The most recommended accountability books

I love Gordon Korman’s books. Slacker is a great way to get young gamers hooked on a great author. Hard-core gamers will relate to the main character, Cameron. This kid does not even notice the fire alarm going off because he is so engrossed in his game.

When his parents tell him he has to join a school club he just makes up a fake one. Why? So he can keep gaming. Of course, things don’t go as he planned – people want to join the club and then a beaver needs to be saved. Cameron learns a lot about being a friend, a brother, and how great it feels to be part of a real-life community.

Although it is more academic than the others I’ve recommended, this book is both practical and urgent: it asks how we’re responsible for facing up to the structures of injustice in which we are implicated—the legacies of colonialism and slavery, the ongoing catastrophe of climate change. Young’s answer is that responsibility here is not about guilt or shame but the obligation to work for change, an obligation we can only meet through collective action, working with others to transform the systems around us. Young’s argument is rich, provocative, and inspiring.

This book is more classically within the philosophical canon. The Imperative of Responsibility is probably Jonas’s masterpiece. He wrote this book in 1979. It’s a contemporary classic, in the sense that it’s really foundational, in my view (but not just in my view), for environmental ethics because it’s a book—and this is over 40 years ago now—that really takes seriously, as very few had before, the change that needs to come to philosophy. We need to start taking seriously the change that has come to us as a species as a result of industrialism, as a result of our growing technological power.

The lion’s share of commentary about the influence of neuroscience on our system of laws has focused on criminal law. What does it mean to punish people for actions that are really the product of biology rather than conscious choice? Alces grapples with what this means for criminal law and its concepts of moral responsibility and builds a thoughtful and compelling argument. But what I really liked was his equally sharp analysis of what this different conception of human agency means when it comes to tort and contract law—legal regimes that we are much more likely to confront in our daily lives.

Action-packed and fast-moving, What We Harvest is one of those books that you can’t put down. A horrible (sentient?) blight infecting crops, animals, and people is a terrifying foe, and at times this book is brutal. But its main character and her friends are the most resilient, resourceful crew I’ve encountered in a long time. I rooted for them so hard.

As a public school teacher, I worked with neurodivergent children.The hero of this middle grade novel, Sparrow, is such a child: spirited, obstinate, an outside-the-box thinker. She often gets “carried away.”

This beautiful book, set in my own state of Maine,  follows Sparrow on her quest to find homes for the many cats her neighbor has to leave behind, when she beaks a hip and goes into a nursing home. This doesn’t sound like a  scintillating premise… but it is.

In finding homes for each cat, Sparrow finds one for herself, in this her new neighborhood and school. Donovan paints a believable portrait of a quiet hero, a quiet rambunctious questioning “too much” hero of a girl. The illustrations, by Elysia Case, are lovely, too. 

Too often, too many of us, ask “Victim Questions” like “When are they going to train me?” or “When are they going to tell us what’s going on?”

Instead of asking “Victim Questions” John teaches us to ask  “QBQs” (The Question Behind the Question).  For example, “What could I do to get trained?” or “How could I find out what is going on?  Asking QBQ’s has consistently moved me from being stuck to having a way forward! 

It is a challenge to make a dyslexic child like reading. I recommend this book it was designed for dyslexic readers.

A special font and large space between letters help dyslexic children read easily. There are only a few of these books on the market. Children’s book editors should adapt their books for children having reading problems. This book is also very funny to read.

The well-illustrated basic plot keeps readers focused on the story. If your child likes this book, they may like the 12-chapter book series titled Here’s Hank.

Neoliberal political economy assumes either a strategic rational actor or an irrational actor who needs to be “nudged” to act rationally. This theory endorses a theory of individualist agency which holds that ultimately all agents must compete against each other. This system of thought emphasizes a lack of alternatives and recommends institutions that accept that actors are narrowly self-interested: people evolved to be machines that survive and propagate. Against this view of human agency, alternative theorists construct theories of action in which individuals can reason together, act in concert, and together be morally accountable. Schwenkenbecher effectively builds this alternative perspective affording possibilities of intentional cooperation and collective moral action.

When Splat gets a newspaper delivery job, he finds it isn’t easy work! From getting up early and not hitting the snooze button, to tossing the papers accurately onto each neighbor’s doorstep, Splat struggles to succeed. Splat’s good friend Kitten helps him invent solutions for each and every challenge, and their teamwork ultimately saves the day. This easy reader encourages kids to ask for help and find solutions to their problems while still getting the job done.