My favorite books on myth, trauma, and cultural reckoning demonstrating why sustainability matters

In these times of Black Lives Matter, emboldened white-supremicists, and with European dominance descendant, Born into Blackness is a revelatory and blunt dose of historical reality. I was not fully aware of the centrality of the slave economy in Europe’s rise to global dominance. Most importantly, I was ignorant of the level of cultural, political, and economic sophistication of the African nations when the Portuguese first explored the west coast of Africa. I had some understanding of the Haitian revolution and its manifestation of the enlightenment ideals, but this book opened my eyes to the historical ripples of the revolution: the Louisiana purchase, ceding much of present-day Southern US from Napoleon’s France; the sale and forced-march of thousands of slaves into the cotton-growing south, fueling an economic take-off that made the US an imperial power.

Maté argues persuasively against the dominant genetic and biophysical roots theories of mental illness. He presents a solid body of research published over several decades to argue that mental illness is a manifestation of trauma, often childhood trauma. Maté co-authored the book with his son. He does not flinch from reflecting on his own life history, recounting his own childhood trauma, resultant mental health challenges, and the less-than-flattering manifestations of that trauma in his closest relationships. He also draws upon his own professional experience working with those who have suffered trauma. I was particularly drawn to Maté’s discussion of the pathologization of the birth process and the over-competitive, detached, disciplinary wrong-headedness of how we raise our children. Importantly, the book also offers a way forward to healing.

I loved the speculative audacity of this alternative story of how human civilizations evolve—a collaboration of an anthropologist and an archeologist. The authors take aim at two foundational myths of the human journey. First, they argue that we should not accept as universal an increasingly sophisticated and hierarchical trajectory from hunter-gatherers to farmers to city-dwellers. They present evidence of civilizations that voluntarily abandoned urban life for a return to agricultural and even hunter-gatherer existence. In a second major contribution the authors weave an intriguing and plausible narrative of the possibility that the articulation of the ideals of the enlightenment was a collaborative effort of indigenous North American and European philosophers and statesmen. At a time of existential crisis, the book offers hope in the diversity of human experience.

San Francisco the good, an icon of diversity, creativity, and prosperity, is how I imagined the city. This book weaves a compelling, alternative narrative. Brechin tells his story through the rising fortunes of founding fathers–politicians, engineers, and entrepreneurs–many today memorialized in San Francisco’s public spaces and places. People like media tycoon William Randolph Hearst Jr. with all his narcissism, wealth, and political ambition (remind you of anyone?). The book unearths the city’s beginnings in the rapacious extraction of resources in frontier California. It illustrates (through art, newspaper cartoons, and headlines) the city as the spearhead of an emerging empire with all of its racist and white supremacist roots. The book chronicles the trauma inflicted on nature and nations that stood in the way of San Francisco’s ambition. It demands that we reflect on ‘the stuff’ our great cities are made of.

This book is important at a time when cities are too often presented unproblematically as the solution to global crises like the climate emergency. Mumford gives a broad historical sweep of cities from their very beginnings and a non-sentimental examination of the prospects of this now-dominant form of human settlement. The book was an instant classic and remains so—often referenced but unfortunately less often read. Mumford went out of favour in the 1970s, in my opinion, in part because his is a critical examination of the role of cities, not a hagiography. Mumford clearly loves the city at its best as ‘a magnifier of all the dimensions of life,’ but he does not shrink from examining cities’ amplification and consolidation of political and economic power, often to humanity’s detriment.