8 Books for Dad this Father’s Day

This Father’s day, ditch the ties and the dad jokes… or maybe keep the dad jokes. But give him the gift of a great book! Don’t know which one? Well, you can rely on us to save the day. Here’s a diverse list for the Father figure in your life! 💙

The Marriage Act by John Marrs

What if marriage was the law? Dare you disobey? Black Mirror meets thriller with a dash of Naomi Alderman’s The Power in this dark, high-concept novel by the bestselling author of The One.

Britain. The near-future. A right-wing government believes it has the answer to society’s ills—the Sanctity of Marriage Act, which actively encourages marriage as the norm, punishing those who choose to remain single.

But four couples are about to discover just how impossible relationships can be when the government is monitoring every aspect of our personal lives—monitoring every word, every minor disagreement…and will use every tool in its arsenal to ensure everyone will love, honor and obey.

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Fire on the Levee by Jared Fishman & Joseph Hooper

Fire at the Levee by Jared Fishman & Joseph Hooper

The former federal prosecutor and founder of Justice Innovation Lab tells the story of his struggle to unravel the cover-up of a police shooting, and subsequent incineration of the shooting victim, in Hurricane Katrina–era New Orleans.

In 2009, Jared Fishman was a young prosecutor working on low-level civil rights cases in the Justice Department when a file landed on his desk. That folder contained two items: a story from The Nation magazine examining a mysterious death in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, and an autopsy report for a man named Henry Glover, whose charred remains were found in a burned-out car two weeks after the storm. The autopsy report, bafflingly, listed no cause of death. But according to TheNation story, a gravely wounded Glover had last been seen in a car driven by a New Orleans police officer.

Intrigued despite the lack of evidence, Fishman set out to learn what happened to Glover. He flew to New Orleans and teamed up with a rookie FBI agent, and together they started to track down anyone with information about what had happened to Glover on that day.

Fire on the Levee tells the story of a young idealistic prosecutor determined to bring the truth to light. The case would lead to major reforms in the New Orleans Police Department and ultimately change our understanding of race, policing and justice in post-Katrina New Orleans and beyond.

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Barkley by Timothy Bella

He’s one of the most interesting American athletes in the past fifty years. Passionate, candid, iconoclastic, and gifted both on and off the court, Charles Barkley has made a lasting impact on not only the world of basketball but pop culture at large.

Yet few people know the real Charles. Raised by his mother and grandmother in Leeds, Alabama, he struggled in his early years to fit in until he found a sense of community and purpose in basketball. In the NBA he went toe-to-toe with the biggest legends in the game, from Magic to Michael to Hakeem to Shaq. But in the years since, he has become a bold agitator for social change, unafraid to grapple, often brashly, with even the thorniest of cultural issues facing our nation today.

Informed by over 370 original interviews and painstaking research, Timothy Bella’s Barkley is the most comprehensive biography to date of one of the most talked-about icons in the world of sports.

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The Perfect Day to Boss Up by Rick Ross

Rick Ross is a hip-hop icon and a towering figure in the business world, but his path to success was not always easy. Despite adversity and setbacks, Ross held tight to his vision and never settled for anything less than greatness. Now, for the first time, he shares his secrets to success, offering his own life as a road map to readers looking to build their own empire. Along the way he reveals:

How to turn your ambition into action
Tips for managing and investing your money
Inside stories from his business and music ventures
Why failure is central to success
Secrets to handling stressful situations
How to build the perfect team

As Ross explains, “It doesn’t matter what’s going on. Even the most dire situation is just another opportunity to boss up. ”Intimate, insightful and brimming with no-nonsense advice, The Perfect Time to Boss Up is the ideal book for hustlers everywhere.

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Attention Span by Gloria Mark

Rediscover your ability to pay attention with this groundbreaking new approach from “the definitive expert on distraction and multitasking” (Cal Newport).

We spend an average of just 47 seconds on any screen before shifting our attention. It takes 25 minutes to bring our attention back to a task after an interruption. And we interrupt ourselves more than we’re interrupted by others.

In Attention Span, psychologist Gloria Mark reveals these and more surprising results from her decades of research into how technology affects our attention. She shows how much of what we think we know is wrong, including insights such as:

Why multitasking hurts rather than helps productivity
How social media and modern entertainment amplify our short attention spans
What drains our mental resources and how to refuel them
The four types of attention that we experience every day and how to recognize them

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The Watchdog by Steve Drummond

Months before Pearl Harbor, Franklin D. Roosevelt knew that the United States was on the verge of entering another world war for which it was dangerously ill-prepared. The urgent times demanded a transformation of the economy, with the government bankrolling the unfathomably expensive task of enlisting millions of citizens while also producing the equipment necessary to successfully fight—all of which opened up opportunities for graft, fraud and corruption.

In The Watchdog, Steve Drummond draws the reader into the fast-paced story of how Harry Truman, still a newcomer to Washington politics, cobbled together a bipartisan team of men and women that took on powerful corporate entities and the Pentagon, placing Truman in the national spotlight and paving his path to the White House.

Drawing on the largely unexamined records of the Truman Committee as well as oral histories, personal letters, newspaper archives and interviews, Steve Drummond—an award-winning senior editor and executive producer at NPR—brings the colorful characters and intrigue of the committee’s work to life. The Watchdog provides readers with a window to a time that was far from perfect but where it was possible to root out corruption and hold those responsible to account. It shows us what can be possible if politicians are governed by the principles of their office rather than self-interest.

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The Lock-Up by John Banville

In 1950s Dublin, Rosa Jacobs, a young history scholar, is found dead in her car. Renowned pathologist Dr. Quirke and DI St. John Strafford begin to investigate the death as a murder, but it’s the victim’s older sister Molly, an established journalist, who discovers a lead that could crack open the case.

One of Rosa’s friends, it turns out, is from a powerful German family that arrived in Ireland under mysterious circumstances shortly after World War II. But as Quirke and Strafford close in, their personal lives may put the case—and everyone involved—in peril, including Quirke’s own daughter.

Spanning the mountaintops of Italy, the front lines of World War II Bavaria, the gritty streets of Dublin and other unexpected locales, The Lock-Up is an ambitious and arresting mystery by one of the world’s most celebrated authors.

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First Family by Cassandra A. Good

While it’s widely known in America that George and Martha Washington never had children of their own, few are aware that they raised numerous children together. In First Family, we see Washington as a father figure, as well as meet the children he helped raise and trace their complicated roles in American history.

The children of Martha Washington’s son by her first marriage—Eliza, Patty, Nelly and Wash Custis—were born into life in the public eye. Raised in the country’s first “first family,” they remained well-known as Washington’s family and keepers of his legacy throughout their lives. By turns petty and powerful, glamorous and cruel, the Custises used Washington as a means to enhance their own power and status. As enslavers committed to the American empire, the Custis family embodied the failures of the American experiment that finally exploded into civil war—all the while being celebrities in a soap opera of their own making.

First Family brings new focus and attention to this surprisingly neglected aspect of George Washington’s life and legacy. As the country grapples with concerns about political dynasties and the public role of presidential families, the saga of Washington’s family offers a human story of historical precedent.

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The Marriage Act by John Marrs

Fire on the Levee by Jared Fishman & Joseph Hooper

Barkley by Timothy Bella

The Perfect Day to Boss Up by Rick Ross

Attention Span by Gloria Mark

The Watchdog by Steve Drummond

The Lock-Up by John Banville

First Family by Cassandra A. Good

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