Recommended Reading

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The Society is pleased to announce the finalists for its 2025 Book Awards:

Shortlisted for the Award in Science

· Crisis Averted: The Hidden Science of Fighting Outbreaks by Caitlin Rivers

· Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It by Christof Koch

· What If We Get It Right? Visions of Climate Futures by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson

· Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory’s Power to Hold on to What Matters by Charan Ranganath

· Wicked Problems: How to Engineer a Better World by Guru Madhavan

Shortlisted for the Christian Gauss Award

· Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel’s Messiah by Charles King (ΦBK, University of Arkansas)

· Reading Genesis by Marilynne Robinson (ΦBK, Brown University)

· The Black Box: Writing the Race by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (ΦBK, Yale University)

· The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture by Tricia Romano

· The Playbook: A Story of Theater, Democracy, and the Making of a Culture War by James Shapiro

Shortlisted for the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award

· Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis by Jonathan Blitzer (ΦBK, Columbia University)

· Native Nations: A Millennium in North America by Kathleen DuVal

· Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories by Amitav Ghosh

· Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling by Jason De León

· The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins by Stefanos Geroulanos (ΦBK, Princeton University)

Winners will be announced in late October and will appear in the winter issue of The Key Reporter.