100 Books Like Designated Survivor

What intrigues me about this book is the way the author, Margaret Atwood, took the (Genesis 30) story of Jacob, who impregnated his wife's handmaiden to produce the children which his wife could not conceive.

She then puts herself in the place of that handmaiden and asks some serious questions. Was that handmaid even given a choice in the matter? What would have happened to her if she had refused? She then rolls the same idea forward 4,000 years to a pseudo religious society in which the sole purpose of handmaidens is to use their bodies to conceive and gestate the next generation for those whom they serve.

I'd heard about this famous book many years before I actually got around to reading it. What I loved about this book was its originality.

I am always reminded about Orwell's book whenever I hear phrases like ‘ thought police’ or ‘big brother’, which have become part of our everyday language. Probably one of the most influential books ever written. For me, the message of Orwell’s book is that the State will always win.

Recent authoritarian trends and attempts to re-establish white supremacy are not new in America.

In this novel, Philip Roth envisions an alternate history where Charles Lindbergh has defeated Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1940 Presidential election. He then proceeds to collude with Adolph Hitler and seeks to establish anti-Semitism throughout the country.

The novel is based on the actual attitudes which Lindbergh had toward Jews and other minorities. Of course, this is not truly an insurrection. Still, it is a portrayal of how extreme right-wing attitudes can seek to rob people of our hard-won democracy.

I was raised with a deep respect for freedom for all people in this country. My family had several Jewish friends and we loved and learned from them.

I love this book because of Katniss Everdeen's depth. She’s not just another “kickass hottie”, she’s complex, with a powerful character arc driven by a deep sense of responsibility.

The book’s commentary on mental health and Katniss' parentification resonated with me personally. The story world of all the districts and President Snow's iron grip on them is well-drawn and has parallels to our own, too. 

I loved Bruce Ackerman’s recent book because he is also a professor of constitutional law reflecting on the state of democracy today but in an existential way, looking laterally at possible solutions to our political problems. Our starting points are similar, but proposed solutions different and complementary—I learned a tremendous amount from this book.

Downs does a great job of explaining how democratic decision-making links voter preferences to public policy outcomes. He looks at political preferences as existing on a left-to-right continuum and concludes that democratic elections tend to select the candidates whose preferences most closely reflect the median voter—the voter whose preferences fall in the middle of that left-right continuum. He offers a few caveats, one being that because one vote has a vanishingly small chance to affect an election outcome, voters tend to be rationally ignorant on political matters. There is no payoff to becoming informed because an election outcome will be the same regardless of how any individual voter votes.

This excellent book is especially useful to those intrigued about the political ideas that currently dominate self-styled liberal western democracies such as the US, the UK, and Canada. Rather than lionize classical Greek or Roman history, this book instead provides nuanced narratives that are intelligible to the non-expert.

These narratives can be drawn on to understand the contested nature of the relationship between citizen and state and some of the historical roots of influential ideas such as justice, republicanism, and sovereignty.

De Tocqueville’s book is the first and probably still the best examination of the genius of America. At times like these, it's good to be reminded of what makes America work. Frankl would firmly understand and concur. The essence of America is our responsibility. Frankl would break it up into two words: “response-ability.”

I first read this book when I was in college. I have read it at least once in every subsequent year. It’s nice to be reminded of who we are. Ultimately, De Tocqueville teaches that this country will be whatever we make it. If we don’t like what’s going on, it’s our responsibility to change it.  

This is a brilliant book by a professor of history holding an endowed chair at Duke University, a scholar who took a year off from her academic duties to tour the country, giving talks about this book. It is the other book that has most affected me since the publication of my last book, After Capitalism. It’s a very readable scholarly study, not explicitly focused on climate change, but which explains more compellingly than any other book I’ve read, as to why, given what we know about the causes of, and solutions to, climate change, we are not doing what needs to be done. This book goes well beyond my own long-held belief that we don’t really live in a democracy, focusing on specific elements I’d never thought about, but which are causally implicated in so much of the systemic disfunction that we observe today in our political and economic… show more.

This is a slim, passionate, personal book by one of the most significant American educators and activists of the last century. It’s part of her “teaching” trilogy (the other two books cover Community and Freedom) and is founded on the belief that “one could choose to educate for the practice of freedom.” Critical thinking is often treated as an emotionless, logical discipline, but this book shows how it’s rooted in a deep human longing for understanding—and is also vital to informed, equitable democratic participation. Teaching Critical Thinking is a profound testament to the significance of emotionally, politically, and intellectually engaged pedagogy – and why these three things are ultimately inseparable.