96 books like Dispatches from Pluto

Serious writing about animals going extinct and how we are all to blame doesn’t necessarily resonate with everyone. Different communication approaches are needed.

In this book, writer Douglas Adams, and Zoologist Mark Cawardine document their travels to see very rare and endangered species like the Kakapo and the blind river dolphin. Never shying away from the realities faced by these species, this book has a wonderful, engaging lightness of touch that rides above the richness and wisdom underpinning the stories being told.

I love this book, not least because it makes me realize that, despite being very much a nature lover’s book, we need more narratives about nature that can appeal to people who don’t necessarily love nature but do enjoy entertaining, amusing, witty writing.

Bryson inspired me while writing a book about my walk along the 600 miles of the Israel Trail.

He hiked the famous Appalachian Trail, but it was his traveling companion–an amusing type who has difficulty walking, who stands at the center of the book. I had more than one friend like this with me, and I learned that trees and landscapes are just the background in a travel book.

As I drove through the South researching my guidebook to civil rights sites, my back seat was filled with books. Atop the pile was Taylor Branch’s magisterial three-volume history – America in the King Years 1954-1968: Parting the Waters, Pillar of Fire, and At Canaan’s Edge.

Though encyclopedic, Branch’s story-telling is riveting—weaving together personalities, legalities, strategies, and geography in a way that made me feel as if I were there witnessing history as it was made. Taylor’s detail, reflecting a journalist’s quest for who, what, where, when, how, and why, showed me that these stories could best be told, understood, and felt where they happened.

This book doesn’t just read like a novel – it reads like a great novel: A battle between two compelling characters set against the absurd backdrop of an effort to establish a hippo population in America’s swampland. Mooallem’s understated wit showed me that sometimes the best way to understand history is by tracking the people we’ve never heard of, and the initiatives that never succeeded.

Set in the height of the Cold War, The Men Who Stare at Goats is the story of the US Army’s psychic warfare unit, the First Earth Battalion. These self-declared “warrior monks” trained in remote viewing and aspired to psychic slay capra with the force of their concentration.

Unlike the rest of the books on my list, The Men Who Stare at Goats is non-fiction. The bulk of the material in these pages are interviews with people in the First Earth Battalion.

Reading this book made me question the reality of psychic phenomena. Is there something to it? Or was this the result of a Soviet PSYOP (psychological operation, not psychic operation) to make the American military-industrial complex waste a lot of money?

Across the South, major statues of Confederate leaders are being removed from prominent pedestals, while schools, military bases, streets, and other memorials named for Confederates are being renamed. No effort is more astonishing than ending the hero worship of Robert E. Lee, the West Point graduate who chose to fight for his home state of Virginia in the Civil War, and led the South to defeat.

In this deeply researched and personal history of Lee and his own reckoning of Lee’s betrayal of the United States, West Point historian and retired Army general Ty Seidule reveals how he, a son of the South, came to revile Lee’s status as a southern God. As a PhD historian, Seidule dismantles many myths about Lee, and proves that Lee was, in fact, fighting to create a new nation based on slavery.

As a young journalist reporting racial unrest in Connecticut and elsewhere in the 1960s, I was stunned by a 1968 government report that declared: “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, and one white – separate and unequal.” Its section on the media noted that except for crime stories, people of color were largely missing from television and newspapers – even in advertisements – and called on newsrooms, corporate boards, and institutions to use affirmative action to hire minorities. I took the Kerner Commission report to heart, and, as one of my proudest professional accomplishments, hired the first Indian journalist in South Dakota, an action that reverberates to this day. Today, we take black and brown faces and voices on TV, movies, ads, and institutions for granted. 

But as New Yorker writer Jelani Cobb explains in his introduction, much of what the commission recommended has been ignored, to… show more.

Often forgotten in the study of the U.S. civil rights movement is the even longer, and less successful, effort by Native Americans to regain the sovereignty that they once enjoyed in North America. In 1976 when I was transferred by the Associated Press from Connecticut to South Dakota as a correspondent, I found the state bleeding from its history. The year before, two FBI agents had been murdered on the Pine Ridge Reservation, remnant violence of the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee. Drive-by shootings were common, discrimination and poverty were rampant, and I felt as if I had walked into an earlier century.

As I came to learn, from this book and its author, Indian tribes were beginning to challenge America’s betrayal of treaties signed in the 1800s – and winning back rights guaranteed in writing. Wilkinson, a friend, attorney, and emeritus history professor at the University of Colorado, helped… show more.

The work I have been doing for decades calling for change in how we teach reading in English is now supported by the world’s preeminent neuroscientific researcher in how the brain reads, Professor Dehaene.

He is candid, unapologetic, and clear regarding what needs to change. He asserts that whole language “does not fit with the architecture of our visual brain” (2009, p. 195) and goes on to say, “Cognitive psychology directly refutes any notion of teaching via a 'global' or 'whole language method'” (2009, p. 219).

Whole language or even balanced literacy confuses the attention of a child. Ergo, 1) Do not use three-cueing; 2) Do not guess from context or from the word’s shape; and 3) Guessing plays no role; it’s all in the letter string (the spelling).

Cognitive neuroscientist Mark Seidenberg writes powerfully about how the way we teach reading is not working and why it cannot continue.

His decades of research reaffirms my own four decades of calling for change in how we teach reading. This powerful and impactful book was a major jumpstart for the science of reading movement—a must read for every teacher and parent of a beginning reader.