Here are 100 books that Learning in Public fans have personally recommended if you like
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All my life, I’ve been aware that there are many layers to reality, many of which are human fabrications. Some are physical, like roads. Some are social, like healthcare. But the ones that control our lives the most, and that determine our global outcomes (poverty, war and ecological degradation for example), are ideological. The most powerful of these is our economic system. If we are to address the meta-crisis, I feel passionately that we need to be able to question and reimagine the economy. All the books I’ve chosen have been really important in helping me to think differently about things we usually take for granted.
I love this book because of how beautiful and hopeful it is. The author pulls together amazing stories from her life to gradually weave an understanding of the meta-crisis we find ourselves in. I was captivated by the way she contrasts her family’s indigenous American culture with our modern approaches to both science and the economy.
I love Robin’s prose, which is exquisitely written. But perhaps what I value the most is the fact that she writes with optimism, giving me the courage to get up every day and think about how to put her wisdom into practice.
Called the work of "a mesmerizing storyteller with deep compassion and memorable prose" (Publishers Weekly) and the book that, "anyone interested in natural history, botany, protecting nature, or Native American culture will love," by Library Journal, Braiding Sweetgrass is poised to be a classic of nature writing. As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer asks questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces indigenous teachings that consider plants and animals to be our oldest teachers. Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take "us on a journey that is…
Throughout my career as a journalist and social documentarian, I have been committed to exposing injustices and seeking out stories overlooked by mainstream media. As my career has evolved in this space—from journalist to grassroots organizer to author—I have learned to remain curious and teachable, acknowledging that my preconceived notions of the world will not do me any good. In confronting the uncomfortable in pursuit of truth, I have uncovered systemic abuses in the criminal justice system and shed light on the harsh realities faced by incarcerated individuals.
Smith offers an up-close-and-personal tour of how the history of slavery has been preserved in various corners of the Earth. From Monticello Plantation in Virginia to the House of Slaves in Gorée Island (Senegal), I was taken on an eye-opening, albeit sometimes cringeworthy, journey through modern-day perceptions of a haunted past.
For me, this retelling of history is most fascinating. It forces the reader to reckon with the idea that truth isn’t just in the eye of the beholder but in the mouth of the teller. How can we find truth in history if it is being told in so many ways? I weirdly enjoyed wrestling with it as I ventured through the places Smith visited as if his storytelling was escorting me.
ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVOURITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR A NUMBER ONE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR NON-FICTION
'A beautifully readable reminder of how much of our urgent, collective history resounds in places all around us that have been hidden in plain sight.' Afua Hirsch, author of Brit(ish)
Beginning in his hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith leads the reader on an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks - those that are honest about the past and those that are not - which offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in…
Excluding every day since my birth, my Gen X studies started in earnest in 2016, when Fortune 100 companies aggressively laid off my Gen X peers across the board. I was an early entrepreneur in the crypto industry and saw firsthand how people in remote reaches of the world used Bitcoin to pull themselves out of poverty. Since 2021, I have been a podcast host, interviewing founders and entrepreneurs about the benefits of technology and how to bring the next billion people across the digital divide. Most of my nearly 600 podcasts discuss how to empower people, especially my age, to live better lives by embracing the new digital economy.
This book resonated deeply within me because, just like the author, I have always relied upon music to drive my emotions. Music played an integral role in shaping my life, especially during times of tremendous grief. This was especially true during the devastating death of a dear friend during my teenage years who succumbed to his demons and the quiet void left by my father’s passing. Each loss felt like a piece of my soul was gone. Music helped me grapple with my mortality.
Being let go from my corporate job was another brutal grief-ridden separation because it felt as if I had lost a part of my identity. Gen Xers like me often navigate the treacherous waters of untapped, sidelined potential. I was reminded that resilience spawns from pain and suffering. Personal battles forced me to confront my fears as I moved forward into today’s digital age. Like Hanif,…
* 2018 "12 best books to give this holiday season" —TODAY (Elizabeth Acevedo) * A "Best Book of 2017" —Rolling Stone (2018), NPR, Buzzfeed, Paste Magazine, Esquire, Chicago Tribune, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, CBC, Stereogum, National Post, Entropy, Heavy, Book Riot, Chicago Review of Books, The Los Angeles Review, Michigan Daily * American Booksellers Association (ABA) 'December 2017 Indie Next List Great Reads' * Midwest Indie Bestseller
In an age of confusion, fear, and loss, Hanif Abdurraqib's is a voice that matters. Whether he's attending a Bruce Springsteen concert the day after visiting Michael Brown's grave, or discussing public displays of…
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
A dozen years ago, my family moved from a homogeneous community where everyone looked, lived, and believed as we did to a vibrant neighborhood filled with difference and complexity. This shifted something deep inside me and ultimately changed the way I see the world and myself within it. It set me on a path toward understanding how authentic, ordinary community holds the power to transform our world. To live as neighbors is to draw near to each other. I have written three books on this central theme and plan to spend the rest of my life reaching for empathy as our best tool in reclaiming the goodness of humanity.
