Here are 85 books that There Are No Accidents fans have personally recommended if you like
There Are No Accidents.
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I have always been drawn to community, meaning how people get together, live, love, and support each other. That love drew me into caring about cities, in all their various forms, because cities are places for people to gather and build lives together. This can be in an Italian hilltown from the 1000 AD, a 15th-century neighborhood in Barcelona, an elegant street on the Upper East Side of New York City, or a subdivision near a highway interchange in Phoenix. Once I started caring about cities, I started asking why these places are the way they are, and this produced my book.
Jane Jacob’s groundbreaking, disruptive classic is first on many people’s lists. A journalist without a college degree and no formal training in urban planning, she blew up the once-established view that old-fashioned streets and buildings were done for, and that towers in the park surrounded by highways and parking lots were the way to go. Her portrait of her neighborhood in the West Village is deeply moving, and she almost single-handedly brought back these types of places as ideals.
However, she missed a lot. She didn’t understand the importance of infrastructure. She barely mentions the subways. She described her beloved streets as if they grew there, which was not the case. Reading this classic with a critical eye is the best way to do it. Jane Jacobs has become Saint Jane to many, but it’s important to see what she missed and what she got right.
In this classic text, Jane Jacobs set out to produce an attack on current city planning and rebuilding and to introduce new principles by which these should be governed. The result is one of the most stimulating books on cities ever written.
Throughout the post-war period, planners temperamentally unsympathetic to cities have been let loose on our urban environment. Inspired by the ideals of the Garden City or Le Corbusier's Radiant City, they have dreamt up ambitious projects based on self-contained neighbourhoods, super-blocks, rigid 'scientific' plans and endless acres of grass. Yet they seldom stop to look at what actually…
When we were doing research for Dora the Explorer (I’m one of the show’s three creators), we read picture book versions of the episodes to preschoolers. The researcher would always begin by saying, “I’ve got a story to tell you.” The preschoolers would clap, cheer, and sometimes even hug the kid next to them. Then, my story would begin. At least with group 1, before we made a lot of changes, the children would invariably fall on their backs and beg to be taken back to class. Everyone longs to be told a great story. So, for my list, I picked some of the greatest read-aloud children’s books ever “told.”
Whenever I read this book’s opening lines, I sink under the author’s magic spell.
Forget Faulkner, forget Joyce, try Grahame’s poetic prose. When Grahame wrote this, the whole idea of writing books for kids was still fresh, and the idea of anthropomorphic animals was novel, too. The book is so good it still seems like something new under the sun.
If you don’t have a child available, pretend that a wise, kind adult is reading the book to you.
Spend a season on the river bank and take a walk on the wild side . . .
Spring is in the air and Mole has found a wonderful new world. There's boating with Ratty, a feast with Badger and high jinx on the open road with that reckless ruffian, Mr Toad of Toad Hall. The four become the firmest of friends, but after Toad's latest escapade, can they join together and beat the wretched weasels?
PLUS A behind-the-scenes journey, including author profile, a guide to who's who, activities and more.
I read and write lots and love doing so. So when I need a break, the last thing I want is another book, right? Wrong! I take a break with books, and I love fun books that are an escape from the normal day-to-day, ones that won’t lull you to sleep, ones that end too quickly. It’s a sickness, I know, and I’ll deal with it as soon as I have worked through this pile of books on my desk.
Oh, what’s not to love? Space travel, poetry writing aliens, a criminal galactic president, the end of the world, a depressed robot … this book has it all, and I reread it (and the other 4 volumes in the trilogy, yes, trilogy) every year or so.
This is a fun escape, I discovered this volume as a kid, fell in love with it, and it’s my favorite book still to this day all these centuries later.
This box set contains all five parts of the' trilogy of five' so you can listen to the complete tales of Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect, Zaphod Bebblebrox and Marvin the Paranoid Android! Travel through space, time and parallel universes with the only guide you'll ever need, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Read by Stephen Fry, actor, director, author and popular audiobook reader, and Martin Freeman, who played Arthur Dent in film version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. He is well known as Tim in The Office.
The set also includes a bonus DVD Life, the Universe and…
I’ve been interested in car culture since my anthropologist sister and I first began collaborating on a research and writing project on the topic over fifteen years ago. At that time, I had just moved from a transit-rich city to a car-dependent suburb and she had just moved from a suburb to a walkable city, which got us talking about just how much this singular object—the car—shaped our everyday lives. Carjackedwas published in 2010, and since then I’ve continued to read and write about transportation, although I also write a lot about education—another obsession for another list of recommended books.
