Book Club
We read a lot around here. It’s a habit we never grew out of, and we’re not trying to. Some of what we read is research and policy, some of it is fiction, and some of it defies category entirely. What follows is the shelf that’s earned a permanent spot in our office, the books we find ourselves recommending, quoting, and pressing into people’s hands.
One request before you buy anything: check your library first. Nearly everything here is available through your local branch, in print, audio, or e-book, and libraries are exactly the kind of community institution this whole site is about. If your library doesn’t have a title, ask for it. Requests are how collections grow.
We’ll keep adding to this as we read, because we’re always reading. If a book has changed how you think about community, health, or the systems we all live inside, we’d love to hear about it.
Like biscuits and gravy...
This list works in pairs. Each novel sits beside a work of nonfiction that covers the same ground, the same institution, the same crisis, sometimes the same patch of earth. We built it this way because fiction and fact do different jobs. A good novel makes you feel what something was like from the inside. A good work of nonfiction proves it happened, names names, and shows you the records. Read them together, and the story stops being just a story.
You don’t have to read in pairs, and you don’t have to read in order. You don’t have to read any of them, but we think you should read them all. And if one of these novels gets under your skin, its neighbor will tell you why it should.
The Reformatory, by Tananarive Due
Every so often, a book takes history you thought you knew and makes you feel it in your chest. It’s 1950 in Jim Crow Florida, and twelve-year-old Robbie Stephens Jr. is sentenced to the Gracetown School for Boys for the crime of defending his sister from the son of a powerful white family. Robbie can see haints, the spirits of boys who never made it out of Gracetown, and through his eyes, we watch an institution built to break children do exactly what it was built to do.Due based the novel on her own family history. Her great-uncle died at the real Dozier School for Boys, and that personal stake is on every page. So is love, especially between Robbie and his sister Gloria, who spends the book fighting a system designed to make rescuing him nearly impossible. The ghosts are the least frightening thing in it. Highly recommended for readers who want American history told with rigor and heart. One of the best books we’ve read in years.
We Carry Their Bones, by Tananarive Due
If The Reformatory is the novel, this is the excavation. Kimmerle is a forensic anthropologist at the University of South Florida, and when the state of Florida was ready to close the book on the Dozier School for Boys, she and her team went in with ground-penetrating radar and found more graves than the official records had ever acknowledged. Boys buried without names, without ceremony, and in many cases without their families ever being told what happened to them.What follows is part science, part detective story, and part reckoning, as Kimmerle’s team works to identify remains, return boys to their families after decades, and push the state to admit what survivors had been saying all along. Read it directly after Due’s novel. The fiction makes you feel it, and this proves all of it really happened. Highly recommended for anyone who wants to see what institutional accountability actually looks like in practice: slow, contested, and worth every bit of the fight.
Small Things Like These, by Claire Keegan
This one is short, quiet, and absolutely devastating in the best way. It’s a novella, so you can read it in a single sitting, but don’t be surprised if it stays with you for weeks. Set in a small Irish town in the 1980s, it follows Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and father who stumbles onto a truth about the local convent that most of his community has quietly agreed not to see. Keegan resists making Bill a hero or a villain. He’s just a decent man trying to figure out what decency actually requires of him.For anyone thinking about community health, civic courage, or the way institutions shape behavior, this book is almost unnervingly apt. It shows how communities can organize themselves around silence, and what it costs when one person decides to stop going along. Highly recommended if you want a story that makes you think hard about responsibility and what it means to actually show up for people.
Republic of Shame, by Caelainn Hogan
This is the history behind Small Things Like These, and it’s harder to read because none of it is invented. Until shockingly recently, the Catholic Church and the Irish state ran a network of institutions for women who became pregnant outside marriage: the Magdalene laundries, where women were confined and put to unpaid work, and the mother-and-baby homes, where their children were taken from them. Death rates were appallingly high, and a mass grave of infants discovered at the home in Tuam forced a reckoning that is still unfolding.Hogan, an Irish journalist, talked to survivors, to the religious orders that ran the institutions, and to the clergy who defended them. What she assembles is a portrait of what she calls a shame-industrial complex, an entire society organized around hiding its most vulnerable people. Highly recommended for anyone thinking about how institutions, faith, and silence combine, and what it takes for a country to finally look.
Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver
This one is a big, generous, heartbreaking novel, and it deserves every bit of the attention it has gotten, including the Pulitzer. It’s a retelling of David Copperfield set in rural Appalachia, following a boy named Damon Fields who goes by Demon. Through his eyes, we see how the opioid crisis didn’t just happen to communities; it was sold to them through pharmaceutical marketing, underfunded safety nets, and a medical system that treated pain management as a profit opportunity. Demon is funny, sharp, and full of life, which makes what happens to him all the harder to watch.What Kingsolver does that most policy books can’t is make you feel the systems. You see how the foster care pipeline, the lack of mental health resources, and predatory prescription practices stack on top of each other until a kid with every reason to succeed has almost no path forward. Highly recommended for anyone working in health, social services, or public policy who wants a reminder of why all of it matters so deeply.
Dreamland, by Sam Quinones
If you want to understand the opioid crisis, this is the book. Quinones tells two parallel stories: the rise of OxyContin and the pharmaceutical industry’s role in flooding communities with prescription opioids, and the simultaneous emergence of a remarkably efficient black-tar heroin network run out of a small Mexican state called Nayarit. The way those two supply chains intersect with gaps in American healthcare and the social safety net is both fascinating and horrifying.What makes it so valuable is that Quinones resists the urge to assign simple blame. The story is about systems and incentives, and how individually rational decisions can combine into collective catastrophe. It’s deeply reported, humanely told, and it pairs beautifully with Demon Copperhead. Highly recommended for anyone who wants a clear-eyed account of how the epidemic developed and what it reveals about American communities.
The Only Good Indians, by Stephen Graham
Let’s get this out of the way: this is a horror novel, and it earns the label. It’s also one of the most acclaimed literary novels of the past decade about Native identity. The story follows four Blackfeet men, a decade after a hunting trip where they crossed a line they knew they shouldn’t have crossed. What follows them is part vengeance, part reckoning, and Jones, who is Blackfeet himself, uses the horror to ask what you owe the place you come from, what it costs to leave, and what it costs to stay.
The dread never feels like a gimmick. The real horror is the weight of history, the pull between tradition and assimilation, and the way harm grows when it goes unaddressed, a story anyone who works with communities carrying generational trauma will recognize. It’s graphically violent in places, so it’s not the pick for readers who want gentle. It’s also probably not your best bet for a breezy beach read, though we wouldn’t blame you if you had a stiff drink while reading. Highly recommended for anyone willing to let genre fiction carry as much truth as anything else on this list. It also went on to win a stack of awards, which tells you how rare it is for a book to be this scary and this serious at the same time.
Empire of the Summer Moon, by S.C. Gwynne
Fair warning: this is not a light read. It covers brutal history, and Gwynne doesn’t shy away from any of it. The book tells the story of the Comanche nation, one of the most dominant Indigenous peoples in North American history, and their decades-long conflict with American expansion. At its center are Cynthia Ann Parker, a white woman captured as a child who became fully Comanche, and her son Quanah Parker, the last great Comanche chief.Beyond the history itself, it’s a vivid picture of what happens when policy, culture, technology, and power collide, and how communities endure even overwhelming force. A note on this pairing: Jones writes about the Blackfeet and Gwynne about the Comanche, two nations with very different histories, and we don’t pair them because Native stories are interchangeable. They aren’t. Together, these books show how Native history has usually been told about Native people, and what it sounds like when a Native writer tells his own. Highly recommended for readers ready to grapple seriously with American history.
The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck
Yes, that one, the one you were assigned in high school. Read it again as an adult who works anywhere near poverty, housing, or health, and it becomes a different book entirely. The Joads are a working family driven off their Oklahoma land, and Steinbeck follows them west as they live out of a truck, move from camp to camp, and chase work that never pays enough to get them housed. At every stop they’re treated as the cause of their own circumstances rather than the casualties of someone else’s profit.
What stands out on rereading is how precisely Steinbeck names the machinery: the banks that take the land, the growers who advertise for ten times the workers they need so wages collapse, the towns that want the labor but not the laborers. Swap the truck for an extended-stay hotel and you have next week’s news. Highly recommended for anyone who thinks they already know this book. You read it before you could see what it was about.
