Here are 100 books that Be a Revolution fans have personally recommended if you like
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I write, coach, and lead at the intersection of identity, healing, and leadership, especially for women navigating cultural complexity. As a South Asian woman raised in the U.S., I spent years unpacking inherited narratives about devotion, obedience, and silence. This list reflects books that helped me reclaim power, soften shame, and lead from a place of alignment rather than survival. Each title here offered me tools, language, or perspective that shaped not just how I show up in the world, but how I guide others to do the same.
I was stunned by the similarities between the men in Gupta’s life and my own. This book laid bare the violence of the model minority myth and how it erases pain, demands silence, and turns belonging into a performance.
I saw so much of myself in her unraveling of that narrative. They Called Us Exceptional reminded me that telling the truth about our families isn't betrayal, it’s a form of generational care. Prachi writes with a kind of fierce compassion that made me feel seen, especially in the messiness.
If you've ever felt the pressure to be exceptional at the expense of being whole, this book is a balm, a reckoning, and a quiet act of rebellion.
“In this vulnerable and courageous memoir, Prachi Gupta takes the myth of the exceptional Indian American family to task. . . . [Her] resilience and her hope to be fully seen are an inspiration in both personal and political terms.”—The Washington Post
“I read it in one sitting. Wow. It aims right at the tender spot where racism, sexism, and family dynamics collide, and somehow manages to be both searingly honest and deeply compassionate.”—Celeste Ng, New York Times bestselling author of Little Fires Everywhere
A SHE READS BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I grew up in an immigrant household where success was defined by how much money you made and your individual progress. But I’ve always been fascinated by social change as the measure of collective success. As a former business journalist, I was most inspired by leaders who were creating opportunities for overlooked communities. I now advise organization leaders on how to create more inclusive and diverse organizations by rethinking the measure of success purely from the profit perspective. That’s why I wrote Inclusion on Purpose. These books have helped me transform my definition of success. I hope you’re catalyzed to action by these books!
How great would the story of an inspiring, successful entrepreneur and venture capitalist be if it was about a Black, gay, formerly unhoused woman who is building the next hundred million dollar company?
That’s exactly who Arlan Hamilton is, and with gems like “I pattern match for grit” about her investing strategy, I couldn’t put this book down. It redefines the idea that successful entrepreneurs only come from elite Ivy League institutions or build legacies in their parents’ garages.
“A hero’s tale of what’s possible when we unlock our potential, continue the search for knowledge, and draw on our lived experiences to guide us through the darkest moments.”—Stacey Abrams
From a Black, gay woman who broke into the boys’ club of Silicon Valley comes an empowering guide to finding your voice, working your way into any room you want to be in, and achieving your own dreams.
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY FORTUNE
In 2015, Arlan Hamilton was on food stamps and sleeping on the floor of the San Francisco airport, with nothing but…
I’ve been obsessed with making the future a better place since I was 8 years old and spent my evenings hanging out in a local community center. I realized that things got better when people who cared showed up for each other. I am now a philanthropic futurist and have spent my career dedicated to helping visionary leaders build a more beautiful and equitable future. All of the books on this list have inspired me, and I hope they inspire you, too. If we all do our small part, we can ensure we have a Star Trek future and not a Hunger Games future.
This book completely shifted my perspective on rest and its importance in my life. I am a recovering hustle-and-grind girl. I learned that great ideas and true creativity flourish when we are well-rested and when we give ourselves the space to make new connections.
Hersey’s book showed me that rest is not just about sleep—it’s a form of resistance against capitalism and white supremacy. I loved how she emphasized rest as a foundation for healing and justice, reminding us that we are enough just as we are. This book made me rethink my relationship with productivity and why it’s essential to reclaim rest as a human right. I now see rest as a radical act of self-care and community care.
Disrupt and push back against capitalism and white supremacy. In this book, Tricia Hersey, aka The Nap Bishop, encourages us to connect to the liberating power of rest, daydreaming, and naps as a foundation for healing and justice.
What would it be like to live in a well-rested world? Far too many of us have claimed productivity as the cornerstone of success. Brainwashed by capitalism, we subject our bodies and minds to work at an unrealistic, damaging, and machine‑level pace –– feeding into the same engine that enslaved millions into brutal labor for its own…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
I grew up in an immigrant household where success was defined by how much money you made and your individual progress. But I’ve always been fascinated by social change as the measure of collective success. As a former business journalist, I was most inspired by leaders who were creating opportunities for overlooked communities. I now advise organization leaders on how to create more inclusive and diverse organizations by rethinking the measure of success purely from the profit perspective. That’s why I wrote Inclusion on Purpose. These books have helped me transform my definition of success. I hope you’re catalyzed to action by these books!