I first learned about this book from the PBS documentary that was based on it, and it is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the complex history of the automobile in America, a history rife with contradictions. Sorin highlights how the advent of the car provided Black Americans with great freedom and opportunity (including through its role in the civil rights movement) but also came with severe risks and restrictions. I especially appreciated how the author’s family history deepened the broader, national story.
Driving While Black demonstrates that the car-the ultimate symbol of independence and possibility-has always held particular importance for African Americans, allowing black families to evade the dangers presented by an entrenched racist society and to enjoy, in some measure, the freedom of the open road. Melding new archival research with her family's story, Gretchen Sorin recovers a lost history, demonstrating how, when combined with black travel guides-including the famous Green Book-the automobile encouraged a new way of resisting oppression.
I’ve been interested in car culture since my anthropologist sister and I first began collaborating on a research and writing project on the topic over fifteen years ago. At that time, I had just moved from a transit-rich city to a car-dependent suburb and she had just moved from a suburb to a walkable city, which got us talking about just how much this singular object—the car—shaped our everyday lives. Carjackedwas published in 2010, and since then I’ve continued to read and write about transportation, although I also write a lot about education—another obsession for another list of recommended books.
I did not expect to thoroughly enjoy a book with ninety pages of footnotes on a subject that people love to complain about day in and day out. But Vanderbilt, who has a great sense of humor and unrelenting interest in human behavior, took me along easily on his quest to satisfy his many questions about drivers, driving, roads, and traffic safety. The answers to those we’ve often asked ourselves on the road (usually while cursing), are often surprising.
One of the Best Books of the Year The Washington Post • The Cleveland Plain-Dealer • Rocky Mountain News
In this brilliant, lively, and eye-opening investigation, Tom Vanderbilt examines the perceptual limits and cognitive underpinnings that make us worse drivers than we think we are. He demonstrates why plans to protect pedestrians from cars often lead to more accidents. He uncovers who is more likely to honk at whom, and why. He explains why traffic jams form, outlines the unintended consequences of our quest for safety, and even identifies the most common mistake drivers…
I’ve been interested in car culture since my anthropologist sister and I first began collaborating on a research and writing project on the topic over fifteen years ago. At that time, I had just moved from a transit-rich city to a car-dependent suburb and she had just moved from a suburb to a walkable city, which got us talking about just how much this singular object—the car—shaped our everyday lives. Carjackedwas published in 2010, and since then I’ve continued to read and write about transportation, although I also write a lot about education—another obsession for another list of recommended books.
This unusual and provocative collection of essays and reflections by a Belgian philosopher contains ideas about car culture I refer to and reflect on often though I first read them over a decade ago. The author led me to understand how cars, though they can close great distances and bring families and friends together, have also contributed to an atomized society in which we move between isolated places in isolation from each other, a separation aided by fear and adding to it.
Particularly since September 11, the War on Terrorism and the war in Iraq, it has been almost impossible to dissociate architecture from its social context. Add to this the massive influence of capitalism on architecture, disturbing demographic developments and associated political, social, and ecological catastrophes, and the result is a robotic snapshot of a society dominated by fear, exclusion and simulation. Lieven De Cauter, a leading theoretician on the subject of capsularisation, has worked over the past six years on the essays and articles contained in this book, and has documented and analyzed our changing societies before and after 9/11.…
I’ve been interested in car culture since my anthropologist sister and I first began collaborating on a research and writing project on the topic over fifteen years ago. At that time, I had just moved from a transit-rich city to a car-dependent suburb and she had just moved from a suburb to a walkable city, which got us talking about just how much this singular object—the car—shaped our everyday lives. Carjackedwas published in 2010, and since then I’ve continued to read and write about transportation, although I also write a lot about education—another obsession for another list of recommended books.
Having grown up in a home where paying for parking was considered a sin, I was intrigued by the title of this book that’s not just for urban planners. Shoup reveals the common, misguided planning decisions that helped create not just a kind of entitlement culture around parking but a dysfunctional transportation system that we all pay for in too many ways, including economic underdevelopment and higher retail prices.
One of the American Planning Association's most popular and influential books is finally in paperback, with a new preface from the author on how thinking about parking has changed since this book was first published. In this no-holds-barred treatise, Donald Shoup argues that free parking has contributed to auto dependence, rapid urban sprawl, extravagant energy use, and a host of other problems. Planners mandate free parking to alleviate congestion but end up distorting transportation choices, debasing urban design, damaging the economy, and degrading the environment. Ubiquitous free parking helps explain why our cities sprawl on a scale fit more for…
I have been interested in city planning for as long as I can remember. That is perhaps because I grew up in Birmingham, England, a city that probably suffered from its worst excesses more than most. In my job as a reporter for The Economist, I have had the privilege to see cities all over the world upfront, and probe how they work. Some of these are books I keep coming back to; others ones that I furiously agreed with. I hope you enjoy them all.
