Here are 100 books that The Divide fans have personally recommended if you like
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I grew up in Los Angeles, California, which is frequently imagined as well as experienced. As a child, we lived by the beach and in the foothills of Angeles National Forest. The leaps of faith you make in this landscape were always clear: earthquakes, wildfires, and mudslides occur regularly. The question asked often about the Arctic: “why on earth do people live there?” applies also to California: life in beautiful landscapes and seascapes is risky. Then, I made my first trip to Iceland alone in 1995, and have now been to Iceland ten times, Greenland twice, and Nayan Mar, above the Russian Arctic Circle, each time with fascination.
What would you do if you were taken by force from your home as a child and placed in a museum for strangers to look at you and touch you? And if two-thirds of the adults with you died almost immediately from this treatment? And if the man who did this to you was acclaimed as a hero?
This is the story of a boy from the Arctic lost in New York City, and his struggle to return home.
A compelling biography of the Eskimo boy who was brought back to the U.S. by explorer Robert Peary recreates the twelve agonizing years little Minik spent living as an alien in New York City, an experience that culminates with the discovery that his father's body is on display at the Museum of Natural History. 25,000 first printing. $25,000 ad/promo. BOMC.
I grew up in Chicago and at a very young age worked in retail. While my mom was building her own brand, lumbar support called the “back machine”, I watched the process and got to shadow her to understand what the customers’ needs were. I went to the University of Wisconsin in Madison and triple majored in Design, Retail, and Business. I then moved to NYC and launched my brand BOY MEET GIRL® in 2001. When I couldn’t find a book on a woman building a brand who was also a mother I knew I had to write my book to show others how you can do it.
I have been in the fashion industry for over two + decades and have been fortunate to work with Alyssa Hardy the author of this book. She has featured me in several articles she writes for and has been a model in one of my anti-bullying campaigns.
Why I would recommend her book is not only because I think she is a rock star but because how important her book is to our society. It gives a real insider look at the rise of “fast fashion” and the abuse and neglect of garment workers.
An insider's look at how the rise of "fast fashion" obstructs ethical shopping and fuels the abuse and neglect of garment workers
"With years of expertise in the fashion industry, Alyssa's reporting is consistently deep and thoughtful, and her work on sustainability and ethics has changed how I view the clothes I wear." -Brittney McNamara, features director at Teen Vogue
Ours is the era of fast fashion: a time of cheap and constantly changing styles for consumers of every stripe, with new clothing hitting the racks every season as social media-fueled tastes shift.
As a feminist academic and activist, I am personally committed to the cause of reproductive freedom. Professionally, I've spent the past seven years carrying out research on abortion pills and their travels around the globe. This research involved more than eighty interviews with activists and doctors across the world, as well as analysis of many different text sources. My work has also taken me into activist spaces across Europe, as a volunteer with the Abortion Support Network. Although I entered the topic of reproductive rights through my interest in abortion, reading widely in the field has led me to pursue research interests in reproductive and biomedical technologies in other areas of sexual and reproductive health.
Eve tackles the topic of ectogenesis – gestation outside the womb. From literature to bioethics to cutting-edge medical research, the book examines this complex topic in creative ways.
Its chapter on abortion politics is particularly insightful because it considers how technology that allows for gestation in artificial wombs might lead to restrictions in abortion laws.
Horn’s writing blends sociological, legal, and bioethical analysis together with personal reflections on her own experience of pregnancy.
Not only is this one of the best books I’ve read on reproductive politics, but it’s one of the best books on the experience of being pregnant because it beautifully reflects on the complex social meanings of pregnancy and its physical embodiment. Eve is written in a highly accessible style, so readers without prior knowledge of the topic will find the narrative compelling.
SELECTED AS A NEW SCIENTIST 'BOOKS TO EXPAND YOUR MIND'
'THOUGHTFUL ... EXAMINES THE BOUNDARIES OF MOTHERHOOD THROUGH AN UNUSUAL LENS: ARTIFICIAL WOMBS. ... A SKILLED WRITER WITH A CAREFUL GRASP OF HER SUBJECT AND ITS FASCINATING HISTORY' Angela Saini, Telegraph
'AN ENGROSSING INSIGHT INTO THE FUTURE OF BIRTH THROUGH THE LENSES OF THE MOST PRESSING WOMEN'S HEALTH ISSUES OF OUR ERA' New Statesman
Throughout human history, every single one of us has been born from a person. So far. But that is about to change.
Scientific research is on the cusp of being able to grow babies outside human…
I have always been fascinated with bodies: the meaning we make of them; the suffering, joy, and indignities we receive through them; the outer limits of what we can do to and with them. I’ve worked in careers that have asked a lot of my own body, and I write about the brutalities humans inflict upon our own and other bodies. My work is obsessed with questions of how and why we endure suffering. Also, I’ve done a lot of dumb shit to and with my own body that has given me (in addition to a lifetime of medical problems) a highly specific perspective about intensity, hazard, and pain.
