'Great Black Hope' is a character study of a young, Black, queer man in high society

Michelle Obama's memoir Becoming delivers candid reflections on the life of the first African-American first lady. Offering a window into her personal evolution, Michelle details how ambition, hard work, and embracing her authentic story helped her journey from her family’s Chicago working-class neighborhood to a 47th-floor law office, then to the White House and beyond.

Becoming provides insights into Michelle’s self-determination: She pushed herself to excel in Ivy League classrooms and achieve a prestigious career by age 26, then mustered the courage to swerve off that path in search of greater fulfillment. It details her relationship with Barack—a love story of two opposites—and their challenging quest to navigate family and political life. Through it all, we witness a woman who perpetually strives to become a better version of herself.

If you could spend several weeks in the body of someone of a different race, would you? In 1959, one man tried to do this. White journalist John Howard Griffin darkened his skin to appear like a Black man, then traveled for six weeks throughout the segregated Southern US. Griffin predicted that he’d experience racial discrimination, and he hoped this outcome would convince white Americans that the US was not the racism-free country they thought it was. In Black Like Me, Griffin’s account of his journey, he argues that his hypothesis was correct: Black Southerners faced brutal racism.

In this guide, we’ll describe Griffin’s experiences passing as a Black man and share his conclusions about Southern race relations. Throughout this guide, we’ll contextualize Griffin’s experiences and ideas by exploring the history of racism according to experts such as Ibram X. Kendi and Michelle Alexander. Furthermore, we’ll outline critics’ opinions of this controversial book. Finally, we’ll examine the relevance of Griffin’s ideas to life today.

Born a Crime is the story of a strong-willed black mother and her mixed-race child as they traverse life in South Africa during apartheid. When comedian Trevor Noah was born in the mid-1980s, his birth was a crime under the laws of apartheid, forbade whites and blacks from mixing and procreating. Growing up during and after apartheid, Noah struggled to understand where he belonged in this racially divided environment.

Through anecdotes from Noah and his mother’s life and details regarding the elements and consequences of apartheid, Noah provides an insider’s perspective of racism, survival, abuse, love, and the importance of heritage in a society built on difference and oppression.

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis examines the spiritual and social decline of the Appalachian white working class through the life story of its author, JD Vance. Growing up in a post-industrial Ohio town, Vance encountered the symptoms of community and familial dysfunction—drug and alcohol abuse, unstable marriages, lack of education, and evasion of hard work—that underscore the failing values of the culture from which he came.

Although Vance eventually escapes the poverty and dysfunction of his roots, attending college and Yale Law School, he finds that even economic mobility can never permanently erase the social markers of his hillbilly upbringing.

What happens when children turn out radically different from their parents’ expectations? In Far From the Tree, award-winning writer and psychologist Andrew Solomon explores how families navigate raising children with disabilities, mental illness, prodigious talents, and other identities that set them apart. His findings shed light on identity formation, belonging, and what it truly means to accept children as they are.

Drawing on over a decade of research and hundreds of family interviews, Solomon explains how parents can move beyond their initial struggles with unexpected differences to find meaning and joy in raising exceptional children. Our guide examines Solomon’s key findings while connecting them to other important thinkers on disability rights, gender identity, and the psychology of belonging. Whether you’re a parent, educator, or someone interested in human diversity, this guide shows how embracing differences enriches both families and society as a whole.

Published in 1965, The Autobiography of Malcolm X chronicles how Malcolm X rose from a life of poverty and crime to become a significant leader of the civil rights movement. Malcolm X was a controversial figure—his views were often considered extreme and changed radically throughout his life. In telling his story (with the help of writer Alex Haley), Malcolm X explains why he believed what he believed—and why he fought for racial justice, even though he knew it would lead to his death.

This guide discusses the impact that early experiences of racism, pro-Black radical traditions, and Islam had on Malcolm X as well as his achievements as a civil rights activist. We’ll go into the historical and sociological context surrounding Malcolm X’s life and explore the civil rights movement (and Malcolm X’s relationship to other activists, like Martin Luther King Jr.) in more depth. We’ll also connect historical and present-day racism, and we’ll provide an update on the circumstances leading up to Malcolm X’s murder and his legacy.

Social order and cultural norms can go unchallenged for decades, but when change comes, it spreads like a virus—and changes aren’t always for the better. From crime waves to teen deaths and drug abuse epidemics, sweeping cultural “diseases” often take us completely by surprise—but in Revenge of the Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell says they aren’t random. Instead, he contends that they result from people’s actions and decisions, and that if we understand how social viruses work, we can inoculate ourselves against them.

As a journalist, Gladwell has written extensively on the intersection of sociology, psychology, and communication. In this guide, we’ll explore the various factors that Gladwell says contribute to social contagions, including changing demographics, ideological superspreaders, and the stories communities tell about themselves. We’ll look at how deliberate social engineering can go wrong, where the responsibility for social change lies, and how the actions of a few can still lead to positive change.

You’ve seen him play a cigarette-smoking, intimacy-fearing, humor-as-a-cudgel-wielding twenty-something from a broken home trying to find love and build a meaningful career. But Matthew Perry’s role as Chandler on the iconic show Friends is a lot closer to reality than you might have imagined. In Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, Perry shares his story of battling loneliness, health scares, and the big terrible thing: addiction. His hope is that it will help others who are also struggling with substance abuse know they are not alone in their challenges, and that, if he could get sober, they can, too.

This guide explores the evolution of three major themes throughout Perry’s life: his addiction, struggles in establishing relationships, and his search for fame. We also contextualize the events and struggles of his life within psychological theories about childhood trauma, attachment theory, and the nature of addiction and recovery.