Beacon: 545 books
The Hardest Questions Aren't on the Test
Lessons from an Innovative Urban School
Language: English
Release Date: March 29, 2016
The Boston Arts Academy comprises an ethnically and socioeconomically diverse student body, yet 94 percent of its graduates are accepted to college. Compare this with the average urban district rate of 50 percent. How do they do it? This remarkable success, writes Principal Linda Nathan, is in large...
These Schools Belong to You and Me
Why We Can't Afford to Abandon Our Public Schools
Language: English
Release Date: September 19, 2017
A challenge to narrow, profit-driven conceptions of school success and an argument for protecting public education to ensure that all students become competent citizens in a vibrant democracy
In These Schools Belong to You and Me, MacArthur award–winning educator, reformer, and author Deborah...
When Grit Isn't Enough
A High School Principal Examines How Poverty and Inequality Thwart the College-for-All Promise
Language: English
Release Date: October 17, 2017
Examines major myths informing American education and explores how educators can better serve students, increase college retention rates, and develop alternatives to college that don’t disadvantage students on the basis of race or income
Each year, as the founding headmaster of the Boston...
by Raymond M. Douglas
Language: English
Release Date: April 5, 2016
Language: English
Release Date: April 5, 2016
A personal and moral inquiry into the crime we do our best to ignore: the rape of adult men
When Raymond M. Douglas was an eighteen-year-old living in Europe, he was brutally raped by a Catholic priest. He eventually moved to the United States and became a highly regarded historian, writing...
Light without Fire
The Making of America's First Muslim College
Language: English
Release Date: April 16, 2013
The story of America’s first Muslim institution of higher education, Zaytuna College
In the fall of 2010, anti-Muslim furor in the United States reached a breaking point, capping a decade in which such sentiment had surged. Loud, angry crowds gathered near New York’s Ground Zero to protest...
Faith Ed
Teaching About Religion in an Age of Intolerance
Language: English
Release Date: August 18, 2015
An intimate cross-country look at the new debate over religion in the public schools
A suburban Boston school unwittingly started a firestorm of controversy over a sixth-grade field trip. The class was visiting a mosque to learn about world religions when a handful of boys, unnoticed by their teachers,...
The Blue Cotton Gown
A Midwife's Memoir
Language: English
Release Date: October 1, 2008
A 2008 Indie Next Pick
Despite nurse-midwife Patsy Harman’s own financial and personal medical trials, including her private battle with uterine cancer, she devotes herself to her patients’ well-being in all aspects of their lives. They, in turn, tell her intimate stories both heartbreaking and uplifting.
Fragile Beginnings
Discoveries and Triumphs in the Newborn ICU
Language: English
Release Date: February 7, 2012
This is a gripping medical narrative that brings readers into the complex world of newborn intensive care, where brilliant but imperfect doctors do all they can to coax life into their tiny, injured patients. Dr. Adam Wolfberg--journalist, physician specializing in high-risk pregnancies, and father...
Love's Promises
How Formal and Informal Contracts Shape All Kinds of Families
Language: English
Release Date: May 26, 2015
Blends memoir and legal cases to show how contracts can create family relationships
Most people think of love and contracts as strange bedfellows, or even opposites. In Love’s Promises, however, law professor Martha Ertman shows that far from cold and calculating, contracts shape and sustain...
by Claude Levi-Strauss
Language: English
Release Date: May 10, 2016
Language: English
Release Date: May 10, 2016
"Levi-Strauss continues his assault on the myth of the primitice as savage by turning to the phenomena of totemism an totoemix classification ... to show, contrary to this myth, that primitive thought rests upon a rich and complex conceptual structure." – Commentary
by Claude Levi-Strauss
Language: English
Release Date: May 10, 2016
Language: English
Release Date: May 10, 2016
Professor Lévi-Strauss’s first major work, Les Structures élémentaires de la Parenté, has acquired a classic reputation since its original publication in 1949; and it has become the constant focus of academic debate about central theoretical concerns in social anthropology. It is, however, a...
My Confection
Odyssey of a Sugar Addict
Language: English
Release Date: January 5, 2016
A funny, candid, and original coming-of-age story told through sugar addiction
She doesn’t drink or do drugs, but like millions of other Americans, Lisa Kotin has a substance abuse problem. Kotin is addicted to sugar. My Confection is a darkly funny and candid memoir of where sugar took this...
Life as Jamie Knows It
An Exceptional Child Grows Up
Language: English
Release Date: October 4, 2016
The story of Jamie Bérubé’s journey to adulthood and a meditation on disability in American life
Published in 1996, Life as We Know It introduced Jamie Bérubé to the world as a sweet, bright, gregarious little boy who loves the Beatles, pizza, and making lists. When he is asked in his...
The Match
Savior Siblings and One Family's Battle to Heal Their Daughter
Language: English
Release Date: April 1, 2010
My Sister’s Keeper in nonfiction: a family’s real-life struggle to cure their daughter by creating her genetic match
Katie Trebing was diagnosed at three months oldwith Diamond Blackfan anemia, a rare form of anemia that prevents bone marrow from producing red blood cells. Even with a lifetime...