What We Are Reading Today: The Light We Carry

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Updated 19 November 2022
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What We Are Reading Today: The Light We Carry

Author: Michelle Obama

In an inspiring follow-up to her critically acclaimed, bestselling memoir Becoming, former First Lady Michelle Obama shares practical wisdom and powerful strategies for staying hopeful and balanced in today’s highly uncertain world.
“When we are able to recognize our own light, we become empowered to use it,” she writes.
A rewarding blend of powerful stories and profound advice that will ignite conversation, The Light We Carry inspires readers to
examine their own lives, identify their sources of gladness, and connect meaningfully in a turbulent world.
The author offers readers a series of fresh stories and insightful reflections on change, challenge, and power, including her belief that when we light up for others, we can illuminate the richness and potential of the world around us, discovering deeper truths and new pathways for progress.

Drawing from her experiences as a mother, daughter, spouse, friend, and First Lady, she shares the habits and principles she has developed to successfully adapt to change and overcome various obstacles—the earned wisdom that helps her continue to “become.”

 


What We Are Reading Today: Three Roads Back by Robert D. Richardson

Updated 06 March 2026
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What We Are Reading Today: Three Roads Back by Robert D. Richardson

In “Three Roads Back,” Robert Richardson, the author of magisterial biographies of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and William James, tells the connected stories of how these foundational American writers and thinkers dealt with personal tragedies early in their careers. 
For Emerson, it was the death of his young wife and, 11 years later, his five-year-old son; for Thoreau, it was the death of his brother; and for James, it was the death of his beloved cousin Minnie Temple. 

Filled with rich biographical detail and unforgettable passages from the journals and letters of Emerson, Thoreau, and James, these vivid and moving stories of loss and hard-fought resilience show how the writers’ responses to these deaths helped spur them on to their greatest work, influencing the birth and course of American literature and philosophy.
As Richardson shows, all three emerged from their grief with a new way of seeing, one shaped by a belief in what Emerson called “the deep remedial force that underlies all facts.”