100 books like Overheated

Barry’s dramatic historical account of the 1918 influenza pandemic has been called “fascinating,” “brilliant,” “sobering,” and “terrifying” by numerous reviewers.

It is a piece of history, the worst public health disaster in the century before COVID-19, that should have helped succeeding generations to take pandemic preparedness more seriously. It should have enhanced our understanding that during such a crisis, science must lead the way. Despite all that we did learn from the great influenza of 1918, we were unable to avoid many of the mistakes made when our leaders too often shunned the advice of science and made the COVID-19 pandemic political.

This book informed and influenced me greatly. It inspired me to see the need for and the importance of recording and learning from our experiences a century later.

Whilst not specifically about tech, I find this book a crucial intervention in clearly laying out how narratives can be weaponized for catastrophic negative impact.

I also really like how it focuses on the scientists themselves, amongst many other people, and their role in being part of the project of doubt – in understanding and unpicking hype, it’s crucial to consider all the actors involved in bringing science and technology into fruition, and this book expertly does just that. 

We are living in a time when ideology, myth, superstition, and ignorance seem to have more influence than ever in shaping our future.

This excellent and important book by Shawn Otto explains the forces (political and economic) at work that are aimed at undermining the role that knowledge and rational empirical evidence might play in making rational public policy decisions. This includes the effort to weaken the role that science might ideally play in helping us to address real-world challenges.

As one who studies and seeks to assess disaster preparedness, response, and mitigation, I have come to believe this “war” on science holds the potential to give birth to ever greater and more expensive (especially in terms of human costs) disasters.  

This classic book, published a quarter of a century ago, redefined the field of emergency management and has influenced my work and writing in this subject area for the past two decades.

Natural disasters are, in this landmark assessment, not events to be addressed in isolation. They are symptoms of broader problems. These broader problems require that emergency management be linked to broader concerns such as the management of natural resources, economic and social resilience, and public health and safety. This requires an orientation that emphasizes hazard mitigation to reduce the impact of disasters (natural and human-caused) and promotes the building of sustainable communities. This insight became the emphasis of the field in the decades that followed the publication of this book.

This book was certainly the most important influence on my work in the study of disaster management.

I loved this no-nonsense take on consumer culture. Listen, I love to shop. I love an outfit. But Aja Barber’s writing was a necessary wake-up call when it came to my spending habits—what’s driving them and how they are impacting the planet.

It’s easy to think the world’s environmental and social issues driven by consumerism can’t be fixed with individual choice, so why bother changing? While that’s true on some level, I feel spiritually (and financially) lighter when I am buying less and caring better for what I already own.

This book helped me finally break some shopping habits I wasn’t proud of and gave me a framework to continue questioning which of my habits are driven by our consumer culture rather than my own genuine desires. 

Vanessa Nakate is a Ugandan climate activist. The book title is a play on the story that catapulted her into the news. She was part of a youth climate change delegation to Davos that included Greta Thunberg and three other prominent young, white female activists. In their coverage, the Associated Press cut Vanessa from the photo.

Vanessa was outraged, and her video condemning the racist edit went viral. Africa generates the least carbon dioxide of all the continents, and it is most affected by climate change. In all subsequent photo shoots, the group placed Vanessa in the center so it couldn’t happen again.

This book is a personal story, an important African perspective on the crisis, and a good read. She ends the book with a "what can you do chapter." In her last paragraph, she says, "It doesn’t matter where you start or how; what matters is that you… show more.

What if you got hit by lightning? What if the lightning came from inside your body? What if you are such an obsessive writer and researcher that you then had to trace the supply chain of the failed medical device that did that to you?

KS does body writing as a research quest, taking her battered heart back and forth across the Atlantic in pursuit of answers to the question of what, exactly, she’d been carrying around in it. The sense of vulnerability—medical, economic, and otherwise—that she creates within the narrative is so felt that I couldn’t shake it when I was done reading.

Etienne Benson’s work on the history of radio tracking of wild animals is a model in combining environmental history, animal studies, and history of technology.

The book is also a fantastic example of how diverse networks of people—including hunters, conservationists, and animal rights activists—link up through a device, in this case the radio transmitter.

This book is a lovingly and expertly written biography of an underappreciated but vastly significant economist, Herman Daly. Professor Daly was an early proponent of ecological economics, and his work is becoming increasingly important and relevant if we want to stop climate breakdown.

One of the main reasons we are approaching climate breakdown is because neo-liberal economic theories and the economic system they have led to through trade agreements and the like rely on false or oversimplified assumptions—like pollution is free or that any resource constraints can be met by new inventions. The fact that neither is true—and the policy implications that set out from that conclusion - are persuasively documented in this biography.

The book is about economics and a great economist who brilliantly and convincingly demonstrated that the Planet and human resource demands on it must be included in our economic analysis and rules. As such, the biography… show more.

This small, beautifully laid out book was published a few years after mine–and it does a great job of introducing readers to a range of topics related to values-aligned investing.

It lays out the case for values-aligned investing and then gives you a few pages on topics as diverse as bonds and cryptocurrency. The highly visual nature of the book makes this a quick and engaging read