100 books like The Matter of History

This is my favorite retelling of Greek mythology from a woman’s (well, goddess’s) point of view. Margaret Miller uses her deep knowledge of the ancient texts—she trained as a classicist—to transform them, giving a big player from the Odyssey her own story and a compelling narrative voice.

The book excels at world-building, with striking descriptions that make its mythological universe a place you can see and touch. And Circe herself is both strange enough to be fascinating and yet powerfully empathetic. This is the book I was looking for as a teenager, but I only appreciated it fully in middle age.

I am recommending this book because one can’t understand power without being beholden to it systemically and repeatedly, all the while dissecting power’s discontents. Baldwin’s words may seem to strike only to America’s core, but every marginalized person will find truth in them. As an Egyptologist, I rely on Baldwin to tell me what oppressed people in an authoritarian regime thought but could not commit to paper.

As a transplant to Atlanta from Los Angeles, I’ve been fascinated by the regional cuisines and culinary traditions of the south. But after being caught up in the romance of pimento cheese, mint juleps, and fried chicken, I knew there was so much more to the story that I was missing.

This book tells that untold story, showing us the immeasurable debt southern food owes to Africa and enslaved peoples brought to America. What I love about this book is not just the history being told but how Twitty tells it, combining a mix of genres, from narrative nonfiction to genealogical documentation, historical account to personal memoir.

Just as cooking is a highly creative act that fuses together diverse flavors and ingredients, writing about food needs to be equally creative and equally diverse.

Why have so many schemes to improve the human condition not worked or even backfired? In this brilliant work, I learned how we need to simplify the world if we want to govern it.

In any domain for which we aim to develop policies, we are forced to define relevant indicators and create a carbon copy of reality full of arbitrary choices. I loved how Scott makes this visible with examples from forests to cities. And how these choices lead to a variety of unexpected consequences that often render interventions ineffective.

The book makes you see that the problem is not that the chosen simplifications are wrong, but that ANY simplification is wrong. The only meaningful forward is a return to embracing the full complexity of the world around us.

This 17th-century debate remains both engaging and unresolved – testimony to the endurance of the free will problem.

Bramhall upholds a traditional view of free will, while Hobbes defends a more modern “materialist” view that is an ancestor to the views defended by List and Ismael above.

While many contemporary discussions of free will often focus on implications for moral responsibility, this debate is notable for the far broader range of considerations that the authors invoke, suggesting that the question of free will touches just about every aspect of our agency.

For several decades Dr. Rupert Sheldrake has been prodding us to awaken beyond the limitations of western science as we know it.

Trained as a scientist at some of the world’s top institutions, he began to understand that science itself needed to be set free from its own dogma that has accumulated over the centuries. He shows the ways in which science is being constricted by its own assumptions that are not only limiting but dangerous for the future of humanity.

Should science be a belief system or simply a method of inquiry? In the skeptical spirit of true science, Dr. Sheldrake turns the 10 fundamental dogmas of materialism into exciting questions and shows how all of them open to startling new possibilities for discovery.

Thomas Berry was a cultural historian who studied the cultures of Europe, China, America, India, and the Indigenous worlds with a single burning question in his mind: What is the role of humanity in the universe? Of course, this idea that humanity has a cosmic role is the opposite of the view promoted by modern science of an evolving universe that is going nowhere.

Given his professional background in the humanities, it is surprising that Berry names science as the primary revelation of the divine. He is committed to the idea that the sciences have discovered a common creation story, one that will play an important role for centuries to come. 

When I first met Thomas Berry and asked him about my personal role in the universe, he said simply, "Tell science's story of a developing universe; but tell it with a feeling for its music. That's what the spiritual… show more.

I’ve been a climate activist for 15+ years and suffered major mental breakdowns as a result. This book has been liberatory.

The Three Ecologies practically explains the overlapping relationships between ecology, society, and the human mind and, written as it was in the ‘80s, Guattari’s proposed ‘ecosophy’ was alarmingly prescient, and practical. He simplifies the complexities of technological, social, and ecological devastation into action.

We’re not the isolated beings our culture says we are. Our minds are made up of and drastically impacted by our ecology and our society, and vice versa. Ecosophy is a practice, a different way of being in the world.

Coming to understand myself as physically and mentally embedded in the world gave me a sense of safety and strength. It gave me confidence in my own mind, a mind that had been pathologised for over a decade.

Guattari was a visionary ecologist, an incandescent critic… show more.

Earth Emotions is a landmark guide to new concepts and vocabulary to represent the complex new ‘eco-emotions’, a spectrum of positive and negative emotional responses caused by recent environmental and life changes. From a mental health perspective to social sustainability, this book is valuable for many people currently processing their eco-emotions. One lesson from my research journey is that emotion and shared empathy as forms of sustainability knowledge are underestimated in favor of more rational approaches, when affect and cognition are intrinsically linked. This book advances our understanding of holistic emotions as sustainable information. Having conducted research into knowledge ecosystems, I can relate to the proposed shift from the Human Age (anthropocene) of isolation and despair to a Symbiotic Age (symbiocene) defined by positive mutually beneficial relationships between different groups.

A visit to the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, is on most architects' bucket lists.

The virologist Jonas Salk, who commissioned architect Louis Kahn to design the significant project, is best known for developing one of the first successful polio vaccines. Less familiar is this remarkable book, which Salk wrote with his son Jonathan, that explores the future of human societies.

By applying scientific principles about how organisms respond to resource limitations, the authors project the significant resource challenges and opportunities that await future human generations. The book looks beyond the population explosion to explore its mysterious aftermath. Indeed, the transition is already underway.