This is the poetry book for people like me, who aren’t “good” at poetry, but who desperately need to believe humanity is still mostly intact and the world around us still brims with beauty.
I keep this one on my bedside table and reach for it when I need a quick reminder that we still have a say in the direction our society leans. More blooms. More abundance. More ordinary goodness. More us.
An Indie Poetry Bestseller! What the world needs now - featuring poems from inaugural poet Amanda Gorman, Ross Gay, Tracy K. Smith and more. More and more people are turning to poetry as an antidote to divisiveness, negativity, anxiety, and the frenetic pace of life. How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope offers readers uplifting, deeply felt, and relatable poems by well-known poets from all walks of life and all parts of the US, including inaugural poet Amanda Gorman, Joy Harjo, Naomi Shihab Nye, Ross Gay, Tracy K. Smith, and others. The work of these poets captures…
I have been an educator for over 20 years teaching elementary-aged children. The environment is a passion of mine. After reading the book Plastic Ocean and meeting the author Charles Moore, I realized that the issues facing our environment are going to be best solved by the upcoming generation of children. They understand how important it is to preserve our planet. Combining my love of writing with my education background, I started writing books to teach children about the environment and inspire them to make lasting changes. I love recommending books that have the same mission. Small actions equal great changes!
We’re all looking for ways to teach our children to care for each other as well as our planet. This is a wonderful way to engage kids and get them thinking about the greater good. Filled with fun ideas, children are empowered to make a difference. I love the discussion questions to prompt thinking and the place for children to write down their own ideas.
This engaging book provides over 40 powerful ideas on how kids and the people who love them can make a difference. Using kid-friendly text and beautiful illustrations, the focus is on three key areas: empathy and kindness, racial and gender equality, and caring for the environment. We know from research that ‘doing good is good for you’. The participant benefits both mentally and physically. Encouraging a mindset of giving and being part of positive change when a child is young, benefits both the child and their future. The aim of this book is to introduce kids to the many positive…
I’m a philosopher who has spent much of the past 30 years writing about Adam Smith—widely considered one of the first theorists of empathy. One consequence of spending all that time on Smith is that I came to see how much empathy infused even his work on economics (he is for one thing the first theorist ever to write empathetically about the lives of the poor). I’ve become as a result something of a crusader on behalf of the importance of bringing empathy into social science and policy-making today. Understanding people’s perspectives from within is essential to figuring out who they are and what they need.
Yes, I know, this book has a long, very academic title. But it’s actually very short and clearly-written, explaining both to professionals and to laypeople why empathy is essential to writing good history. Kohut is a distinguished historian of modern Germany, who also has psychoanalytic training, and he makes a convincing case that we can properly understand even such horrific events as the Wannsee conference (which instituted the Nazis’ “final solution” to the problem of the Jews) only if we enter into the perspective of the people who attended it. This is an eye-opening book on an extremely important topic.
Empathy and the Historical Understanding of the Human Past is a comprehensive consideration of the role of empathy in historical knowledge, informed by the literature on empathy in fields including history, psychoanalysis, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and sociology.
The book seeks to raise the consciousness of historians about empathy, by introducing them to the history of the concept and to its status in fields outside of history. It also seeks to raise the self-consciousness of historians about their use of empathy to know and understand past people. Defining empathy as thinking and feeling, as imagining, one's way inside the experience of…
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’m a believer that kids can be creative, powerful problem-solvers–for themselves but also as mediators in their schools. I’ve been a school mediation trainer for over 30 years and know that learning someone else’s story brings empathy, understanding, and caring, and solutions can be found. I love delightful picture books that make this truth come alive for kids and adults alike, and I use them in trainings and just for my own inspiration and joy. I’ve also written YA (for all ages), including the novel Encounter: When Religions Become Classmates–From Oregon to India and Back. I want to make ripples for good in our world.
I love being “caught” by great truths in the shape of precious, funny picture books. And this is one that did just that!
We all get that strangers are scary and probably not friendly and probably not nice and probably.. and probably... Well, I didn’t know how Maggie could possibly change the situation for her family, but she sure did.
