Fans pick 100 books like Birds of Heaven

Mother Nature must be very grateful this handbook exists. Within its 368 pages is a treasury of time-tested stories, creative activities, and methods that environmental educators and storytellers can use to affect people’s pro-environmental behaviour. Its collection of 21 chapters share a myriad of ways to use storytelling for a greener world. Each chapter has a different author(s), bringing their perspective on environment, community, and learning through stories. They explore the links between storytelling and emotional literacy, place, environmental justice, connecting with alienated youngsters, how to encourage children and adults’ curiosity about nature, building community, sustainability, and indigenous peoples, local legends, human-animal communication, and how to co-create a sustainable future together.

This is a book for all who work with people – in other words, it is a book for everyone. It is full of inspiration and practical tools to bring transformation and healing into your daily life, wherever you are. During times of conflict, storytelling dedicated to peace and reconciliation has proven successful in creating a common ground between people of all ages, from different cultures and disparate world views.

The New Story includes more than 30 tales from around the world plus easy-to-do exercises, with contributions from six modern storytellers at work in places like Israel, Kurdistan, and Sierra Leone.

If you feel inhibited about making up stories and telling them to children, this is the book for you. Encouraging you to spin golden tales, Nancy Mellon shows how you can become a confident storyteller and enrich your family with the power of story. Children love the unique and human quality of storytelling, and parents and teachers alike can learn this practical, magical art with Nancy’s methods, tips and resources. This book may help give you storytelling wings - even if you didn’t think you could fly this way! It is a must for any adult who seeks to enrich and deepen communications with the young ones in their life.

Why do we tell stories? What power lies within storytelling? From the great myths and legends to enchanting fairy tales, parables, fables, and folk tales, stories can have a great healing and educative power. They come from our subconscious and imagination, deep inside us. They have much to teach us about ourselves and the world we create around us.

Described as a manual for ‘soul ecology’, in his book Kornberger first explores this ‘story power’, then explains how to apply it to help a child develop, or to heal and transform a child with difficulties. He then discusses the art and practicalities of creating new stories to help children with particular needs.

This is a valuable and inspiring book for teachers, parents, creative writers, and students of literature.

This is a kind of reverse-quirky choice among quirky books about leadership because it gives what I might call the conventional view of leadership, with leaders being people who are simply exemplary in every way your grandmother told you to be. The book does so excellently; I took away lots of actionable tips, and I enjoyed the real personal stories of leadership.

It’s just a very likable book, and you can’t go wrong reading it or taking its recommendations. Those recommendations will make you a gosh-darn good person to be around, which will go a long way–but maybe not quite all the way–as a leader. 

A fact lost in their massive success in children’s books is that Stan and Jan Berenstain started as cartoonists.

In the 1940s and 1950s their work appeared in the likes of the Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, and McCall’s, and they had a series of best-selling “cartoon essay” books. Their famous bears debuted in 1962 as part of Beginner Books, a line created by Theodor “Dr. Seuss” Geisel, Helen Palmer Geisel, and Phyllis Cerf.

With 1978’s The Spooky Old Tree, The Berenstains created the quintessential early reader, using repetition and predictability, prepositional phrases, rich visuals, and high drama to captivate their young audience (and their parents). “Do they dare? Yes. They dare.”

It is exciting to encourage students to start telling stories too. This book had lots of good ideas that I use in my storytelling classes for children. Kids enjoyed activities like rolling a yarn ball back and forth across a circle as they add to a story. The book includes 25 easy-to-tell tales for student beginners. And I learned from watching the DVD Children Telling Stories: A Storytelling Unit in Action that was included.

I love great storytelling and what makes stories compelling. Suber goes into great detail about story, plot, and characters in a way that I found totally fascinating. It inspired me to think about storytelling differently. I got deeper and deeper into the process of what makes characters and their journey interesting.

There are many films that are successful at the box office, but not memorable. They fade as time passes. Great stories resonate for generations. Ultimately, the book is about what makes a film memorable. 

When I read this book, it was the full Jade Phoenix trilogy put into one paperback, so for me it was a really long book that showed someone completely fail in life, then drag himself back up and crawl his way to the top. It also exposed me to the ‘Clans’ and what they meant. 

Position by merit. Earning your place through combat. A desire to prove yourself and gain power, but not by sucking up or backstabbing. Imagine a nation led by warriors instead of politicians. Even though the Clans aren’t the ‘good guys,’ there’s a huge difference between this book and all others. Enough that it stuck with me and the concept was reused in my own book as an homage to these Battletech books.

This is not even a motherhood-focused book, but it absolutely had to make this list. It completely transformed my motherhood journey. It helped me find my new identity in motherhood. It allowed me to recognize that I have stories to tell - about my experience as a mother and also about myself separate from motherhood.

It allowed me to take life a little slower and be more intentional and mindful in my living and parenting. It’s essentially what moved me to start writing my poetry book in the first place. It helped illuminate my life in a way I never noticed before. I am a better mother because of this book.