On My Bookshelf: Associate Professor John Diamond

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Currently reading: Whistling Vivaldi and Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us by Claude Steele.

The thing that drew you to it: Steele’s work is really helpful for understanding how stereotypes affect academic performance. It’s particularly useful for me in thinking about my current work on race and educational outcomes in integrated schools.

Last great read: Gang Leader for a Day by Sudhir Venkatesh. It is about his experience studying a drug gang in a Chicago Housing Project. Once I picked up this book I could not put it down. It’s a powerfully human story. It was insightful, eye-opening, and made me think in new ways about the possibilities and limitations of social science research.

Book you have read over and over: Carter Godwin Woodson’s The Mis-Education of the Negro. Published in 1933, this book still resonates today. It is a probing critique of African American education. It shows that education has the potential to liberate but also to oppress.

Favorite spot to curl up with a good book: I think my favorite place is on my couch (as boring as that sounds). I guess I also occasionally read in bed.

Reading rituals: I can’t really read a book without underlining text and writing notes in the margins. As I write notes, I think they will make sense to me later but I really think it’s mostly just a ritual that helps me focus in the moment.

Noneducation genre of choice: My wife’s plays. My next read will probably be a rough draft of her latest work.

How you find the time: I don’t really. They just get read somehow.