Taking its title from a 1993 Time cover that purported to show the face of the future, which Alex Wagner thought looked very much like her own, Futureface chronicles the author's search for details of her own ancestry.

Obama says: "I once wrote a book on my own search for identity, so I was curious to see what Alex, daughter of a Burmese mother and Iowan Irish-Catholic father — and a friend of mine — discovered during her own. What she came up with is a thoughtful, beautiful meditation on what makes us who we are — the search for harmony between our own individual identities and the values and ideals that bind us together as Americans."

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Since the 2008 housing crisis, the working world's landscape has changed, and the U.S. is highly unlikely to revert to its past state. As the economy continues to recover a decade later, we're still wrestling with the shadows of the past and the promises of the future. In The New Geography of Jobs, Enrico Moretti mythbusts some common misconceptions about the American job market, and provides thoughtful suggestions to improve our future.

Obama says: "It's six years old now, but still a timely and smart discussion of how different cities and regions have made a changing economy work for them — and how policymakers can learn from that to lift the circumstances of working Americans everywhere."

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In Why Liberalism Failed, Patrick J. Deneen examines what he identifies as the flaws in liberal ideology, which he predicts will lead to the 20th century political movement's ultimate failure. Although Obama disagrees "with most of the author's conclusions," he still recommends this book to readers.

Obama says: "In a time of growing inequality, accelerating change, and increasing disillusionment with the liberal democratic order we've known for the past few centuries, I found this book thought-provoking. I don’t agree with most of the author’s conclusions, but the book offers cogent insights into the loss of meaning and community that many in the West feel, issues that liberal democracies ignore at their own peril."

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In this essay, Matthew Stewart examines how meritocratic achievement has passed down through generations in much the same way as other, inherited wealth. This money has stabilized the 9.9 percent — the members of the wealthiest tenth of Americans who are not the 0.1 percent — who had a minimum net worth of $1.2 million in 2012, and yet "keep insisting that we're 'middle class.'"

Obama says: "Another thought-provoking analysis, this one about how economic inequality in America isn’t just growing, but self-reinforcing — and what that means for education, health, happiness, even the strength of our democracy."

Read the essay here.

New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu removed four Confederate monuments from the city in 2017. Part memoir and part microhistory, In the Shadow of Statues traces Landrieu's evolution of thought on race, and examines the history of racism and pro-Confederate sentiment in the modern-day South.

Obama says: "A few years ago, I eulogized the Reverend Clementa Pinckney, who was slain by a white supremacist in his church in Charleston, South Carolina. And I'll never forget something Clem said while he was alive: 'Across the South, we have a deep appreciation of history. We haven't always had a deep appreciation of each other's history.' That's something Mitch takes to heart in this book, while grappling with some of the most painful parts of our history and how they still live in the present. It's an ultimately optimistic take from someone who believes the South will rise again not by reasserting the past, but by transcending it."

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Available free from Rand Corporation, this eBook analyzes disturbing trends in U.S. discourse today — "an increasing disagreement about facts and analytical interpretations of facts and data; a blurring of the line between opinion and fact; an increase in the relative volume, and resulting influence, of opinion and personal experience over fact; and lowered trust in formerly respected sources of factual information" — and attempts to explain how and why those trends took hold in the country over the last 20 years.

Obama says: "The title is self-explanatory, but the findings are very interesting. A look at how a selective sorting of facts and evidence isn't just dishonest, but self-defeating to a society that has always worked best when reasoned debate and practical problem-solving thrive."

Read the eBook here.