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Summer Reading: Latest Books From Penn LDI Senior Fellows
For your summer reading pleasure, here are some of the latest books from LDI Senior Fellows.
Katherine Milkman, PhD, Wharton
How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be
Penguin Portfolio, May, 2021
Drawing on Milkman’s original research and the work of her dozens of scientific collaborators, this book shares an innovative new approach that will help individuals change or encourage change in others.
Lawton Burns, PhD, MBA, Wharton
Big Med: Megaproviders and the High Cost of Health Care in America
University of Chicago Press, 2021
Drawing on decades of combined expertise in health care consolidation, this just-released new work traces Big Med’s emergence in the 1990s, followed by its swift rise amid false promises of scale economies and organizational collaboration.
Julia Lynch, PhD, Arts & Sciences
The Unequal Pandemic: COVID-19 and Health Inequalities
Policy Press, June, 2021
Drawing on international data and accounts, the new book argues that the pandemic is unequal in three ways: it has killed unequally, been experienced unequally and will impoverish unequally. These inequalities are a political choice.
Jason Karlawish, MD, Perelman School of Medicine
The Problem of Alzheimer’s: How Science, Culture, and Politics Turned a Rare Disease into a Crisis
St. Martin’s Press, 2021
Part case studies, part meditation, the book traces Alzheimer’s from its beginnings to its recognition as a crisis, and tells the story of the biomedical breakthroughs that may allow Alzheimer’s to finally be prevented and treated.
Barbara Kahn, PhD, MPhil, Wharton
The Shopping Revolution, How Retailers Succeed in an Era of Endless Disruption Accelerated by COVID-19
Wharton School Press, April, 2021
In an updated and expanded edition, Kahn examines companies that have been most successful during a tsunami of change in the industry and offers fresh insights into what can be learned from these companies’ continued transformation during the pandemic.
David Fajgenbaum, MD, MBA, MSc, Perelman School
Chasing My Cure: A Doctor’s Race to Turn Hope Into Action
Ballantine Books paperback edition, 2021
In a memoir of his extraordinary experience after being diagnosed with Castleman disease, an extremely deadly and rare condition, Fajgenbaum details his efforts to create an international research project that has made surprising progress on identifying a Castleman treatment.
Jason Schnittker, PhD, Arts & Sciences
Unnerved: Anxiety, Social Change, and the Transformation of Modern Mental Health
Columbia University Press, June, 2021
Schnittker investigates the social, cultural, medical, and scientific underpinnings of anxiety — why it has assumed a more central position in how we think about mental health and carried the imprint of social change more acutely than have other emotions or disorders.
Damon Centola, PhD, Annenberg School for Communication
Change: How to Make Big Things Happen
Little, Brown Spark, 2021
Drawing on deep research and examples from the spread of coronavirus to the success of the Black Lives Matter movement, the failure of Google+, and the rise of political polarization, Centola presents groundbreaking new science for understanding change in the world around us.
