Here are 100 books that Culture from the Inside out fans have personally recommended if you like
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I was born in Quebec, have lived in eleven countries, and speak four languages. In my 20+ years as an author and journalist, my goal has always been to create bridges between cultures and to tell stories that enable individuals to better understand each other. For me, a trip to a new country, no matter how short or long, is incomplete unless I’ve had the chance to meet locals.
This book is a ‘gold standard’ piece of investigative journalism, a travelogue about a people I will probably never meet, rolled into the intriguing history of a unique city.
The book interweaves the tale of the efforts local people made to save priceless manuscripts from al-Qaida in 2012 with the West’s fascination of fabled Timbuktu since the 18th century.
It is an un-put-downable example of creative non-fiction at its most interesting and easily readable.
Two tales of a city: The historical race to reach one of the world's most mythologized places, and the story of how a contemporary band of archivists and librarians, fighting to save its ancient manuscripts from destruction at the hands of al Qaeda, added another layer to the legend.
The fabled city of Timbuktu has captured the Western imagination for centuries. The search for this 'African El Dorado' cost the lives of many explorers but Timbuktu is rich beyond its legends. Home to many thousands of ancient manuscripts on poetry, history, religion, law, pharmacology and astronomy, the city has been…
I’m a serial memoirist (two published, two more to come), and a true fan of well-written memoir. I read all kinds, but my favorites often combine coming-of-age with unusual travel or life choices. I love getting inside the authors’ heads, discovering not just what they did, but why, and how they felt about it later, and what came next. Great memoirs take us out of our own lives and into settings, situations, and perspectives we may never experience. What better way to understand how other people live and move and think and feel? Fiction is fine, but a unique true story hooks me from start to finish.
I lived in Lagos for four years in the early ‘90s and have struggled ever since to describe the strange energy and appeal of this troubled, oft-maligned country.
Noo, a British-raised Nigerian, takes us to 12 Nigerian locations in a quest to understand her roots. Her childhood memories of visits to the homeland weren’t great, and she’s highly attuned to the widespread corruption that afflicts almost every aspect of Nigerian life.
Still, she travels with an open mind, asking questions, seeking mini-adventures, and falling in love-and-exasperation with the loud, outspoken, resilient residents of Africa’s most-populated country.
Her lively account, packed with nuggets of history, culture, and one-of-a-kind encounters and conversations, brought me back to a country that stole my heart when I least expected it. Such a treat!
I was born in Quebec, have lived in eleven countries, and speak four languages. In my 20+ years as an author and journalist, my goal has always been to create bridges between cultures and to tell stories that enable individuals to better understand each other. For me, a trip to a new country, no matter how short or long, is incomplete unless I’ve had the chance to meet locals.
I wish I’d read this book before visiting Lebanese friends there.
The story of a man who returns to his native Lebanon years after the civil war, it portrays the complexity of their society through the impact the war had on a group of university friends.
It gives a wonderfully accurate feel of the sights, sounds, and tastes of the country, and an astute description of the psyche of the Lebanese people from the point of view of a returnee.
“A thoughtful, philosophically rich story that probes a still-open wound.” ―Kirkus Reviews
“Maalouf is a thoughtful, humane and passionate interlocutor.” ―The New York Times Book Review One night, a phone rings in Paris. Adam learns that Mourad, once his closest friend, is dying. He quickly throws some clothes in a suitcase and takes the first flight out, to the homeland he fled twenty-five years ago. Exiled in France, Adam has been leading a peaceful life as a respected historian, but back among the milk-white mountains of the East his past soon catches up with him. His childhood friends have all…
A fresh take on the difference between trauma and hardship in order to help accurately spot the difference and avoid over-generalizations.
The book integrates the latest findings in brain science, child development, psycho-social context, theory, and clinical experiences to make the case that trauma is much more than a cluster…
I was born in Quebec, have lived in eleven countries, and speak four languages. In my 20+ years as an author and journalist, my goal has always been to create bridges between cultures and to tell stories that enable individuals to better understand each other. For me, a trip to a new country, no matter how short or long, is incomplete unless I’ve had the chance to meet locals.
Gregory Shapiro – the American Netherlander – brings you a must-have alternative to the Dutch assimilation course. What is the true Dutch identity? Shapiro shares his hilariously clumsy assimilation into Dutch culture and blasts some well-known stereotypes along the way. The book includes questions from the real Dutch Assimilation Exam, whose logic Shapiro delightfully dissects to reveal the Dutch identity they’d rather you didn’t know. How to Be Orange includes a photo essay of the most awkward Dutch product names and is illustrated by award-winning cartoonist Floor de Goede.