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.
What if a lifesaving medical device causes loss of life along its supply chain? That's the question Katherine E. Standefer finds herself asking one night after being suddenly shocked by her implanted cardiac defibrillator.
In this gripping, intimate memoir about health, illness, and the invisible reverberating effects of our medical system, Standefer recounts the astonishing true story of the rare diagnosis that upended her rugged life in the mountains of Wyoming and sent her tumbling into a fraught maze of cardiology units, dramatic surgeries, and slow, painful recoveries. As her life increasingly comes to revolve around the internal defibrillator freshly…
I’m a Stanford professor who became fascinated
with oil and everything it does to for us and to us. For years I traveled the
world talking to the people who know petroleum: executives in the big oil companies,
politicians and activists, militants and victims, spies and tribal chiefs. Blood
Oil explains what I learned and how we can make our oil-cursed world better
for all of us.
If you love villains, you’ll love this book (plus all these villains are real).
Psychopathic dictators, Russian arms dealers, ultra-violent warlords, and corrupt French presidents all show the evil oil can inspire—and the ruin it can bring to a country. I had to put this book down a few times; the depravity around oil can shock even those of us who think we’ve heard it all.
Each week the oil and gas fields of sub-Saharan Africa produce over a billion dollars worth of oil yet this rising tide of money is not promoting stability or development but instead is causing violence, poverty and stagnation. "Poisoned Wells" exposes the root causes of this paradox of poverty from plenty, and explores the mechanisms by which oil causes grave instabilities and corruption around the globe. Shaxson's access as a journalist to the key players in African oil results in an explosive story.
I’m a science and technology journalist who has reported on neurotech and bioelectricity for over 15 years, for publications includingNew Scientist, IEEE Spectrum and Quartz. After a formative experience in a DARPA brain-stimulation experiment, I began to dig into the history and science of bioelectricity, trying to understand both the science at the level of membrane biophysics, and the history and psychology of how biology lost custody of electricity. My resulting book is an effort to create a repository of the real, rigorous studies that have advanced our understanding of this fascinating science at an accelerating rate in the past 20 to 40 years - and what the new science means about the future.
They say the law is perpetually at least five years behind new developments in technology.
Nowhere is it more important to reverse this phenomenon than in neurotechnology. We may not understand the brain, but that hasn’t stopped neurotech startups and big tech companies from trying to eavesdrop on and interpret its bioelectric signals.
Farahany, a bioethics professor at Duke University, says that this market is expected to reach $21 billion by 2026 largely because it will be a boon for surveillance capitalism. The devices don’t even have to actually tell you what a person is thinking or feeling for the information to be used that way by companies and governments.
People become credulous when AI tells them something, whether it’s a policing or recidivism algorithms. Wearable says you are about to commit a crime or have an affair?
Farahany makes an impassioned argument to build the legal framework that will…
A new dawn of brain tracking and hacking is coming. Will you be prepared for what comes next?
Imagine a world where your brain can be interrogated to learn your political beliefs, your thoughts can be used as evidence of a crime, and your own feelings can be held against you. A world where people who suffer from epilepsy receive alerts moments before a seizure, and the average person can peer into their own mind to eliminate painful memories or cure addictions.
Neuroscience has already made all of this possible today, and neurotechnology will soon become the “universal controller” for…
The best fiction explores complex relationships between friends and lovers. I’ve been fascinated by this for as long as I can remember because love and friendship are the cornerstones of human existence. As concepts, they give life meaning yet can also take it away. They bring us together but can also leave us estranged. The sun-soaked cities of Europe have for so long been playgrounds for young lovers and friends, enjoying both the best of life and the most melancholy. I love traveling Europe–the grandeur, the romance, the happy-sad sentiment of it all. It embodies the topic and makes for the most beautiful setting.
Fitzgerald’s mastery of the English language is beautiful to behold. This book is one of the most eloquent expositions of the control of his prose while at the same time confronting his greatest weakness in life: an inability to find happiness and true love that loves him back. Set on the French Riviera, Tender is the Night is honest and painful. It’s an insight into Fitzgerald’s melancholy world of excess.
This is both fantastic to be a part of and tragic. The tragedy and the beauty are juxtaposed in the most fantastic way–this makes this book one of my favorite romances. I read this book for pure enjoyment. Each sentence makes me smile with its beauty and its profundity.
