Message from the Dean

Recommended Reading

Dear incoming students,

Summer has officially begun! The spirit of the Dean’s Summer Reading List is to offer some recommended summer reading that is insightful and not academic (as these are not books that are required in our courses), but can jumpstart ideas, concepts, and philosophies and help get the conversation going as you prepare to study here at Pardee RAND. We’ve put together a handful of summer reading books that have a lot of ideas in them — correlation vs. causation, the effects of the socioeconomic divide at home and abroad, globalization and its discontents, and the power of working together.

Please read at least two books from our reading list this summer before starting the program. The first is required for all and the second will be your choice from the several options on the list. These books were recommended by our faculty, students, and/or alumni. In addition to your own conversations, you will be discussing the readings at the fall orientation and in the fall quarter classes.

Happy reading!

Susan L. Marquis
Dean and Distinguished Chair of Policy Analysis
Vice President, Innovation
dean@prgs.edu

Previous Recommendations

• Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, by Matthew Desmond
• The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being in Charge Isn't What It Used to Be, by Moisés Naím
• Rolling Blackouts: Dispatches from Turkey, Syria, and Iraq, by Sarah Glidden
• Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic, by Sam Quiones
• The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed Our Minds, by Michael Lewis
• The Age of Wonder: The Romantic Generation and the Discovery of the Beauty and Terror of Science, by Richard Holmes
• The Fires of Spring: A Post–Arab Spring Journey Through the Turbulent New Middle East — Turkey, Iraq, Qater, Jordan, Egypt, and Tunisia, by Shelley Culbertson
• Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, by Robert D. Putnam
• Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics Is Fueling Our Modern Plagues, by Martin J. Blaser
• It’s Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistle-Blower, by Michela Wrong
• The Machine Stops, by E.M. Forster (full text available online)
• Capital in the 21st Century, by Thomas Piketty
• The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor, by William Easterly
• Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, A Man Who Would Cure the World, by Tracy Kidder
• It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism, by Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein
• The Sun, The Genome, and The Internet: Tools of Scientific Revolutions, by Freeman Dyson
• Smart Choices: A Practical Guide to Making Better Decisions, by John Hammond, Ralph Keeny, and Howard Raiffa