3. Rock & Roll Will Save Your Life
by Steve Almond
With a life that’s spanned the phonographic era and the digital age, Steve Almond lives to Rawk. Like you, he’s secretly longed to live the life of a rock star, complete with insane talent, famous friends, and hotel rooms to be trashed. His book traces Almond’s passion from his earliest (and most wretched) rock criticism to his eventual discovery of a music-crazed soul mate and their subsequent production of two little superfans.


4. Poor People
by William T. Vollmann
With intense compassion and a scrupulously unpatronizing eye, Vollmann invites his readers to recognize in our fellow human beings their full dignity, fallibility, pride, and pain, and the power of their hard-fought resilience.


 5. Consider the Lobster
by David Foster Wallace 
Do lobsters feel pain? Did Franz Kafka have a funny bone? What is John Updike's deal, anyway? And what happens when adult video starlets meet their fans in person? David Foster Wallace answers these questions and more in essays that are also enthralling narrative adventures. Please also read everything he's ever written.


GITI KHALSA (Urban Think! Foundation Founding Board Member)

 1. The Next 100 Years
by George Friedman  
A fascinating, eye-opening and often shocking look at what lies ahead for the U.S. and the world from one of our most incisive futurists. 


 2. How We Decide
Jonah Lehrer 
Jonah Lehrer arms us with the tools we need, drawing on cutting-edge research as well as the real-world experiences of a wide range of "deciders"—from airplane pilots and hedge fund investors to serial killers and poker players. Lehrer shows how people are taking advantage of the new science to make better television shows, win more football games, and improve military intelligence.

 3. The Checklist Manifesto
by Atul Gawande 
An intellectual adventure in which lives are lost and saved and one simple idea makes a tremendous difference, The Checklist Manifesto is essential reading for anyone working to get things right.
 
 4. The Back of the Napkin
by Dan Roam  
Now with more color, bigger pictures, and additional content, this new edition does an even better job of helping you literally see the world in a new way. Join the teachers, project managers, doctors, engineers, assembly-line workers, pilots, football coaches, marine drill instructors, financial analysts, students, parents, and lawyers who have discovered the power of solving problems with pictures.
 
 5. Who's That? Discovering Orlando One Interview at a Time
by Jana Waring 
Have you ever been curious to know a stranger’s story? Like who they are? Where they’re from? And why they do the things they do? Jana Waring has asked herself those questions, but she’s taken the thought one step further. Who’s that? Discovering Orlando One Interview at a Time is a candid book of conversations between one nosy grad student and many different people in the Orlando community.

JANA WARING (Volunteer Extraordinaire)

  1. Interpreter of Maladies
by Jhumpa Lahiri  
Navigating between the Indian traditions they've inherited and the baffling new world, the characters in Jhumpa Lahiri's elegant, touching stories seek love beyond the barriers of culture and generations.


2. Magical Thinking
by Augusten Burroughs
It begins with a Tang Instant Breakfast Drink television commercial when Augusten was seven. Then there is the contest of wills with the deranged cleaning lady. Dating an undertaker and much more. A collection of true stories that are universal in their appeal yet unabashedly intimate and very funny.

3. The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
In 1955, Marquez was working for a newspaper in Bogota, when in February of that year eight crew members a Colombian destroyer were washed overboard and disappeared. Ten days later one of them turned up, barely alive, on a deserted beach in northern Colombia. This book, which originally appeared as a series of newspaper articles, is Marquez's account of that sailor's ordeal.

4. The Beach
by Alex Garland
Dark, sarcastic and deliciously hedonistic, this is this story of a twenty-something backpacker looking for the “perfect” beach in remote Thailand. The movie cannot begin to touch the depth and fascination of this novel.

5. Push
by Sapphire
Precious Jones, 16 years old and pregnant by her father with her second child, meets a determined and highly radical teacher who takes her on a journey of transformation and redemption.
 

CRAIG USTLER (Urban Think! Foundation Board Member)


  1. The Great Reset
by Richard Florida  
In The Great Reset, bestselling author and economic development expert Richard Florida provides an engaging and sweeping examination of these previous economic epochs, or "resets." He distills the deep forces that have altered physical and social landscapes and eventually reshaped economies and societies.

  2. Only in New York
by Sam Roberts  
No one denies that New York City is unique—but what makes it sui generis? Sam Roberts, longtime city reporter, has puzzled over this in print and in his popular New York Times podcasts for years. In Only in New York, he writes about what makes New York tick and why things are the way they are in the greatest of all cities on earth.

  3. Green Metropolis
by David Owen  
In this remarkable challenge to conventional thinking about the environment, David Owen offers an invaluable environmental template for a global population that is growing as natural resources shrink. Green Metropolis will change the way people think about the environment.

  4. The Next 100 Years
by George Friedman  
A fascinating, eye-opening and often shocking look at what lies ahead for the U.S. and the world from one of our most incisive futurists.

  5. Wrestling with Moses
by Anthony Flint  
Like A Civil Action before it, Wrestling with Moses is the tale of a local battle with far-ranging significance. By confronting Moses and his vision, Jacobs forever changed the way Americans understood the city, and inspired citizens across the country to protest destructive projects in their own communities.