As the author of 73 published books, I have four goals for writing. I want to write more women into history, emphasize how everyday activities children accomplish are important, empower young readers, and tell a story that moves readers, either through an emotional response or the knowledge that they can do what whoever I wrote about did. My biographies cover role models who have been groundbreakers in their time and place. Readers can be, too.
Why suggest a book that is essentially competition? Because I love well-researched nonfiction that is interesting and informative.
While conducting my research, I came across this biography for slightly older readers than my book and found excellent perceptions and interesting tidbits about Jane Addams’ incredible journey. Some differ from my book but are definitely worth learning.
Most people know Jane Addams (1860-1935) as the force behind Hull House, one of the first settlement houses in the United States. She was also an ardent suffragist and civil rights activist, co-founding the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the American Civil Liberties Union. But it was her work as a pacifist that put her in the international spotlight. Although many people labeled her “unpatriotic” for her pacifist activities, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931 and, at the time of her death, Jane Addams was one of the most respected and admired women…
I’ve read a lot of horror fiction over the years. It has been something I’ve come back to again and again over the years. Horror is a great way of exploring our fears and dread of what is around us. Sometimes we can’t look at these directly but through the medium of horror stories we can catch a glimpse and gain some understanding.
Now this isn’t in the zombie genre but it has that sense of being overwhelmed by numbers of nameless foes that seems very much a central tenet of the modern zombie genre. It has the outpost of an empty island that put our narrator (a pacifist) in the position of having to kill again and again. So often the zombies are faceless hordes – perhaps that is the fear they encapsulate but here, in what feels like the setting of a late-night movie I used to watch as a kid, here the narrator is tested again and again. A fantastic novel that defies categories.
'A troubling, hammering and glorious novel' DAVID MITCHELL
On the edge of the Antarctic Circle, in the years after World War One, a steamship approaches a desolate island. On board is a young man on his way to assume the post of weather observer, to live in solitude for a year at the end of the earth. But on shore he finds no trace of the man whom he has been sent to replace, just a deranged castaway who has witnessed a horror he refuses to name. The rest is woods, a deserted cabin, rocks, silence and the surrounding sea.…
A computer programmer turned author; I’ve been a fan of science fiction for as long as I remember. Star Wars, Dune, Alien, you name it. I’ve also been a follower of Christ since childhood and so enjoy stories where authors have a faith component to their work. It’s hard to imagine a future where belief systems won’t be in play—for good and evil. So, why not explore that element? Even if it means taking the Amish into space to encounter vampires? (As I did in one of my stories.) Hopefully, we discover something about ourselves and the world we live in along the way.
Are you a fan of Galaxy Quest, Futurama, or The Orville? Then this is the series for you.
There are scant few science fiction stories that have caused me to laugh out loud, but Paul Regnier’s Space Drifters did. Often. All three Space Drifters books are witty, action-packed, and fun. The main character, Captain Glint Starcrost, is perpetually broke, with a less-than-adequate starship and a bounty on his head. To make matters worse, he has a passive-aggressive ship computer, a pacifist alien “warrior,” and a time-traveling teen as his crew. Of course, there’s an unattainable love interest in the mix, along with a quest or two. Space Drifters is enjoyable and unique.
Captain Glint Starcrost is not having the carefree, adventurous life the space academy brochures promised star pilots.
Broke, with an unreliable star freighter and a bounty on his head, Glint is desperate enough to try anything. Even set out on a quest to find a fabled good luck charm, the Emerald Enigma.
Now for a crew. A passive aggressive ship computer, a peaceable alien warrior, and time-traveling teen from the past aren’t what he had in mind. But they’ll have to do.
The Emerald Enigma won’t wait forever and neither will the bounty hunter tracking…
As a lifelong student with what I sometimes call “a multidisciplinary disorder,” I have been intrigued both about “the outer world,” or the “external environment of life on planet Earth, and “the mind that knows the world.” Hence, as a teenager in New York City, I read voraciously books in philosophy, history, and the social and natural sciences to learn what “great minds” have thought about “the world.” Much later, as an “academic” researcher and writer, I scoured the shelves of university libraries to examine what I considered the strengths and weaknesses of the academic disciplines that addressed our “knowledge of the world,” and their applications for “changing the world for the better.” My book The World as Idea is the first volume of a projected trilogy modestly entitled The Fate of This World and The Future of Humanity. I’m now working on the second volume, The Reality of This World.
