Writing my first book, I found out how dependent my thinking about the world beyond my doorstep was on language made up by engineers (“Please don’t block the driveway”). Engineering language defined how I saw the street. It was a shock to realize how severely this had limited my thinking about public space but also a liberation to become aware of this: now I could perceive streets in completely new and different ways. The books I recommend all have made me perceive the world differently. I hope they do the same for you. Also, see the recommendations by my co-author, Marco te Brömmelstroet.
I wrote...
Movement: how to take back our streets and transform our lives
Almost everywhere in the world, streets are designed for travel at the highest speed, giving precedence to the chunkiest vehicles. The idea that streets are for traffic is so pervasive that it has colonised our thinking. That is why we say roads are closed for the marathon rather than that they are open for the marathon.
In this book, journalist Thalia Verkade and mobility expert (“the cycling professor”) Marco te Brömmelstroet take a three-year shared journey of discovery into the possibilities of our streets. They investigate and question the choices behind traffic engineering logic and look at how public space could be designed differently. This book will change the way that you view our streets.
Fungi live mostly underground, much less visible than plants or animals. When Merlin Sheldrake started studying fungi at Cambridge, he did this in the Department of Plant Sciences. There is no Department of Fungi Sciences, which helps explain why scientists know so little about them and why society keeps regarding them as less important than plants or animals.
Merlin explains fungi are closer to animals than plants. They are crucial, fascinating, and intelligent beyond ways Western man has words for. He uses language in a sensitive and creative new way to describe and visualize the fungi world. This book is not for fungi lovers (I’m not one); it is for anyone who wants to expand his view of life.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A “brilliant [and] entrancing” (The Guardian) journey into the hidden lives of fungi—the great connectors of the living world—and their astonishing and intimate roles in human life, with the power to heal our bodies, expand our minds, and help us address our most urgent environmental problems.
“Grand and dizzying in how thoroughly it recalibrates our understanding of the natural world.”—Ed Yong, author of I Contain Multitudes
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR—Time, BBC Science Focus, The Daily Mail, Geographical, The Times, The Telegraph, New Statesman, London Evening Standard, Science Friday
Many thousands of adults have learned to draw better by following Betty Edwards’ course. I am one of them.
In the book, she also explains why so many people (including me) believe they cannot draw. Why, she asks, do children spend so many hours at school learning to write? What if schools devoted that much time to drawing? Why don’t they?
Letting go of thinking in words and starting to use our senses to perceive the world helps us see the world more like it is and less as we believe it is. Betty Edwards provides great methods for getting ‘out of the words’ into the senses. I see more detail around me after having spent some time drawing something around me attentively.
'You will quickly amaze and delight yourself. Hands down the best and most life-enhancing thing I've done in lockdown' India Knight, Sunday Times
Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain is the world's most widely used drawing instruction book. Whether you are a professional, a student, or enjoy art as a hobby, Betty Edwards' practical step-by-step guide will give you greater confidence in your ability, deepen your artistic perception and provide a new way to appreciate the way you perceive the world around you.
This groundbreaking guide includes: - Expert advice on materials…
This book helped me stop thinking about singular problems and solutions and taught me to think in terms of relationships.
I read it at a time when I believed the electric car to be a solution to oil dependence and the greenhouse effect. Electric cars do not directly produce CO2 and are more energy efficient. What I missed was the fact that cars are much more than oil-burning CO2-emitters. They limit our street life and kill more than a million people in traffic each year.
By solving one problem without looking at the big picture, we enlarge other problems and create new ones. Will cobalt wars follow after the oil wars? Reading this book felt like walking around with a flashlight in my head and then a construction lamp switching on.
The classic book on systems thinking, with more than half a million copies sold worldwide!
This is a fabulous book. This book opened my mind and reshaped the way I think about investing. Forbes
Perfect for fans of Kate Raworth, Rutger Bregman and Daniel Kahneman!
The co-author of the international best-selling book Limits to Growth, Donella Meadows is widely regarded as a pioneer in the environmental movement and one of the world's foremost systems analysts . Her posthumously published Thinking in Systems, is a concise and crucial book offering insight for problem solving on scales ranging from the personal to…
This little book from 1973 made me realize I wrongly believed that all technological advancement was progress. Why should it be? With every invention that promises to make life easier, ask this question, says Illich: "Will this make me a more independent, capable human being? Or will human qualities be made obsolete?"
In the Middle Ages, people built cathedrals without burning fuel. We have since lost this ability. Is that progress? Ivan Illich introduces the concept of radical monopolies: industrial processes that make non-industrial activities impossible. "Cars can [...] monopolize traffic [...] practically ruling out locomotion on foot or by bicycle in Los Angeles." Likewise, funeral systems rule out the possibility of burying a loved one ourselves.
Illich is a radical philosopher of thin books, best read slowly.
Ivan Illich argues for individual personal control over life, the tools and energy we use. A work of seminal importance.
The conviviality for which noted social philosopher Ivan Illich is arguing is one in which the individual’s personal energies are under direct personal control and in which the use of tools is responsibly limited. A work of seminal importance, this book claims our attention for the urgency of its appeal, the stunning clarity of its logic and the overwhelmingly human note that it sounds.
Until this book, I didn’t realize we live in a culture that applauds starting, growing, and flowering while turning a blind eye to ending, decaying, and dying.
Harald Welzer starts out by calculating how humans turn more living matter on Earth into dead matter each year. We don’t seem able to see that this is a sure way to stop living. Having survived a stroke, he asks the question: "What life do I want to have lived?" This is the framework of the book.
Along the way, he shares wonderful examples of (artistic) endeavors that attend to the ending–of a factory’s life, of insects killed by pesticides, of cathedrals that can only be built by accepting that some of them will crumble before they are finished.
Our culture has no concept of stopping. We continue to build motorways and airports for a future in which cars and planes may no longer exist. We're converting our planet from a natural one to an artificial one in which the quantity of man-made objects - houses, asphalt, cars, plastic, computers and so on - now exceeds the totality of living matter. And while biomass continues to decline due to deforestation and species extinction, the mass of man-made objects is growing faster than ever. We're on a treadmill to disaster.
To get off this treadmill, argues Harald Welzer, we need…
Benghazi: A New History is a look back at the enigmatic 2012 attack on the US mission in Benghazi, Libya, its long-tail causes, and devastating (and largely unexamined) consequences for US domestic politics and foreign policy. It contains information not found elsewhere, and is backed up by 40 pages of citations and interviews with more than 250 key protagonists, experts, and witnesses.
So far, the book is the main -- and only -- antidote to a slew of early partisan “Benghazi” polemics, and the first to put the attack in its longer term historical, political, and social context. If you want to understand some of the events that have shaped present-day America, from political polarization and the election of Donald Trump, to January 6, the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, Russian expansionism, and the current Israel-Hamas war, I argue, you need to understand some of the twists and turns of America's most infamous "non-scandal, scandal.”
I was in Benghazi well before, during, and after the attack as a US diplomat and co-director of a medical NGO. I have written three books, and have been a contributor to The NYT, Foreign Affairs, Forbes, Salon, The Financial Times, Newsweek, and others.
On September 11, 2012, Al Qaeda proxies attacked and set fire to the US mission in Benghazi, Libya, killing a US Ambassador and three other Americans. The attack launched one of the longest and most consequential 'scandals' in US history, only to disappear from public view once its political value was spent.
Written in a highly engaging narrative style by one of a few Western experts on Libya, and decidely non-partisan, Benghazi!: A New History is the first to provide the full context for an event that divided, incited, and baffled most of America for more than three years, while silently reshaping…