There is No Place for Us, by Brian Goldstone
If The Grapes of Wrath is the novel, this is the proof that it never stopped being true, and this time it hits close to home, literally. Goldstone spent years following families in Atlanta who work, sometimes multiple jobs, and still have nowhere stable to live. They cycle through extended-stay hotels, cars, and doubled-up arrangements with relatives, and because they’re not in shelters or sleeping outside, most of them never appear in official homelessness counts at all. That invisibility is the book’s central argument, and it’s a sharp one.For community health work, the connection is direct. Housing instability of this kind shapes everything from school attendance to medication adherence to chronic disease management, and these are exactly the families a needs assessment can miss if you only look in the usual places. Highly recommended for anyone working in housing, health, or social services, especially in the South, and for anyone who thought they already knew what homelessness in America looks like.
The tool shed
Not every book on our shelf is about the why. Some are about the how, and some are simply lenses we keep coming back to. These are the ones we reach for when the work gets technical, when we need to think about scale, or when we need to find the right words.
Note: we included links to these books to make them easy to find (though we still think you should start first at the library). We gain nothing from you clicking through; we just want to make it as easy as possible for you to read these gems. To that end, some are links to free PDFs, eliminating at least that cost as a barrier.
How Neighborhoods Make Us Sick, by Veronica Squires and Breanna Lathrop: Where you live is one of the strongest predictors of how healthy you’ll be, and that’s not an accident. This book walks through why: housing, food access, the daily grind of environmental stress, and the policy and investment decisions that built those conditions in the first place. What we like most is that it doesn’t stop at diagnosis. It gets into what you can actually do. Full disclosure: our founder serves on a board of directors with Veronica and has watched her work up close for years. We’re not unbiased here, and that’s exactly the point. Veronica lives this work, and you can tell.
Ripples of Hope: Great American Civil Rights Speeches, edited by Josh Gottheimer: Less analysis, more primary source. This is a collection of American civil rights speeches, from Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth to Bobby Kennedy on the night Dr. King was killed, which is where the title comes from. We keep it around for a simple reason: you have to reach people’s hearts before you can change their minds, and nobody teaches that better than these speakers. And when we say we keep it around, we mean it. The book is in its 23rd year of sitting on our founder’s desk. Sometimes you need to remember how much people care, and how impactful words can be. If your work involves convincing anyone of anything, keep it close.
Small is Beautiful, by E.F. Schumacher: Schumacher wrote this in 1973, and it reads like he finished it last week. His argument is simple: bigger isn’t always better, and systems built at a human scale work better for the humans living inside them. If you’ve ever had the nagging feeling that there should be a better way to measure success than the bottom line, this is the book that names it. He writes like a philosopher who happens to be an economist, which helps. Bonus- the link brings you to a PDF version with no paywall, so this is available to anyone for free.
The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality, by Angus Deaton: Deaton is incredibly smart and an unusually good writer, which is rarer than it should be. This one, our favorite of his, is about progress: how some people and countries got dramatically healthier and wealthier over the past two centuries, and why others got left behind. He’s also deeply skeptical of foreign aid as it currently works, and even if you don’t end up agreeing with him, you’ll think harder because of him. Read it, then go read everything else he wrote. You’ll be better for it. In case you didn’t already guess, he’s one of our biggest economic crushes. The man knows what he’s talking about.
Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty, by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo: Banerjee and Duflo won a Nobel for the work behind this book, but that’s not why it’s here. It’s here because of how they think: test your assumptions, measure what happens, be willing to be wrong. It’s built on years of randomized trials, and it treats poor people the way they deserve to be treated, as smart people navigating hard circumstances, not as charity cases. If you design or evaluate programs, read it before your next one.
Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data, by Charles Wheelan: The most painless introduction to statistics we’ve ever found, and actually funny in places, which should not be possible in a stats book, but here we are. Wheelan covers regression, probability, why correlation isn’t causation, and why studies mislead even when nobody’s lying, all without any math past basic arithmetic. If you want to read research without getting fooled by it, start here.