When I was writing my book, I read a lot of history to try to understand what the planners and politicians of the past were thinking when they demolished whole neighbourhoods to make way for cars.
After Jane Jacobs’s book, Traffic in Towns, a government report that became a surprise best-seller in the 1960s, is perhaps the best guide.
Buchanan’s book makes you realise that in fact they did understand the problems. They just felt that there was nothing they could do about it – people would buy cars whatever happened.
To read it now, with its mix of modernist optimism and infuriating madness, is fascinating.
Traffic in Towns, also known as the Buchanan Report, is regarded as one of the most influential planning documents of the twentieth century. The report reflected mounting concern about the impact on Britain's towns and cities of rapid growth in the ownership and use of motor vehicles. Its purpose was to evaluate policy options for reducing the threat of traffic congestion to urban circulation and quality of life.
Two main conclusions were drawn from the report: firstly, the need for large-scale reconstruction to make Britain's cities fit for the `motor age', including split-level megastructures and urban motorways; and secondly, the…
My second novel, Snakes of St. Augustine, describes an unconventional love story served up with a large side of Florida weirdness. My first novel, City in a Forest, received a Gold Royal Palm Literary Award from the Florida Writers Association in 2020. My short fiction and essays have appeared in Pangyrus, Eckerd Review, Northern Virginia Review, Atticus Review, and elsewhere. I earned my bachelor’s degree in English from Eckerd College and the M.F.A. in Fiction from Queens University of Charlotte. Currently, I’m a writer for a university in Daytona Beach, Florida. A resident of Ponce Inlet, I began volunteering with the Volusia-Flagler Sea Turtle Patrol in 2018.
Award-winning Florida author Connie May Fowler writes vividly and with intense emotion.
Best known for her six novels, including Before Women Had Wings, which became a film featuring Oprah Winfrey and Ellen Barkin, Fowler’s memoir, A Million Fragile Bones, describes the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Fowler was living a peaceful, luminous existence on Alligator Point, enjoying all the natural wonders that Florida has to offer, when a BP-operated oil rig exploded.
The disaster killed 11 men and spewed an estimated 210 million gallons of oil into the sea. Her detailed and deeply personal account of the resulting catastrophic environmental damage is riveting, heartbreaking, and informative.
Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. Environmental Studies. On April 20th, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon, a BP operated oil rig, exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. Eleven men died in the explosion. Before the well was capped, it spewed an estimated 210 million gallons of oil into the gulf. The spill directly impacted 68,000 miles of ocean, and oil washed ashore along the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida.
Connie May Fowler began that day as she had begun most days for the previous sixteen years, immersed in the natural world that was her home on Alligator Point on Florida's gulf coast,…
I'm a death professional who lives in a world where nobody wants to talk about my specialist subject, so I hoover up any books that discuss mortality and our relationship to it. To do my job well, I need to face death on a daily basis in a matter-of-fact way, without losing that reverence, but equally not getting lost in the reverence because there is plenty to smile at, laugh at and be brutally honest about. These things make me the rounded human that is needed to perform the task well and the kind of people who write these books typically embody those qualities and inspire me. I hope they can inspire you too.
I read this book when I was in a slump whilst working on my own and it really inspired me.
The job depicted here is fascinating but the woman carrying it out is doubly so.
Sandra - originally a married with kids man called Peter, who had suffered violence as a child - has been a drag queen, a sex worker, undergone gender reassignment, and takes all of this suffering and rich experience into her work cleaning up death scenes and hoarder houses.
The latter involving working with the damaged living who are often resistant. The human side of her job is beautiful and I saw the parallels with my own work and started writing again with vigour.
Husband, father, drag queen, sex worker, wife. You've got to hear Sandra's incredible story.
Sarah Krasnostein's The Trauma Cleaner is a love letter to an extraordinary ordinary life. In Sandra Pankhurst she discovered a woman capable of taking a lifetime of hostility and transphobic abuse and using it to care for some of society's most in-need people. Audible's editors fell in love with Sandra because of her warmth, humour and grace, and we think you will, too. Here’s what we thought of The Trauma Cleaner:
"As an acquiring editor at Audible, I read a huge number of books but this…