I laughed and was so glad that I had discovered this book! It was written in 1979 and is so worth the search to find!
I always sensed I was from another planet, here to help create a new world by nature of my heightened sensitivity and ability to perceive beneath the surface of our supposed reality. After decades of struggling and nearly dying through addiction to mute my sensitivity, my healing path led me to see how being an empath is the greatest gift, once we learn to take care of ourselves and refine our abilities. My book The Empath Experience is the guide I wish I had when I was born, that tells my story and guides life-changing practices to master your energy and harness your empathic gifts as the superpowers they are.
I love this book from Anita – it feels like it resonates a lot with the messages in my original book on the empath experience yet includes some other stories and anecdotes that can relate to an even broader audience. I appreciate her core thesis that empaths are really the world’s healers especially at this time – here to teach empathy, compassion, and true connection simply by being who they truly are.
The New York Times bestselling author of Dying to Be Me returns with “a gorgeous and powerful field guide to the empath living in today’s wild world” (Laura Berman, PhD, author of Quantum Love) and how they can fully embrace their gifts of intuition and empathy.
Empaths not only sense other people’s emotions, but also absorb them—sometimes to their own disadvantage, often leading to overwhelming sensory overload and feelings of confusion or low self-esteem. Their willingness to help and please others might make them prey to opportunists or cause them to give away more energy than they can afford.
I’m a historian of emotions, science, and medicine, with more than a decade of experience in meddling in other scientific affairs, especially in the worlds of psychology and neuroscience. I’m fascinated by human emotions in part, at least, because I feel we’re living in a crude emotional age. I’ve worked in five different countries since gaining my PhD in 2005. In that time I’ve written or edited 14 books of historical non-fiction, as well as dozens of articles and reviews. You can freely read my work inAeon or History Today. I live between Canada (my adopted country) and Finland, where I frequently lament the loss of my European citizenship.
I was desperately waiting for Lanzoni’s book to come out, being certain that it would be the key to displacing an all-too-easy tendency, among scientists, scholars and the general public alike, to make empathy the hardwired mechanism that defines humanity.
It frankly amazes me how quickly the fortunes of empathy rose in the second of half of the twentieth century when, fundamentally, nobody has been able to say precisely what it is, where it is, how it works or what its limits might be.
I loved Lanzoni’s book for laying it all out. Down with empathy!
A surprising, sweeping, and deeply researched history of empathy-from late-nineteenth-century German aesthetics to mirror neurons
Empathy: A History tells the fascinating and largely unknown story of the first appearance of empathy in 1908 and tracks its shifting meanings over the following century. Despite the word's ubiquity today, few realize that it began as a translation of Einfuhlung ("in-feeling"), a term in German psychological aesthetics that described how spectators projected their own feelings and movements into objects of art and nature.
Remarkably, this early conception of empathy transformed into its opposite over the ensuing decades. Social scientists and clinical psychologists refashioned…
I grew up thinking that being adopted didn’t matter. I was wrong. This book is my journey uncovering the significance and true history of adoption practices in America. Now, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, the renewed debate over women’s reproductive rights places…
I’ve always been curious about people and the way they interact. When I was a small child, all our neighbors had their back doors wide open to catch the summertime breeze; they’d get the sense they were being watched… by my small face pressed against the screen door, listening and learning. My parents would get called..” She’s doing it again.” As an introvert, a performing artist, and a coach, I’ve learned to tune my ears to the messaging beneath the words—the unspoken truth in the interaction. And I truly believe that if we can learn to be more effective and compassionate listeners—our world will change for the better.
One of the most powerful benefits of skilled listening is building trust. Empathy is essential to creating trusting relationships. Jamison is a trained actor, and deep listening and empathy are essential to the craft of acting.
This book spans her experiences, from her work in medical training to her research on incarceration, reality TV, and street violence. I was struck by the heartfulness and clarity in Jamison's writing about what she has witnessed and experienced. She pulls no punches.
The stories in this book provide a clarion call for our species to regain our empathy for each other through skilled and intentional listening to connect, extend understanding, and ensure our survival.
From personal loss to phantom diseases, The Empathy Exams is a bold and brilliant collection, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize
A Publishers Weekly Top Ten Essay Collection of Spring 2014
Beginning with her experience as a medical actor who was paid to act out symptoms for medical students to diagnose, Leslie Jamison's visceral and revealing essays ask essential questions about our basic understanding of others: How should we care about each other? How can we feel another's pain, especially when pain can be assumed, distorted, or performed? Is empathy a tool by which to test or even grade…
