Native Tongues (Charles Berlitz)

Berlitz knows languages, and this book is a collection of interesting facts about languages. Here are a few examples: After discussing various Chinese ideograms, including the one for "horse" and the one for "door," we learn that the symbol for something surprising is a horse in a door. I love knowing that the Latin word for "seagull" means "noise with feathers."  Berlitz includes the worlds most efficient travel dictionary, based on the claim that knowing eight words in 25 languages will allow you to convey most essential ideas to the vast majority of the people in the world. Language tells a lot about a culture (in traditional Chinese, the word for "wife" is "the person inside") and about history (the Russian word for "train station" is just their version of the name of an English train station, Vauxhall, that early Russian railroad engineers admired). I recommend this to anyone who wants to know more about how we talk to each other, and why.

The Other Wes Moore (Wes Moore)

This is a memoir and a biography, telling the stories of two men named Wes Moore.  Both were black, both lived in the same neighborhood in Baltimore at the same time, both grew up in single-mother households, both had scrapes with the law at an early age, both struggled in school. Their lives diverged wildly, though; the Wes Moore who authored this book became a military man, a Rhodes Scholar, a graduate of Johns Hopkins University, a happily married man, and a nationally-known speaker, while the other Wes Moore will live out his life in prison for murder. What happened? How did the author's life get turned around and set back on track, while the other kept spiraling further and further down a dark path? The book offers many possibilities: one father abandoned his boy while the other died unexpectedly, one mother was never able to complete college while the other was a college graduate, one dropped out of failing inner-city schools while the other was able to attend private and military schools. Ultimately, though, there are no clear answers. This book is a thoughtful look at the questions, opening our eyes to the complexity of the situation and the difficulty of finding the answers. Highly recommended.

Whistling Vivaldi (Claude Steele)

A in-depth exploration of the concept of stereotype threat - how being in a situation where we are in a minority creates stress that can reduce our performance on the things most important to us, including academic performance in school. The research is thorough and convincing. I have to say that I found the book less than enthralling, since it goes step by step over the same ground in many different ways. This is the right and proper way to do research of this kind, but it doesn't make for a page-turner. It has a big and important idea to express, but there is no second act. Highly recommended if you are interested in this idea; otherwise, not so much.

In the Neighborhood (Peter Lovenheim)

My book club was interested in this book because it's local; we are all from around Rochester, NY, and some of us live in Brighton, though none on the street that is the focus of this book. The author is disturbed when a murder-suicide happens in his quiet, well-to-do neighborhood, and reflects on the fact that nobody on the street really knew the victim and she had no one there to turn to. This book describes his idiosyncratic attempt to overcome the barriers between neighbors by introducing himself to people and asking if, as an author, he could get to know them, shadow them for a whole day, and even stay overnight in their homes. A few people said yes, and he was able to build a tiny community among a few of his neighbors. On the other hand, the link between a general lack of community on a street like this one, with imposing homes on huge lots, and the death of the murder victim was forced. She did know her next-door neighbors well enough so that her children knew to go there when something went wrong. She just didn't really believe her husband was going to kill her until it was too late. And the community he built was tiny and temporary. Was it worth it? With the communities we all build among more distant folks, is it really important that you be good friends with your next door neighbor? We weren't as convinced as he was.

The Help (Kathryn Stockett)

In Jackson, Mississippi in 1962, the lines between white folks and the black women who clean their homes, cook their meals, and raise their children seem inviolable. This novel describes how one white woman's ambition to become a writer leads her to cross those lines, enlisting a dozen maids to tell their stories in a book that threatens to tear their society apart. Though simplistic in many ways, the story rings true. Stockett has captured the voices and the attitudes of her characters spot-on and built a world that is compelling and uplifting even as it breaks your heart.

Guns, Germs, and Steel (Jared Diamond)

An ambitious and largely successful attempt to illuminate some of the complex historical forces that drove some human cultures, largely Eurasian, to develop so much faster than others since the end of the last ice age. The main factors he identifies are environmental; Eurasia had a larger suite of plants and animals suitable for domestication, an east-west axis that made it easier for crops and livestock to diffuse to nearby regions with similar climates, and few natural boundaries to this diffusion. As a result, farming and husbandry developed earlier and spread faster there, supporting denser human populations and therefore more innovation (and more deadly germs from the animals, to which they developed some resistance). The author supports his thesis with a great volume of data that is exhaustive, not to say exhausting.