Springtime Reading

In this installment of Good Reads are four books by Seattle University faculty covering a diverse array of topics worth considering, including poems, the South Asian diaspora and potential answers to pressing questions society is facing around income inequality and eroding trust with vital institutions.

Here’s a look this spring’s picks:

The Nature and Practice of Trust by Marc Cohen, PhD

Scores of surveys and news articles document declining levels of trust in the U.S. Some of us experience it directly. But Seattle University Professor Marc Cohen’s new book addresses this problem, showing—using economic experiments—that trusting someone most often makes that other person more trustworthy. This means that trusting another person is not as risky as we're inclined to think.

The central theme of Cohen’s book is the moral dimension of trust. We tend to think of trust as being important because of the economic benefits. In academic terms trust makes transactions less expensive. We experience trust as being less guarded when we interact with others, in coffee shops, at businesses, everywhere. But there is also, even primarily, a moral dimension to trust relationships. Trusting another person is not to bet on that person doing something, as one very prominent sociologist suggested; we are betrayed if someone violates our trust. Seeing the moral dimension helps us think differently about the role of trust in business organizations—those organizations can be held together by networks of commitments and obligations, by trust. And seeing the moral dimension also shows us that trust is an intrinsic good—when we trust others we expand the moral community.

“We can think about the moral community as the set of people who rely on one another’s promises and commitments,” explains Cohen. “So, when one person trusts another, the first includes the second in that community. Philosophers might say that being trusted gives the second person a kind of standing as a member of that community. Fostering this moral community is important and good in a moral sense, apart from any economic or instrumental benefit.” 

Get Cohen’s book.

Teaching South Asian Anglophone Diasporic Literature edited by Nalini Iyer, PhD

Edited by Professor of English Nalini Iyer, Teaching South Asian Anglophone Diasporic Literature traces migration from the Indian subcontinent on a large scale beginning more than 150 years ago. Today there are diasporic communities around the world. The identities of South Asians in the diaspora are informed by roots in the subcontinent and the complex experiences of race, religion, nation, class, caste, gender, sexuality, language, trauma and geography. The literature that arises from these roots and experiences is diverse, powerful and urgent. This volume provokes meaningful reflection on other literatures in an age of increasing migration and diaspora. 

“My co-editor, Pallavi Rastogi of Louisiana State University, and I developed this book project after an informal conversation at the 2020 Modern Language Association Convention in Seattle,” explains Iyer. “It is a passion project developed during the pandemic lockdown. As an immigrant from India, the diasporic experience is deeply personal and informs a lot of my scholarship including my earlier book, Roots and Reflections: South Asians in the Pacific Northwest.” 

Get Iyer’s book.

Income Inequality in America by Stacey Jones, PhD, with co-author Robert Rycroft

Income Inequality in America is an introduction to the complex and controversial issue of rising income inequality in the U.S. By placing today’s rising inequality in historical context and by examining the forces driving the rise in inequality Jones, a professor of economics, shows that increasing inequality is not inevitable. The book examines multiple dimensions of inequality, including income, wealth, gender and racial inequality and offers strategies for reducing inequality, including essays by experts currently engaged in policy work. 

“Writing this book was an opportunity to dig more deeply into understanding economic inequality in the United States, a subject that I teach and a reality that we all experience in our daily lives,” explains Jones. “My goal is to better understand the American experience of inequality from the perspective of economic history and to share that understanding. 

“Economist Thomas Piketty has written that ‘each country has its own intimate history of inequality.’ One lesson from history is that throughout much of the 20th century, the United States experienced a decrease in economic inequality alongside economic growth and rising living standards. History refutes the notion that there is a tradeoff between equality and economic growth.”

Research support from the Albers School of Business and Economics allowed Jones to invite some outstanding former students to join in the research and writing of Income Inequality in America: Cameron Hub, ’19, Sydney Mead, ’21, and Abigail Dean, ’23. 

Get Jones’s book.

Learning to Jump by Sean McDowell, PhD

Learning to Jump teaches all of us that only by paying close attention to that which matters most will allow us to trust our many leaps and the ground we land on. The book features 40 poems Seattle University English Professor McDowell has written over the years as a way of bearing witness to the past, attesting to the natural beauty in the present and expressing gratitude to those who help and support along the way. 

The poems implicitly speak to the experience of others. Across a range of spaces, from the ancient Celtic ring forts of the Aran Islands to an artist’s studio or a grandmother’s dressing table, the poems in Learning to Jump attend to urgencies too often neglected in our harried lives. 

“I am a poet as well as a scholar. Writing generally, and poetry in particular, helps anchor me in the most important considerations of my life,” explains McDowell, who has published poetry in Ireland, England, Wales, Greece and Australia. “Many people are happiest, I believe, when they make things because making focuses one’s attention on the here and now and contributes something new to the world. That activity can be an antidote to the troubles and worries of our times.”

Get McDowell’s book.