Albert Einstein was, for a very good reason or three, Time magazine’s “Person of the Twentieth Century.”
Unfortunately, very few people are knowledgeable about his contributions to modern science, which are enormous and complex, and even fewer seem to know about his thinking on politics, war, and peace in particular, and the world in general.
In this book, readers have the opportunity to learn more about Einstein’s thoughts about the world of the 20th century, which are usually presented in a clear, accessible fashion.
The most advanced and celebrated mind of the 20th Century, without a doubt, is attributed to Albert Einstein. This interesting book allows us to explore his beliefs, philosophical ideas, and opinions on many subjects. Subjects include politics, religion, education, the meaning of life, Jewish issues, the world economy, peace and pacifism. Einstein believed in the possibility of a peaceful world and in the high mission of science to serve human well-being. As we near the end of a century in which science has come to seem more and more remote from human values, Einstein's perspective is indispensable.
I found Akst’s book
revelatory, opening up a whole sphere of American history between the world
wars that I was only vaguely aware of.
I was moved by the sheer moral tenacity
of men and women who refused to accept the necessity for war under any circumstances. His four central characters – Black activist Bayard Rustin, Catholic
radical Dorothy Day, the religious intellectual David Dellinger, and leftwing
journalist Dwight Macdonald – struggled for their values at great personal cost
to themselves.
Akst, who writes beautifully, is a sympathetic but critical
narrator who shows persuasively that techniques that the pacifists developed
went on to significantly shape the later Civil Rights and Vietnam-era antiwar
movements.
"Akst argues that the modern progressive movement, wide-ranging in its causes and narratives today, has origins in the pacifist response to American involvement in World War II... At its best, one gets the sense of generative force born from such intense intellectual, moral and religious pressure." -- The Washington Post
Pacifists who fought against the Second World War faced insurmountable odds—but their resistance, philosophy, and strategies fostered a tradition of activism that shaped America right up to the present day.
In this provocative and deeply researched work of history, Akst takes readers into the wild, heady, and uncertain times of…
Between us, we’ve been in the interreligious relations business for a combined 50 years. We started working together when Jerry was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State under President Barack Obama. In 2015, we were both invited by Prince Ghazi of Jordan to join other interreligious leaders to advance a UN resolution defining and taking a stand against religicide. That resolution never made it to the Security Council. But we joined forces to sound the alarm about religicide. We wrote our book in the hope of inspiring an international campaign to end this killing in the name of God – or being killed because of your God.
With all that has been written about religion as a cause of violence, here are two volumes of case studies about how religion is used by individuals on the ground to stop violence. The case studies feature the heroic individuals in the Peacemakers in Action Network of the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding. They operate in conflict zones around the world and this book reveals the methods and techniques they use to transform conflicts. I founded Tanenbaum in 1992 and this signature program was inspired and guided by the late Ambassador Richard Holbrooke.
Every day, men and women risk their lives to stop violence in religiously charged conflicts around the world. You may not know their names - but you should. Peacemakers in Action, Volume 2 provides a window into the triumphs, risks, failures, and lessons learned of eight remarkable, religiously motivated peacemakers including: * A Methodist bishop in the Democratic Republic of the Congo who confronts armed warlords on his front lawn * A Christian who travels to Syria to coordinate medical aid and rebuild postwar communities * A Muslim woman, not knowing how Kabul's imams will react, arrives to train them…
I am a rainbow fantasy author who has been writing and studying LBGTQIA+ fantasy for over a decade, most well known for being the author of YA fantasy epic The War of the North Saga. I have an absolute passion for healthy and positive queer representation in fiction, and even though I was only able to pick a mere 5 books I hope I have offered up a teeny varied buffet of options to get readers started in the #1 genre that makes my heart sing.
A huge part of why I write is that I struggle to find books I like written by other people, yet this one came out of left field and bowled me over (Elliot would probably hate that I used a sports metaphor for that). Elliot is the protagonist of this book and he is a walking queer disaster. I love him, I hate him, and I became strangely, desperately invested in him. The book doesn’t have what I would describe as a conventional plot, but Brennan does a fantastic job studying her characters with a depth that got me obsessed. During the few days it took me to read this book (when I had to put it down and do life things) I would huff around the house muttering ‘FFS Elliot!’ under my breath. If you want to know why, I recommend giving it a go.