How to Be Orange makes you redefine the Holland you thought…
My plan to write my book clicked after I bought an apple grown in New Zealand, 10,000 miles away from my home in Ohio. How did it make sense that we could buy apples so cheaply from so far away? What was the carbon footprint of that one transaction? Growing up in Michigan in the 1970s and 1980s, I had seen our industrial cities decay as trade globalized. Later I watched with horror as global financial markets crashed in 2008. With these experiences in mind, I wanted to write about both the benefits and the costs of globalization—and about its ethics—for religious communities like mine. So I did.
Friedman, a longtime New York Times foreign affairs columnist, was one of the first to show me what I should love and hate about globalization, circa 1999, at the peak of Western support for neoliberal globalization.
Although his gee-whiz, gung-ho enthusiasm for the world of the Lexus (high-tech globalization with global supply chains and integrated financial markets) sometimes wears thin, he also covers the problems caused by globalization. He even appeals to the need for the “olive trees” of community, family, and religion to make globalization ethical.
Even when the breezy tone annoys me, this book is still my go-to guide for mapping the effects of globalization on business, economics, politics, culture, and the environment.
A brilliant investigation of globalization, the most significant socioeconomic trend in the world today, and how it is affecting everything we do-economically, politically, and culturally-abroad and at home.
As foreign affairs columnist for The New York Times, Thomas L. Friedman crisscrosses the globe talking with the world's economic and political leaders, and reporting, as only he can, on what he sees. Now he has used his years of experience as a reporter and columnist to produce a pithy, trenchant, riveting look at the worldwide market forces that are driving today's economies and how they are playing out both internationally and…
I don’t have a passion for the diversity, equity, and inclusion topic. I have an obligation. When I didn’t see or understand the horrific injustice of systemic oppression, I couldn’t do anything about it. Now that I see it, I cannot ignore it. I’ve become an expert through my work in organizational development. I work with technology, healthcare, financial services and educational services clients around the globe, and in 2016 I founded GAR (Gender, Age, Race) Diversity Consulting. Prior to GAR, I was a director in the National Diversity and Inclusion office at Kaiser Permanente, and I worked for many years as a global management and technology consultant with American Management Systems, Inc (now CGI).
Workplaces are increasing in diversity, making it essential for workers to understand the nuances of cross-cultural relationships. This book delves into those nuances in a way that is practical, insightful, and fun. The author begins by introducing the four stages of cultural awareness, then builds by providing workbook opportunities for the reader to develop often profound insight. The author remarkably shows no bias toward one culture over another, which heightens the book's value. It’s also a terrific read for global travelers to gain an understanding and appreciation of places and people visited.
Here is the ultimate, self-instructional cross-cultural training manual. Craig Storti, author of The Art of Crossing Cultures, The Art of Coming Home, Incident at Bitter Creek and Cross-Cultural Dialogues, brings his wealth of knowledge and his creative mind to this exceptional new resource.
Figuring Foreigners Out is designed for anyone who wants to help in "figuring out" the behavior of someone from another culture. Educators, trainers and individuals will profit from this user-friendly workbook. readers can work through exercises which are vintage Storti - on their own, or in a training group.
Concepts at the heart of intercultural communication are…
The constellation we know as Taurus goes all the way back to cave paintings of aurochs at Lascaux. This book traces the story of the bull in the sky, a journey through the history of what has become known as the sacred bull.
I study culture. Ever since I was little, I’ve been fascinated by what people think, feel, believe, have, and do. I’ve always wondered why people need things to be meaningful. Why do people need an explanation for why things happen that puts the meaning outside their own minds? I wanted to get beyond the need for things to be meaningful by themselves, so I began looking into meaning-making as a thing we do. Once I realized the process was infinitely more interesting and valuable, I read books like those on my list. I hope they spark you as much as they have me.
I love this book because Tsing walks me through an increasingly complex, increasingly comprehensive understanding of how people think, feel, and make meaning and how that process is fundamental to understanding who we are as a species.
Each chapter gives me a basic yet profound bit of insight into people as meaning makers, and each chapter flows from the one(s) previous, all building toward the sort of “holy crap, I get it!” culmination that leaves me wanting to go back and read it again and again.
Tsing makes the complicated understandable and the obscure accessible.