Dr. Blackstock’s advocacy for equity and access during the COVID-19 pandemic made her a hero in my eyes, and I was eagerly awaiting her memoir! I read it in one weekend. It’s compelling, heartbreaking, and, in parts, deeply devastating when you’re shown firsthand the huge health disparities in this country.
It’s tragic to see how some people are given immediate access to health care while others are systematically denied it on the basis of their skin color. The racism Dr. Blackstock has to navigate in her career as a Black physician and academic doctor is heartbreaking, but the overall story is one of triumph and resilience.
Dr. Blackstock is an incredibly inspiring character, but the ultimate heroine is their late mother, whose training at Harvard Medical School led to her twin daughters becoming the first Black mother-daughter legacies from the school. This book reminded me that success doesn’t come from…
“This book is more than a memoir—it also serves as a call to action to create a more equitable healthcare system for patients of color, particularly Black women.” —Essence
One of NPR’s 11 Books to Look Forward to in 2024
One of Good Morning America’s 15 New Books to Read for the New Year
“Legacy is both a compelling memoir and an edifying analysis of the inequities in the way we deliver healthcare in America. Uché Blackstock is a force of nature.” —Abraham Verghese, MD, New York Times bestselling author of The Covenant of…
I am a history professor at Boston University, where I teach and write about modern American popular thought, political culture, trade, travel, and war especially in urban and transnational contexts. I enjoy histories that are based on deep and creative bodies of research and that push past timeworn myths and clichés about the American past.
Delmont’s sweeping story about the complex wartime outlooks and experiences of Black Americans necessarily includes the travails and triumphs of combat fighters; the battlefield contributions of Black GIs have been too often dismissed or ignored.
But here they appear alongside a fascinating, broader cast of war workers battling racism while doing their bit to defeat the Axis across the world’s continents. From the engineers carving roads out of impenetrable Asian jungle or Alaskan tundra to the women of the all-Black 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion who sorted mail in an unheated English warehouse while under bombardment, Delmont’s subjects offer a reminder of the awesome scope of this war.
• Winner of the 2023 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Nonfiction • A New York Times Notable Book • A Best Book of the Year from TIME, Publishers Weekly, Booklist, Washington Independent Review of Books, and more!
The definitive history of World War II from the African American perspective, written by civil rights expert and Dartmouth history professor Matthew Delmont
“Matthew F. Delmont’s book is filled with compelling narratives that outline with nuance, rigor, and complexity how Black Americans fought for this country abroad while simultaneously fighting for their rights here in the United States. Half American belongs firmly within the…
Rich Weiner co-edited this featured volume with Francesca Forno. He is a political sociologist with a strong foundation in the history of political and social thought. He has served for twenty-two years as dean of the faculty of arts and sciences. His focus has been on non-statist political organizations and social movements with a perspective of middle-range theorizing enriched by three generations of Frankfurt School critical theory of society.
Describes in depth a brave new world of uncertain constant acceleration and continued change in institutions and social relations.
I like the way Bauman depicts a condensing resonance, a new way of “being in the world.” Specifically, this is an increasing fluidity and fragmentation of social solidarities, where nothing is secure and where everything can be made redundant.
A world that Ulrich Beck, even before the new century, referred to as “the Second Modernity.”
In this new book, Bauman examines how we have moved away from a a heavya and a solida , hardware--focused modernity to a a lighta and a liquida , software--based modernity. This passage, he argues, has brought profound change to all aspects of the human condition. The new remoteness and un--reachability of global systemic structure coupled with the unstructured and under--defined, fluid state of the immediate setting of life--politics and human togetherness, call for the rethinking of the concepts and cognitive frames used to narrate human individual experience and their joint history. This book is dedicated to this task. Bauman…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
I’m a lifelong sci-fi/fantasy reader who loves the way speculative fiction helps us explore who we are, what we could become, and how to troubleshoot the future before we get there. As a parent and active community member, I’m looking for fresh perspectives on how to tackle the increasingly complex challenges of our time, perspectives that go beyond simplistic solutions like finding bad guys and killing them in climactic battles. I hope books that showcase nonviolent social change in all its complexity can help us imagine better ways to make a difference in our own lives.
Another nonfiction book, Healing Resistancedoes a splendid job showing the philosophical connections between nonviolence on an interpersonal level and nonviolent social change movements. Drawing on the tradition of Kingian nonviolence, this book is a useful starting place for anyone who wants to understand what nonviolence is and isn’t as well as how it works. It’s also chock full of recommendations for other books and is a great jumping-off point for further reading. Sometimes nonviolence doesn’t look like what we expect.
An expert in the field offers a mindfulness-based approach to nonviolent action, demonstrating how nonviolence is a powerful tool for personal and social transformation
Nonviolence was once considered the highest form of activism and radical change. And yet its basic truth, its restorative power, has been forgotten. In Healing Resistance, leading trainer Kazu Haga blazingly reclaims the energy and assertiveness of nonviolent practice and shows that a principled approach to nonviolence is the way to transform not only unjust systems but broken relationships.
