Here are 50 books that Affluence Without Abundance fans have personally recommended if you like
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In my early 50s, I thru-hiked the Ice Age Trail, one of just 11 National Scenic Trails in the U.S. The experience was so rewarding—in many different ways—that I vowed to hike the other 10. To date, I’ve thru-hiked six of the 11 and am in the midst of section-hiking two more. My enthusiasm for long-distance hiking and its numerous benefits also inspired me to transform my freelance writing business to one centered around hiking, whether that’s penning fitness articles for CNN, giving talks on long-distance trails, or writing articles I hope will inspire others to lace up their hiking shoes.
This one scared me. Who wants to think about dying during a hiking trip?! Yet, while I’d never wanted to conquer Mount Everest, I did long to undertake other (less extreme) adventures.
Reading Jon Krakauer’s account of his Everest experience inspired me to continue to dream big about other outdoor excursions more suited to my personality. I credit this book as one reason I wasn’t afraid to start hiking and backpacking long-distance trails—mostly solo—when I was in my 50s.
#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The epic account of the storm on the summit of Mt. Everest that claimed five lives and left countless more—including Krakauer's—in guilt-ridden disarray.
"A harrowing tale of the perils of high-altitude climbing, a story of bad luck and worse judgment and of heartbreaking heroism." —PEOPLE
A bank of clouds was assembling on the not-so-distant horizon, but journalist-mountaineer Jon Krakauer, standing on the summit of Mt. Everest, saw nothing that "suggested that a murderous storm was bearing down." He was wrong.
By writing Into Thin Air, Krakauer may have hoped to exorcise some of his own demons…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
In 2019, I spent a year traveling around the world with my husband and two small kids. These days, we still travel whenever we get the chance, soaking up as many cultures, landscapes, and experiences as possible. Wherever we go, we read books set in our destination, usually by local authors, which deepens our connection to the places we visit. But you don’t need a plane ticket for a good book to transport you overseas. Here are a few of my favorite reads guaranteed to immerse you in faraway lands, even as you sit on your favorite couch at home.
This is one of the best armchair travel books out there. I can’t surf and don’t know the first thing about surfing, but Finnegan’s personal story of chasing waves from continent to continent throughout the 60s and 70s had me nostalgic for a life I’ve never led.
He takes risks and roughs it in ways I never would, but his depictions of places like Madagascar, Hawaii, and Indonesia are so enticing I yearned to hop a plane every time I got to a new chapter. It’s easy to see why Finnegan won a Pulitzer for this autobiography—his writing made for an un-put-downable escape.
**Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Autobiography**
Included in President Obama's 2016 Summer Reading List
"Without a doubt, the finest surf book I've ever read . . . " -The New York Times Magazine
Barbarian Days is William Finnegan's memoir of an obsession, a complex enchantment. Surfing only looks like a sport. To initiates, it is something else: a beautiful addiction, a demanding course of study, a morally dangerous pastime, a way of life.
Raised in California and Hawaii, Finnegan started surfing as a child. He has chased waves all over the world, wandering for years through the South…
I am a retired Army officer who served for 43 years. I was also in the Pentagon on 9/11 and knew that life as we knew it would change dramatically. The book I wrote, called The Impossible Mission, is about the drawdown of U.S. forces from Iraq and the birth of a small contingent called OSC-I, which I had the privilege to command, with the mission to build the Iraqi security systems. This command allowed me to bring closure to the many years I had to deal with “the war on terrorism” both from a policy perspective and by leading America’s soldiers who were at the front lines fighting the war.
This book tells the story of war from a Soldier’s perspective. He tells the story of what war “actually feels like.”
You get to feel the fear, the bonds of brotherhood, the joys of living, the pain of loss, and to face mortal danger from the eyes of those who face it every day. You will experience war in ways no other American can experience it, and it will move you in a powerful way.
From the author of The Perfect Storm, a gripping book about Sebastian Junger's almost fatal year with the 2nd battalion of the American Army.
For 15 months, Sebastian Junger accompanied a single platoon of thirty men from the celebrated 2nd battalion of the U.S. Army, as they fought their way through a remote valley in Eastern Afghanistan. Over the course of five trips, Junger was in more firefights than he could count, men he knew were killed or wounded, and he himself was almost killed. His relationship with these soldiers grew so close that they considered him part of the…
Stealing technology from parallel Earths was supposed to make Declan rich. Instead, it might destroy everything.
Declan is a self-proclaimed interdimensional interloper, travelling to parallel Earths to retrieve futuristic cutting-edge technology for his employer. It's profitable work, and he doesn't ask questions. But when he befriends an amazing humanoid robot,…
For most of my life, stillness eluded me. I struggled to be present in any moment, to experience joy or comfort, let alone peace. It took me a virtual lifetime to understand that this exterior version of me, with its incessant mental chatter and negative bias, could no longer control me. I reached a breaking point. Divorced after a lifetime partnership, played out of my most recent company, kids all grown up—utterly alone and without meaningful purpose, the hard inner journey began. I spent years focused on my own journey of self and spiritual development. The payoff is I am now not only more present to life but able to help others on their journeys.
