited a lab, a science department, a research foundation, or a biotech firm. Rita Colwell is one of the top scientists in America: the groundbreaking microbiologist who discovered how cholera survives between epidemics and the former head of the National Science Foundation. But when she first applied for a graduate fellowship in bacteriology, she was told, "we don't waste fellowships on women." A lack of support from some male superiors would lead her to change her area of study six times before completing her PhD. Along the way, she encountered other women challenging the the status quo, including a group at MIT who revolt when they discover their labs are a fraction of the size of their male colleagues'. A Lab of One's Own shares the sheer joy a scientist feels when moving toward a breakthrough, and the thrill of uncovering a whole new generation of female pioneers. But it is also the science book for the #MeToo era, offering an astute diagnosis of how to fix the problem of sexism in science – and a celebration of the women pushing back.

In 1961, Sarah M. Broom's mother Ivory Mae bought a shotgun house in the then-promising neighborhood of New Orleans East and built her world inside of it. It was the height of the Space Race and the neighborhood was home to a major NASA plant – the postwar optimism seemed assured. Widowed, Ivory Mae remarried Sarah's father Simon Broom and their combined family would eventually number twelve children. But after Simon died, six months after Sarah's birth, the Yellow House would become Ivory Mae's thirteenth and most unruly child. This is the story of a mother's struggle against a house's entropy, and that of a prodigal daughter who left home only to reckon with the pull that home exerts, even after the Yellow House was wiped off the map after Hurricane Katrina. Located in the gap between the "Big Easy" of tourist guides and the New Orleans in which Broom was raised, The Yellow House is a brilliant memoir of place, class, race, the seeping rot of inequality, and the internalized shame that often follows.

Schizophrenia is not a single unifying diagnosis, and Esmé Weijun Wang writes not just to her fellow members of the "collected schizophrenias" but to those who wish to understand it as well. Opening with the journey toward her diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder, Wang discusses the medical community's own disagreement about labels and procedures for diagnosing those with mental illness, and then follows an arc that examines the manifestations of schizophreniain her life. In essays that range from using fashion to present as high-functioning to the depths of a rare form of psychosis, and from the failures of the higher education system and the dangers of institutionalization to the complexity of compounding factors such as PTSD and Lyme disease, Wang's analytical eye, honed as a former lab researcher at Stanford, allows her to balance research with personal narrative.

In September 1921, four young men and Ada Blackjack, a diminutive 25-year-old Eskimo woman, ventured deep into the Arctic in a secret attempt to colonize desolate Wrangel Island for Great Britain. Two years later, Ada Blackjack emerged as the sole survivor of this ambitious polar expedition. This young, unskilled woman – who had headed to the Arctic in search of money and a husband – conquered the seemingly unconquerable north and survived all alone after her male companions had perished. Following her triumphant return to civilization, the international press proclaimed her the female Robinson Crusoe. But whatever stories the press turned out came from the imaginations of reporters: Ada Blackjack refused to speak to anyone about her horrific two years in the Arctic. Jennifer Niven has created an absorbing, compelling history of this remarkable woman, taking full advantage of the wealth of first-hand resources about Ada that exist, including her never-before-seen diaries, the unpublished diaries from other primary characters, and interviews with Ada's surviving son. Ada Blackjack is more than a rugged tale of a woman battling the elements to survive in the frozen north – it is the story of a hero.