A wheel turns because of its encounter with the surface of the road; spinning in the air it goes nowhere. Rubbing two sticks together produces heat and light; one stick alone is just a stick. In both cases, it is friction that produces movement, action, effect. Challenging the widespread view that globalization invariably signifies a "clash" of cultures, anthropologist Anna Tsing here develops friction in its place as a metaphor for the diverse and conflicting social interactions that make up our contemporary world. She focuses on one particular "zone of awkward engagement"--the rainforests of Indonesia--where in the 1980s and the…
As a rebellious woman who is passionate about words and the revolutionary force of books, I know the power of stories. Stories are the seeds that give life to your purpose. Stories give you a reason to fight the good fight, care about something bigger than yourself, and want to be a part of social justice and positive change. The daily grind can kick you down, but a good story can remind you that there's still time to rise up, speak truth to power, help others less fortunate, and commit to what you value most. The books that I’m recommending are meant to be your personal guide to what really matters most in life to you.
If you seriously care about racial healing, you have to read this book. White people are so damn afraid to say the wrong thing or to offend anyone when it comes to the topic of race, that we end up not saying anything at all. And silence is death to a movement. If you care about Black and Brown lives, then this book will shake you up in a good way, and remind you of the importance of being a good listener to the concerns of people of color. When you listen, you can have empathy. When you have empathy, you can start to be a part of the racial reckoning and healing that’s starting to take place in our nation.
n So You Want to Talk About Race, editor-at-large of The Establishment Ijeoma Oluo offers a contemporary, accessible take on the racial landscape in America, addressing head-on such issues as privilege, police brutality, intersectionality, micro-aggressions, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the "N" word. Perfectly positioned to bridge the gap between people of color and white Americans struggling with race complexities, Oluo answers the questions readers don't dare ask, and explains the concepts that continue to elude everyday Americans.
Oluo is an exceptional writer with a rare ability to be straightforward, funny, and effective in her coverage of sensitive, hyper-charged…
James M. Jasper has written a number of books and articles on politics and social movements since the 1980s, trying to get inside them to see what participants feel and think. In recent years he has examined the many emotions, good and bad, involved in political engagement. He summarizes what he has learned in this short book, The Emotions of Protest, taking the reader step by step through the emotions that generate actions, to those that link us to groups, down to the emotional and moral impacts of social movements. The book is hopeful and inspiring but at the same time also clear-eyed about the limitations of protest politics.
Meetings are one of the main activities of social movements, and plenty of misunderstandings occur based on the way people talk due to different backgrounds. This amusing book focuses on the effects of social class, which both activists and scholars have tended to forget about in recent years. If nothing else, it will give you something to think about during your next meeting.
Many activists worry about the same few problems in their groups: low turnout, inactive members, conflicting views on racism, overtalking, and offensive violations of group norms. But in searching for solutions to these predictable and intractable troubles, progressive social movement groups overlook class culture differences. Missing Class looks through a class lens and discovers that members with different class life experiences tend to approach these problems differently. Using this class lens enables readers to envision new solutions, solutions that draw on the strengths of all class cultures to form the basis of stronger cross-class and multiracial movements.
I was born in Toronto, yet spent formative years in Atlanta during the height of the civil rights movement. My family shared values dedicated to social justice and actively working against discrimination. Yet at times, I endured antisemitic jokes and name-calling while observing the parents of my “friends” using racist and hateful language toward Black people. We moved to the Seattle area where I later studied political science at the University of Washington, then earned a master’s degree in organizational leadership from the City University of Seattle. For 20+ years, I led global teams at Microsoft and Amazon.
This book opened a whole new world to me and tapped into my passion and thirst to understand the diversity of our world. I read this classic book early in my career, and it inspired a learning journey that continues to this very day. I still have my original paperback copy, which I dog-eared, tabbed, and highlighted throughout.
I found Hofstede’s book an easily consumable read that explains the differences in people and cultures from countries around the world in a manner everyone can relate.
The revolutionary study of how the place where wegrew up shapes the way we think, feel, and act--with new dimensions and perspectives
Based on research conducted in more than seventy countries over a forty-year span,Cultures and Organizations examines what drives people apart-when cooperationis so clearly in everyone's interest. With major new contributions from MichaelMinkov's analysis of data from the World Values Survey, as well as an account ofthe evolution of cultures by Gert Jan Hofstede, this revised and expanded edition:
Reveals the "moral circles" from which national societiesare built and the unexamined rules by which people think,feel, and act
Explores…
