Welcome to One Book One University

In 2024-2025, PNW read and discussed, “The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the 21st Century’s Greatest Dilemma” by Mustafa Suleyman.

As co-founder of the pioneering AI company Deepmind, part of Google, Mustafa Suleyman has been central to this revolution. He argues that this wave of powerful, proliferating new technologies will define the coming decade.

In  “The Coming Wave,” Suleyman shows how these forces will create immense prosperity but also threaten the nation-state, the foundation of global order. As our fragile governments sleepwalk into disaster, we face an existential dilemma: unprecedented harm on one side and the threat of overbearing surveillance on the other.

Can we forge a narrow path between catastrophe and dystopia? This groundbreaking book from the ultimate AI insider establishes “the containment problem”— maintaining control over powerful technologies— as the essential challenge of our age.

In 2023-24. PNW read and discussed “What Happened to You: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing” by Dr. Bruce Perry and Oprah Winfrey.

Our earliest experiences shape our lives far down the road, and “What Happened to You?” provides powerful scientific and emotional insights into the behavioral patterns many of us struggle to understand.

Have you ever wondered, “Why did I do that?” or “Why can’t I just control my behavior?” Others may judge our reactions and think, “What’s wrong with that person?” When questioning our emotions, it’s easy to place the blame on ourselves, holding ourselves and those around us to an impossible standard. It’s time we started asking a different question.

Through deeply personal conversations, Oprah Winfrey and renowned brain and trauma expert Dr. Bruce Perry offer a groundbreaking and profound shift from asking “What’s wrong with you?” to “What happened to you?”

Take a look back at PNW’s hosted lecture led by Dr. Bruce Perry

In 2022-23, PNW read and discussed “The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power” by Deirdre Mask.

In this wide-ranging and remarkable book, Deirdre Mask explores the fate of streets named after Martin Luther King, Jr., the wayfinding means of ancient Romans, and how Nazis haunt the streets of modern Germany. She also reveals what not having an address means for millions of people worldwide, whether in the slums of Kolkata or the parks of London.

Filled with fascinating people and histories, The Address Book illuminates the often hidden stories behind street addresses and their power to decide who counts, who doesn’t – and why.

In 2021, we read and reflected on “The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life, Freedom and Justice” by Anthony Ray Hinton. Mr. Hinton spent thirty years on Alabama’s death row for a crime he did not commit. Mr. Bryan Stevenson and the Equal Justice Initiative defended Mr. Hinton.

For his work, Mr. Hinton received the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work. Since his release, Mr. Hinton has devoted himself to criminal justice reform.

For the 2021-22 “One Book, One University” program, PNW read and discussed “What the Eyes Don’t See: A Story of Crisis, Resistance, and Hope in an American City” by Mona Hanna-Attisha.

“What the Eyes Don’t See” is an inspiring story of how Mona Hanna-Attisha, alongside a team of researchers, parents, friends, and community leaders, first discovered that the children of Flint, Michigan, were being exposed to lead in their tap water—and then battled her government and a brutal backlash to tell that truth to the world.

Paced like a scientific thriller, “What the Eyes Don’t See” veals how misguided austerity policies, broken democracy, and callous bureaucratic indifference placed an entire city at risk. At the center of the story is Dr. Mona herself—an immigrant, doctor, scientist, and mother whose family’s activist roots inspired her pursuit of justice.