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in a friend's copy of Tender Is the Night, "If you liked The Great Gatsby, for God's sake read this. Gatsby was a tour de force but this is a confession of faith." Set in the South of France in the decade after World War I, Tender Is the Night is the story of a brilliant and magnetic psychiatrist named Dick Diver; the bewitching, wealthy, and dangerously unstable mental patient, Nicole, who becomes his wife; and the beautiful, harrowing ten-year pas de deux they act out along the border between sanity and madness. In Tender Is…
I’ve been an astronomer since I was young and lucky enough to make a living at it. I ventured into space mining when I found Mining the Sky. I started doing some calculations using the newest research. What I found was surprising and ignited a new passion in me that has led me from asteroids to the Moon to the ends of the Solar System and from pure astrophysics into questions of law, government, and ethics. Now, I write almost entirely about our future in space.
After I got all fired up about space mining with the other books, Erika Nesvold raised all sorts of questions that I hadn’t considered. What sort of “world” do I want to see when people expand across the solar system?
After reading her book, I realize that despite my urge to just get on and do it, a Wild West in space isn’t what we’re after.
Can we do better in space than we’ve done here on Earth?
We’ve pinpointed the destination, refined the technology, designed the habitat, outfitted our space residents. Are we forgetting something? A timely reminder that it’s not just rocket science, this thought-provoking book explores the all-too-human issues raised by the prospect of settling in outer space. It’s worth remembering, Erika Nesvold suggests, that in making new worlds, we don’t necessarily leave our earthly problems behind. Accordingly, her work highlights the complex ethical challenges that accompany any other-worldly venture—questions about the environment, labor rights, and medical ethics, among others.
I'm the author of several books on this topic and work on this topic as executive director of a nonprofit organization. I see war as one of the dumbest things that we could easily stop doing and as one of the most damaging things we do. It's the reason we are at risk of nuclear apocalypse, the leading cause of homelessness, a leading cause of death and injury, the justification for government secrecy, one of the most environmentally destructive activities, the major barrier to global cooperation on non-optional crises, and one of the main pits into which massive resources are diverted that we all desperately need for useful things.
This book makes a powerful case that humanitarian war no more exists than philanthropic child abuse or benevolent torture. I’m not sure the actual motivations of wars are limited to economic and strategic interests—which seems to forget the insane, power-mad, and sadistic motivations—but I am sure that no humanitarian war has ever benefitted humanity.
This book makes that very clear. It does not take the approach so widely recommended of watering down the truth so that the reader is only gently nudged in the right direction from where he or she is starting. There’s no getting 90% reassuringly wrong to make the 10% palatable here. This is a book for either people who have some general notion of what war is or people who aren’t traumatized by jumping into an unfamiliar perspective and thinking about it. Refreshing!
"Kovalik helps cut through the Orwellian lies and dissembling which make so-called 'humanitarian' intervention possible." -Oliver Stone
War is the fount of all the worst human rights violations including genocide and not its cure. This undeniable truth, which the framers of the UN Charter understood so well, is lost in today's obsession with the oxymoron known as "humanitarian" intervention.
No More War: How the West Violates International Law by Using 'Humanitarian' Intervention to Advance Economic and Strategic Interests sets out to reclaim the original intent of the Charter founders to end the scourge of war on the heels of the…
A former Catholic, raised in the restaurant business, becoming a Franciscan, and with a passionate love of art, they collectively integrated and came to define my life. I was sent to culinary school. Suffering from a chronic lung condition and obesity, I learned that an animal-based diet was the primary cause and became a vegan in October 1976, regaining my health. Vegan culinary art, as my life’s passion, led me to compete in the International Culinary Olympics five times in Germany, winning Seven medals, including gold, writing for magazines, authoring four books, and working with the United Nations to help humanity improve its health with a plant-based vegan diet.
Food Politics is a compelling read about the tensions between economics and nutrition. Corporate food companies' strategic efforts to undermine sound nutrition for profit is one of the core themes. Government is petitioned and lobbied by corporations to weigh in on their side. Vegetarianism was not endorsed by the American Dietetics Association until 1987.
The meat industry is beginning to embrace and develop vegan products as a result of the consumer shift. It is a reminder to be vigilant and informed as to our food choices and the influence corporate food manufacturers have on your governments. In part due to industrial pressure, it wasn’t until 2009 that the American Dietetic Association endorsed the vegetarian diet.
We all witness, in advertising and on supermarket shelves, the fierce competition for our food dollars. In this engrossing expose, Marion Nestle goes behind the scenes to reveal how the competition really works and how it affects our health. The abundance of food in the United States - enough calories to meet the needs of every man, woman, and child twice over - has a downside. Our over-efficient food industry must do everything possible to persuade people to eat more - more food, more often, and in larger portions - no matter what it does to waistlines or well-being. Like…