Georgia Peach Award Nominee * Florida Teens Read Award Nominee * ABC Best Books for Young Readers * Bank Street College Best Children's Books of the Year * A Junior Library Guild Selection * Hugo & Locus award finalist
In Other Lands is an exhilarating novel from bestselling author Sarah Rees Brennan about surviving four years in the most unusual of schools - friendship, falling in love, diplomacy, and finding your own place in the world - even if it means giving up your phone.
Excerpt:
The Borderlands aren't like anywhere else. Don't try to smuggle a phone or any…
Brandon Wilson is an author, photographer, explorer, and pilgrim. He is a voracious explorer of nearly one hundred countries, he has trekked many pilgrimage trails, including: the Camino de Santiago, Camino Catalan, Camino Aragonés and Via de la Plata across Spain, and twice the St. Olav’s Way across Norway and Sweden. Brandon and his wife Cheryl were the first Western couple to complete the 1100-kilometer pilgrim trail from Lhasa, Tibet to Kathmandu, and he was the first American to traverse the 1850-kilometer Via Francigena from England to Rome. In 2006, he and his French friend re-blazed the 4500-kilometer route of the First Crusades from France to Jerusalem, naming it the Templar Trail, to establish it as a path of peace.
Peace Pilgrim was a true modern pioneer. For nearly thirty years, starting in 1953, she devoted her life to international peace, as she crisscrossed America on foot with her few belongings on her back, "Walking until given shelter and fasting until given food.” At a time when American school kids were hiding under their desks in fear of a nuclear attack, Peace Pilgrim bravely “walked the talk” about unabashedly spoke about the necessity of peace, a message which inspired generations.
Peace Pilgrim walked and spoke continuously across America from 1953 until her death in 1981. "Walking until given shelter and fasting until given food," she carried a simple yet powerfully enduring message of peace. A few of her friends later gathered her writings and talks into this first-person account of her experiences and beliefs. Peace Pilgrim has become a spiritual classic, with over half a million copies in print in nine languages. Includes news clippings, questions and answers, photographs, index.
I was born and raised in Kansas and will forever have a soft spot in my heart for golden wheat fields, sunflower-filled ditches, and sunsets that explode colors on the horizon. I always knew I’d write a book set in Kansas, and I’d explore my long Mennonite linage and its seemingly unrealistic theology. Pacifism is a beautiful concept until you’re faced with protecting the people you love. As I grew older, I became more curious about larger, practical questions. It’s one thing to be a conscientious objector to war. It’s another thing to confront the cosmically dark evil of your neighbor. From that, Never Enough Flamingos was born.
If you’ve browsed my list this far, maybe you’re curious enough to peek into Mennonite theology, which truly is upside-down from the world we live in. Even though I’d been Mennonite all my life, this book, which I read decades ago, explained what radical Christian discipleship meant in a way I’d never fully understood. All those things that make the theology challenging—choosing pacifism, taking care of the least in society, living humbly instead of seeking power, turning the other cheek, forgiving when it’s easier to seek revenge—are also what make it transformative. If only living it were that easy.
The Upside-Down Kingdom calls readers to imagine and embody the reign of God on earth as it is in heaven. Since its publication in 1978, The Upside-Down Kingdom won the National Religious Book Award and has become the most trusted resource on radical Christian discipleship. In this completely updated anniversary edition, author Donald B. Kraybill asks: What does it mean to follow the Christ who traded victory and power for hanging out with the poor and forgiving his enemies? How did a man in first-century Palestine threaten the established order, and what does that mean for us today? Jesus turned…
I have been fascinated by women who are artists and activists, such as Ivy Bottini, Käthe Kollwitz and Peggy Guggenheim. (All subjects of plays I wrote). They are convicted, unique, champions of justice, diversity and inclusion.
Ms. Kollwitz is one of the most famous expressionistic German artists and was the first female to teach in a university setting. She was a pacifist, champion of the poor, a politically-active socialist. Under the Nazi regime, her work was labeled “Degenerate.” After learning about Ms. Kollwitz, I wrote a play about her entitled Censored.
