Off The Common Books: 23 books

What can we learn from Bitcoin and Burning Man about re-inventing money and designing better forms of self-governance?  Why are “decentralized autonomous organizations” the next great Internet disruption? From Bitcoin to Burning Man and Beyond:  The Quest for Autonomy...

At once a writer's autobiography and a road book, with vivid portraits of an unusual group of people-ranging from an early mentor and one-time neighbor, the late poet Archibald MacLeish, to world renowned jazz great Wynton Marsalis (with whose bands Carl Vigeland traveled for many years) and the author's...

"Tzivia Gover tells us that according to the educator, Paulo Freire, 'It is impossible to teach without the courage to love.' In this beautifully written memoir, Gover musters up the courage to love her students despite the often difficult differences between them. By having the pregnant and parenting...

Stories of men and women confronted by the Vietnam War. Contains personal stories of Vietnam War Veterans, people who fled the country, people who refused to go to war, people who beat the draft, people who obtained Conscientious Objector Status, and people who loved and supported them.

In this 100-page novella three women who’ve passed their 70th birthdays look around to find time short. How to spend these coming years? Nikki divides the days remaining into millions of minutes, Chessa gets a dog and Pru downsizes to a condo, only to discover that—with the loss of familiar objects—even her children begin to look a bit strange.

Soon after enrolling her older son in a Boston public elementary school, Susan Naimark began to see that opportunities offered to her kids were often unavailable to their classmates of color. In The Education of a White Parent Naimark candidly describes her sometimes faltering efforts to create change...

High Lonesome is a pasture on a West Texas ranch, a state of being, an affecting personal mythology. Poet Patricia Lee Lewis writes, "Think how brambles catch her petticoats, hold them 'til they tear, feed on blood....Say the old woman can find her way, can feel the thorns of walls," and...

In 1965, the architect and design theorist Christopher Alexander published a landmark theoretical critique of modern urban design, and by extension, modern design in general. His critique was different from others of the day in that it was not based on a social or political argument, but on a structural...

This collection of articles describes how to use design patterns to create better — more emotionally-responsive and human — architectural environments. The pattern concept was introduced by Christopher Alexander and his collaborators in 1977, and has enjoyed wide success outside architectural...

“A little rebellion now and then is a good thing,” Thomas Jefferson wrote to his good friend James Madison in 1787, upon hearing the news of Shays’ Rebellion.  This is the story of how that little rebellion, largely centered in the Pioneer Valley in Massachusetts, became part of the cultural...

Tom Zink was born in a blizzard in 1947, a child of winter. Seasoned: A Memoir of Grief and Grace is the story of Tom’s unwitting grief journey of five decades that begins when his older brother Steve is hit by a car and killed while on the paper route the two boys shared. It’s the story of a...

Emancypantki (Emancipated Women), by the acclaimed Polish author Boleslaw Prus, was first published as a serial in the Daily Courier (Kurier Codzienny), 1890-1893, and as a book in 1894. Leading his readers, in a manner reminiscent of Dickens, from an elegant girls’ school in Warsaw to a provincial...

International entrepreneur Pat Culliney flew high as the wealthy owner of Universe Electronics. Then, teen lovers found Pat drowned in his Jaguar coupe, submerged in a lake at the end of a secluded dirt road in the woods. The medical examiner said suicide, but a receipt for dry ice let attorney Shawn...

Lord David Cholmondeley (“chum-lee”) is a dairy farmer in the Cotswolds, an occasional tutor at Oxford University, and an MI5 agent. England is in the midst of the 1930s economic Great Slump. Recently married, Lord Cholmondeley is looking forward to a quiet life with his wife, Dr. Fitzwilliam....