Pollan approached the exploration of psychedelics with rigorous journalism, history, and neuroscience, but with deeply human storytelling.
It resonated with me and pushed me in the direction of experiencing psychedelics for my own growth. Pollan approaches a controversial subject with intellectual humility and curiosity while never losing sight of the personal and cultural implications. It helped me reconsider long-held assumptions about the mind, healing, and what it means to be open to change.
"Pollan keeps you turning the pages . . . cleareyed and assured." -New York Times
A #1 New York Times Bestseller, New York Times Book Review 10 Best Books of 2018, and New York Times Notable Book
A brilliant and brave investigation into the medical and scientific revolution taking place around psychedelic drugs--and the spellbinding story of his own life-changing psychedelic experiences
When Michael Pollan set out to research how LSD and psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms) are being used to provide relief to people suffering from difficult-to-treat conditions such…
I am a writer, an anthropologist, and a mother. I spent five years researching ancient human survival skills and learning from modern wilderness survival experts about how to live the original Homo sapiens lifestyle. I became deeply invested in the importance of these skills amidst climate change and digital transformation because they connect us to our evolutionary heritage and safeguard our species’ survival into the future if and when our civilization collapses (as all past civilizations have done!) I find hope in being prepared for the possible demise of our industrial system, embracing the opportunities that arise instead of trying to preserve it at all costs.
The secret to mastering your apocalypse experience is to think of it not as surviving, but as thriving—in the way that humans did for over 300,000 years as hunter-gatherers.
This book will drop you into that mindset as you read about how far our modern civilization has deviated from our original lifestyle, and the huge price we have paid for all of our comforts, conveniences, and technological wizardry.
This book may make you want to adopt an apocalypse-ready lifestyle even in the absence of societal collapse, since the new path he proposes offers so much in terms of improved health and wellbeing, rewarding outdoor activities, and IRL interaction (enjoy more sex, he says).
A New Path takes a candid look at the contemporary lifeway of humans in an attempt to reinstate our biological norms--patterns of living that define each species on the planet. Whether one is to discuss a wolf, a caribou, or an eagle, there are features of these animal's lives that define them. Given their unique adaptations, they are tailored, through evolution, to living in a particular way (e.g., a caribou cannot enjoy the diet of a wolf). This book presents the forgotten species' norms of Homo sapiens and explains that when we deviate from these patterns, we experience sickness of…
I’m a professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Queensland. I’ve had the good fortune to spend my life studying humans and trying to figure out how they got that way. These are some of the best books I’ve read on this fascinating topic. They might seem to be all over the map, but understanding human nature requires approaching it from many different perspectives, and these books will get you started.
To understand human nature you need to take a deep dive into anthropology, particularly into the lives of hunter-gatherers. Because humans are the most flexible animal on this planet, it can be incredibly difficult for an outsider to tell which lessons from any one society are general and which relate to just their small part of the world. The beauty of this book is that the brilliant anthropologist who wrote it does the hard yards for you, narrating a fascinating and highly accessible trip through the lives of hunter-gatherers.
Are humans by nature hierarchical or egalitarian? Hierarchy in the Forest addresses this question by examining the evolutionary origins of social and political behavior. Christopher Boehm, an anthropologist whose fieldwork has focused on the political arrangements of human and nonhuman primate groups, postulates that egalitarianism is in effect a hierarchy in which the weak combine forces to dominate the strong.
The political flexibility of our species is formidable: we can be quite egalitarian, we can be quite despotic. Hierarchy in the Forest traces the roots of these contradictory traits in chimpanzee, bonobo, gorilla, and early human societies. Boehm looks at…
Nature writer Sharman Apt Russell tells stories of her experiences tracking wildlife—mostly mammals, from mountain lions to pocket mice—near her home in New Mexico, with lessons that hold true across North America. She guides readers through the basics of identifying tracks and signs, revealing a landscape filled with the marks…
In 1972, I started an early childhood center in the Monadnock Region in New Hampshire. The focus was on child-centered education, with an emphasis on working with children outdoors. I've spent the last 50 years continuing to connect children with nature in schools, nature centers, national parks, museums, and in families. I taught graduate courses in developmental psychology, cognitive development, place-based education and have done hundreds of professional development workshops for early childhood and elementary school teachers. As a father, I focused on connecting my own children with nature. My son is a ski coach and runs an ecotourism kayaking business. My daughter is a theater director and writes grants for an environmental non-profit.
The course I took from Paul Shepard in college was one of the most thought-provoking courses I ever experienced. Find an image of the original cover of the book and you'll see what I mean—it's a strange synthesis of a post-modern bow hunter emerging from his paleo ancestor. Shepard contends that the key to understanding human happiness is recognizing that we are genetically hunters and gatherers living in a post-modern age. Reclaiming our hunting and gathering impulses will help us lead fuller lives. He does a fascinating job, in this book, of describing what hunting and gathering culture childhoods looked like and then suggesting how we should parent our children with these old genetic impulses in mind.
