100 books like The Ugly History of Beautiful Things

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.

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. 

As the author and philosopher Heather Widdows makes clear, one of the big reasons why appearance has come to mean so much to us, and we spend so much time, energy, and resources on upgrading our looks, is because physical beauty has wrongly become conflated with worthiness and character.

In other words, we assume if you look good, you’re a good, moral person. In this comprehensive yet fast-paced read (which laid an academic groundwork for a lot of the reporting in my own book), Widdows connects the dots between ethics and beauty and makes the case for why we should resist the increasing demands of beauty ideals. 

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… show more.

Jacob Needleman’s Money and the Meaning of Life is the most influential and inspiring book by far for the development of life planning movement in financial advice.

A masterful storyteller with his own set of characters, Needleman guides us into the mystery of how money works and what money is really about. Going back and forth between money’s practicalities and the deeper longings we all have for freedom, he challenges us to explore what freedom really means in relation to money.

A page-turner of speculative philosophy, I can still remember how gripping the final 20 pages were. In his exploration of money and meaning, Needleman tells the story of life planning, which is the story of each of our aspirations for freedom, and then the path to accomplish them. 

I think Zachary Shore is one of our most underappreciated, insightful interpreters of American and global history.

Shore impressed me with his unique method of examining micro-events that give us a much wider view of American culture. He shows how America, at its best, can be a strong and moral guiding force for good in the world, but he doesn't shy from divulging the darker sides of the American psyche, such as the blunders that lead American leaders to make terrible and consequential military decisions.

Shore is not only a great historian but also a gifted writer. This book showed me how the collective memory of our nation has been portrayed too often in flawed stereotypes, either a villainous, youthful colossus or a city on a hill, a shining example for the rest of humanity. Shore convinced me that at its root, America can be a force for good as… show more.

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. 

What I love about this book is the way it challenges the taken-for-granted thought that ‘truth’ is easily discovered. With compelling examples from the past, Shapin works through the ways in which scientific knowledge is made–the struggles that its practitioners have to engage in to construct and consolidate credibility.

What the author reveals is that trust is as fundamental in science as it is in everyday life. A revolutionary thought: who do we trust, and why?

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.

Are things getting better or worse for farmed animals? I greatly appreciate the honesty of Peter Singer’s update to his 1975 classic. His dream was to inspire a movement that would end cruel “factory farming” by boycotting its products. And he did inspire a movement—but the industry has only got bigger, more intensive, more brutal, more ruthless.

It’s wrecking our environment, our health, and other animals’ lives all at once. The enemy was tougher to beat than he thought. Where do we go from here if we care about other animals? I think this book is a really powerful place to start.