Fans pick 42 books like Into the Jungle

I loved this book because I could relate to the tough, emotional place the author was in when she made this epic journey. Her rucksack was extremely heavy. It felt like it represented the burden she was carrying at the time. I loved the unfolding of both her physical and emotional journey, how much she learned about herself, and how much she was eventually able to let go of to enable her to move forward.

Reading this book motivated me to go on a similar journey, hiking many of the Camino Pilgrimage routes. This was a book I thought about long after I had finished reading it. It had the kind of truth about it that stays with you. 

A murder mystery and so much more. Set in the marshlands of North Carolina in the United States, it’s an unusual read with the emotional content tugging at my heartstrings. It describes life in the marsh and a child’s heartbreaking struggle to survive.

Nevertheless, I found the author’s description of the natural world in the marshlands brilliant and the haunting tale stayed with me long after I finished reading the book.

This story also tells of a river journey by four young orphans who in 1932 escape from a horrid Indian training school and travel for months down the Mississippi River. They head into the unknown, unprotected from the perils they encounter.

On my journey, I needed to be constantly vigilant for natural predators like lions, hippos, and crocs. These children had to be on the lookout for human predators: the search party sent looking for them, drifters, grifters, and traveling faith healers. Facing each obstacle we encountered on our trips, we managed not only to survive but actually thrive in hostile surroundings.

I identify strongly with the main character Julia Win, a Manhattan attorney, whose life had felt empty since returning from a tiny Burmese village in search of her missing father.

She is drawn back to Burma by questions left unanswered from her first visit. Both Julia and I were deeply affected by the actions of our fathers as young girls. In physically remote locations, we both searched for explanations that would free us from internal fears and doubts.  

This book gets at questions near and dear to my own ethnographic explorations, namely how migration changes gender roles in households. Women don’t leave home without figuring out care for young children and frail elders. Tanja Bastia looks at how Bolivian families handle the challenge of transnational parenting. Grandmothers often fill in for their migrant daughters (there’s the aging connection!), and migrant women struggle to balance their financial opportunities with the social stigma of having ‘abandoned’ their children in search of wealth.  

Did you know that African and indigenous people worked together in what is today Bolivia and Argentina? They were both enslaved and those who had bought their freedom. Bolivia, high in the mountains, might seem remote, but in the 1500s and 1600s its rich silver mines were the motor of the Spanish Empire’s economy. And Spain was the superpower that dominated Europe, America, and the Atlantic.

Bolivia and the zones that supplied it with coerced and free workers, mules, food, wine, textiles, and the stimulant coca leaf was called Charcas, and it was the most valuable and important part of all of the Americas at the time.

This wonderfully detailed book by an outstanding Bolivian historian tells the story of the Black and indigenous laborers who made this possible.

The collection focuses on communities in the tropics – specifically in Bolivia, Brazil, Cameroon, Indonesia, Malawi, Nepal, Philippines, and Zimbabwe – where the Adaptive Collaborative Management approach discussed in my own book was first used, in the early 2000s. The examples in this book focus on the centrality of learning in the ACM process. When we developed our version of ACM (at the Center for International Forestry Research), we imagined the monitoring would build on the literature on criteria and indicators in sustainable forest management (C&I). It did that, and more. This book shows the many ways that the program itself ‘walked the talk,’ using its emphasis on learning to expand our own approach beyond its beginnings—just as our own new book does.

There have been many descriptions of Atlantis published before, but very few have been written by someone who has actually been there, via psychic time travel, or at least via a series of dreams inspired by Atlantean stone furniture in Bolivia.

Fortunately, Walter F. Laredo has left us just such a book, and if he sometimes plays coy (maybe it was all just a dream???), he wonderfully includes an appendix of technical schematics of Atlantean inventions (bionic eyes, “chemical laser” beams) alongside full-color paintings of Atlantean architecture and the occasional nude Atlantean woman.

I have given this the top spot, not because of the political ideals of the author, but the intimate portrayal of his passion for justice that this classic book portrays with such vivid humanity. Che Guevara was a gifted writer and in this book all the revolutionary idealism that fed into his life-long battle merge into a powerful narrative that is so symptomatic for the romanticism of a bygone era. The Cuban revolution firmly rooted the idea of independence in the political lexicon of resistance movements all over the world, as independence from outside interference, is a necessary step towards a progressive democracy. I read Guevara's books as a Junior Research Fellow at Oxford University in order to train my mind in the various methods of critique.

This is not only a great ethnography (a book based on long-term anthropological fieldwork) giving a splendidly detailed and deeply humane account of the lives of Bolivian tin miners and their families in the 1970s, but also one of the most effective case studies within the framework of “dependency theory.”

The title, which comes from one of the author’s interviews with a miner, captures the violence and misery of tin mining, but I also love the way the book portrays its protagonists as ordinary people living and giving meaning to their lives as best they can.