In what may be his boldest and most controversial book, Paul Shepard presents an account of human behavior and ecology in light of our past. In it, he contends that agriculture is responsible for our ecological decline and looks to the hunting and gathering lifestyle as a model more closely in tune with our essential nature. Shepard advocates affirming the profound and beautiful nature of the hunter and gatherer, redefining agriculture and combining technology with hunting and gathering to recover a livable environment and peaceful society.
I am a French-American writer with a passion for young adult stories and flawed female characters. Born and raised in France in a household without a TV, I spent my entire childhood reading avidly, which in turn led me to study Literature and Film. In fact, most of my life, I have been inspired by novels that offer windows into new worlds that open up possibilities. Some of the novels from the list below feature some of my favorite characters, and provide insights into other worlds and other times.
While not entirely about romantic love, Hunting and Gathering was such a huge success when it came out in France, it was hard not to include it on my list.
Set in modern-day Paris, and spanning a year, the story follows four people each struggling with their own demons, who end up sharing a roof, and who, despite their differences, learn to lean on each other. This is a truly refreshing story about love, how vast, unexpected, and healing it can be. A feel-good read!
Camille is doing her best to disappear. She barely eats, works at night as a cleaner and lives in a tiny attic room. Downstairs in a beautiful, ornate apartment, lives Philibert Marquet de la Durbelliere, a shy, erudite, upper-class man with an unlikely flatmate in the shape of the foul-mouthed but talented chef, Franck. One freezing evening Philibert overcomes his excruciating reitcence to rescue Camille, unconscious, from her garret and bring her into his home.
As she recovers Camille learns more about Philibert; about Franck and his guilt for his beloved but fragile grandmother Paulette, who is all he has…
I thought I was going to be a farmer, but some serious practical experience after I finished school put paid to that idea. I then focused my attention on conservation, before turning to travel writing. All of which led, eventually, to a growing interest in development issues and how people can make a living from the land. The result is over a dozen books, some of which are narrative-driven travelogues – many based on my experiences in Africa and elsewhere; and some of which focus on the nitty-gritty of agriculture, agroforestry, and related issues. My most recent book, Land of Plenty, provided a state of the nation account of British farming during the tumultuous year (for farmers, at least) when the UK voted to leave the EU.
On Hunting is not so much a defence of foxhunting, which the conservative philosopher came to quite late in life, as a celebration of everything associated with it, from its culture to its profound influence on rural communities and the strange veneration of the quarry species. It also helps to explain, better than any other book I have read, why significant numbers of people are so passionate about hunting. “This book will bring on its author’s head the abuse to which he has long been accustomed,” wrote the historian Raymond Carr in the Literary Review. “But even the politically correct, if they have a shred of honesty, must acknowledge the intellectual power and literary elegance that distinguish it.”
Drawing on his own experiences of hunting and offering a delightful portrait of the people and animals who take part in it, Roger Scruton introduces the reader to some of the mysteries of country life. His book is a plea for tolerance towards a sport in which the love of animals prevails over the pursuit of them, and in which Nature herself is the centre of the drama. 'A supremely witty book. ' EVENING STANDARD 'A pocket masterpiece. . . and a lyrical celebration. 'THE SPECTATOR 'This is a lovely book. . . A Classic. ' INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY 'A…
The Bridge provides a compassionate and well researched window into the worlds of linear and circular thinking. A core pattern to the inner workings of these two thinking styles is revealed, and most importantly, insight into how to cross the distance between them. Some fascinating features emerged such as, circular…
I have been enamored with archaeology and evolutions since childhood when my parents handed me my first book on these subjects: Ruth Moore's Man, Time and Fossils, and The Testimony of the Spade by Geoffrey Bibby. These themes have guided my study and teaching. I retired as a University Distinguished Professor of Anthropology in the SUNY system. I am the author or editor of eight books in areas related to this interest. My focus on archaeology and cultural evolution and my counter-intuitive conclusion that workload and illness often increased with the evolution of civilization were stimulated by the works of Lee and Boserup.
This book revolutionized our common understanding of human history by showing that the smallest and simplest (most “primitive”) human populations, mobile rather than sedentary, subsisting only on wild foods, contra the standard Hobbesian characterization of primitive life, actually had relatively light workloads and often were better nourished and more disease free than contemporary agriculturalists [and I might add many historic civilizations].
This book excited me and started me on my counterintuitive interpretation of the evolution of human economies.
Man the Hunter is a collection of papers presented at a symposium on research done among the hunting and gathering peoples of the world. Ethnographic studies increasingly contribute substantial amounts of new data on hunter-gatherers and are rapidly changing our concept of Man the Hunter. Social anthropologists generally have been reappraising the basic concepts of descent, fi liation, residence, and group structure. This book presents new data on hunters and clarifi es a series of conceptual issues among social anthropologists as a necessary background to broader discussions with archaeologists, biologists, and students of human evolution.
