Prep School Library: 11th and 12th Grade Symposium

Journalist Johann Hari, losing his ability to focus and noticing signs of a larger “attention crisis” all around him, embarked on a worldwide investigation of the mind’s ability to focus and of the ways modern life and technology affect how we develop and maintain that ability. This book offers deep insight into the strategies employed by Big Tech companies to “steal” your focus and, at the same time, broadens your understanding of the human mind and its wondrous ability to attend to what it encounters.

Bonny Reichert is a chef, an award-winning journalist, and the daughter of a Holocaust survivor—these three aspects of her life converge in this deeply moving and introspective book. Part biography, part memoir, this is a story of survival, of survivor's guilt, of finding one's own meaning in the world, and of food—the thing that connects families, generations, and cultures. Reichert works to balance the courage to face her father's tragic past while navigating the seemingly trivial dramas of her own life, and throughout, cuisine is both an anchor and an identity; a source of joy and a signifier of survival.

In a word, Prophet Song, winner of the 2023 Booker Prize is urgent. Eilish Stack and her family navigate a nation that is gradually–then seemingly all at once–engulfed by authoritarianism, propelled by events that are equal parts shocking and inevitable. This narrative urgency conjures something deeper beneath every propulsive sentence—the broader questions raised are as compelling as the suspense driven plot. What does action and survival look like when “ownership of the facts” is rooted in power, not reality? When truth is one of the world’s most precious resources, what lies are we willing to tell ourselves?

This true crime story chronicles Susan Orlean’s investigation of the 1994 arrest of horticulturist John Laroche and a group of Seminoles in south Florida for poaching rare orchids in the Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve in the Everglades. The narrative fascinatingly interweaves the history of these rare flowers with the mania of collectors, dealers, and smugglers as it explores broader themes of obsession, passion, and the human relationship with nature.

Tovah Sullivan, still recovering from the disappearance of her son thirty years ago, spends her nights as the cleaner of Sowell Bay Aquarium, where she strikes up an unlikely friendship with Marcellus, a giant octopus. The novel is narrated by both Tovah and Marcellus, and poignantly explores themes including grief, connection, and the ethics of captivity.

Is AI helpful or harmful? Is it the end of civilization as we know it or the start of a new frontier? These are just some of the questions grappled with in Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age, a memoir and work of long form journalism about one woman’s deep dive into the world of AI, beginning with the early internet. One thing is certain: Only a human could have written this book.

Moving from Mexico to America when their daughter suffers a near-fatal accident, the Rivera family confronts cultural barriers, their daughter's difficult recovery, and her developing romance with a boy from their apartment complex. The story interweaves multiple narratives from members of a small immigrant community in Delaware struggling to make it in America with the Rivera family as its central focus.