With over 20 years of experience practicing and teaching Kingian Nonviolence, Haga offers us a practical approach…
I have known that I was gay since I was in second grade and kissed a boy on the playground. But that wasn’t the only way that I knew. Coaches, bullies, religion, and family warned me by namecalling, violence, and intimidation. It wasn’t until I was in college that I heard homosexuality portrayed in a positive light. Thank you, Walt Whitman. Then I saw The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Dessert, and knew that I had to go on my own adventure in search of my gay tribe. Novels can be a tribe. I hope the books on my list give you a place to find acceptance and love.
Two Boys Kissing is a book about the culture and “inherited memory” of LGBTQ+ people. It is a crucial contribution because it bridges the generation of gay men living (and dying) through the AIDS crisis of the 1980s with the younger, modern LGTBQ+ generation who share similar challenges but haven’t connected to the wisdom of LGBTQ history.
The story and characters affirmed my identity, named my pain, and brought it within the collective history of those who have carried the same burdens of shame, fear, and self-loathing.
From the New York Times best-selling author of Every Day, comes a touching, thoughtful and deeply romantic look at love and discovering your true self.
The two boys kissing are Craig and Harry. They're hoping to set the world record for the longest kiss. They're not a couple, but they used to be.
Peter and Neil are a couple. Their kisses are different. Avery and Ryan have only just met and are trying to figure out what happens next. Cooper is alone. He's not sure how he feels.
As the marathon progresses, these boys, their friends and families evaluate the…
I love being a college professor, teaching and learning from young adults. In fact, I wroteWhen Time Is Shortin close conversation with my students. As climate crisis and collapse loom ever larger on the horizon, more and more of them are sharing experiences of climate anxiety and even climate trauma. They are not alone. Many of us are almost paralyzed by such feelings. We need help processing and moving through them in order to find hope—deep hope, as opposed to shallow optimism, which easily slides into despair. These books, most of which I've used in my "Religion and Ecology" class, can help show us the way.
Joanna Macy is an environmental activist and a scholar of Buddhism and deep ecology. Her writing is at once direct and gracious, inviting us to explore new ways of understanding ourselves and our world. Central to her message of hope is what she calls the "Great Turning," a revolution in which humankind will turn from industrial capitalism, which seeks infinite growth through extraction, to a sustainable civilization of compassion and interdependence. This new edition of Active Hope, co-authored with Chris Johnstone, acknowledges that the Great Turning may in fact happen in the midst of a massive societal and ecological collapse, a "Great Unravelling." Yet, even in the midst of collapse, we can find deep hope by investing heart, mind, and strength in the Great Turning. "What's the best we can hope for? And how can we be active in making that more likely or even possible?"
The challenges we face can be difficult even to think about. Climate change, the depletion of oil, economic upheaval, and mass extinction together create a planetary emergency of overwhelming proportions. Active Hope shows us how to strengthen our capacity to face this crisis so that we can respond with unexpected resilience and creative power. Drawing on decades of teaching an empowerment approach known as the Work That Reconnects, the authors guide us through a transformational process informed by mythic journeys, modern psychology, spirituality, and holistic science. This process equips us with tools to face the mess we’re in and play…
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
I have always been fascinated with ideas and ideologies and how people can interpret the world differently. As a teenager I wanted to become an ethnographer, to travel the world and discover other cultures. Now I focus mostly on Europe and the US, but I always look to challenge myself by talking with people who hold opposing views. I am impressed by the revival of religious, nationalist, and conservative ideas in our current world and how they offer their own philosophy of the social order. That’s why I selected books that can help me see the world through the eyes of others.
This is my preferred book on this topic because it offers a pungent story of how pride and shame matter to our understanding of politics. Arlie Russell Hochschild already wrote another terrific book on Louisiana a few years ago, so I was really looking forward to this new one on the Appalachian post-industrial communities.
The way she describes small events of everyday life and how they influence voting patterns struck a chord with me. It tells us how politics at the grassroots level is, in fact, about making sense of the world around us and navigating difficulties, and it’s all about emotions and the way we deal with the question, “What about me?” It’s a superb book for deconstructing “high politics” and shows how far away people may feel from decisions made in Washington, DC.
In her first book since the widely acclaimed Strangers in Their Own Land, National Book Award finalist and bestselling author Arlie Russell Hochschild now ventures to Appalachia, uncovering the "pride paradox" that has given the right's appeals such resonance.
A 2024 New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Pick
For all the attempts to understand the state of American politics and the blue/red divide, we've ignored what economic and cultural loss can do to pride. What happens, Arlie Russell Hochschild asks, when a proud people in a hard-hit region suffer the deep loss of pride and are confronted with a…
