100 Books Like Flourishing

Friedman, a longtime New York Times foreign affairs columnist, was one of the first to show me what I should love and hate about globalization, circa 1999, at the peak of Western support for neoliberal globalization.

Although his gee-whiz, gung-ho enthusiasm for the world of the Lexus (high-tech globalization with global supply chains and integrated financial markets) sometimes wears thin, he also covers the problems caused by globalization. He even appeals to the need for the “olive trees” of community, family, and religion to make globalization ethical.

Even when the breezy tone annoys me, this book is still my go-to guide for mapping the effects of globalization on business, economics, politics, culture, and the environment.

I find Sam’s book imperative: love it or hate it, praise it or criticize it; Sam gets us to think seriously about culture and identity as he opens an important debate for our complex democracies to engage with. I taught with Sam at Harvard and never ceased to be amazed by his profound understanding of the world. We may disagree with him, but he certainly gets us talking.

Hamid’s prose is sparkling, reflecting his experience of globalization, as a Princeton-trained native of Pakistan who lives in Lahore, New York, and London.

Framed as a self-help book and narrated in twelve short chapters with self-help titles like “work for yourself,” this novel follows the life story of one man in a country that sounds a lot like Pakistan, as he moves from the village to the city and tries to make it in business.

I loved Hamid’s vivid portrait of challenging daily living conditions in a developing country, including unclean water, stifling rural life, urban overcrowding, and corrupt bureaucrats. While reading, I felt like I was living in Lahore, rooting for a Pakistani friend to succeed.

Is the self-help advice ironic or earnest? The reader will have to judge. 

Professor Peters was my first and foremost guide when it came to framing the ethics of globalization from within my own religious perspective.

She helped all of us later writers by mapping the academic terrain, describing two dominant theories of globalization and two resistance theories. The two dominant theories are neoliberalism (as exemplified by Thomas Friedman) and reformist social development (as exemplified by John Maynard Keynes), while the two resistance theories stem from ecological and postcolonial perspectives.

She evaluates all four theories according to how they contribute (or don’t) to human flourishing. While I don’t always agree with her conclusions, she is asking the right questions and applying them to the most important perspectives on globalization.

Baba Muktananda is surely the most entertaining – dare I say, “cool” — of all the great gurus. This book, a collection of Satsang, or Q&A sessions, with the Siddha Yoga Guru, is a very easy-going, unpretentious discussion of the most important things about finding yourself. As the title promises, you are not a finite being; you are infinite. It’s very convincing.

I always love books that give me a clear plan to improve some aspect of my life. Comer’s book has four key principles that are easy to remember and apply every day. They include silence and solitude, Sabbath, simplicity, and slowing. My favorite quote from the book was, “For all the talk about hurry and overload, most of it is self-inflicted.”

This book is both a memoir of Stephen Batchelor and a memoir of the Buddha himself. Batchelor integrates these two life stories with his journey through India which followed the footsteps of the Buddha. Batchelor teaches us what Buddha taught, but in a way that inspires as many questions as it provides answers. In this way, the reader goes on her own spiritual quest and perhaps, transformation, just as did Buddha and Batchelor. I love this book so much that it is a re-read for me, a wonderful well of inspiration and contemplation. This is also an easy read and a great way to begin dipping into the story and teachings of Buddha through a contemporary lens.

An unforgettable book about the power of women restoring themselves and each other and how that will also help us restore the Earth. Full of mythology, If Women Rose Rooted is about women seeking our roots and rootedness. While seeking a place to live, the author is also searching for the true place within herself. Blending memoir, the land, and folk stories, this book can help women everywhere come home to themselves. 

I don’t think that I am different from the majority when I say that for most of my life, the idea of “discipline” wasn’t that attractive to me. I wanted freedom. But in this book, as well as all her other books, the Siddha meditation master Gurumayi Chidvilasnanada convinced me that the means to a perfect existence must come through discipline. You cannot find yourself if you do not first sort yourself out. The goal isn’t recklessness; it’s improvisation within defined constraints. That’s where the magic happens. Gurumayi is one of the clearest thinkers and writers that I have ever come across. More importantly, everything she writes is infused with love.

As a parent of a child diagnosed with apraxia, you probably have heard, “what’s wrong with him?” at least once. If not, be prepared, because when you hear it and you aren’t ready for it, it can feel like someone knocked the wind out of you. I didn’t only love the Chicken Soup for the Soul books for me, but I also would share the stories I felt were of interest with my boys who both were diagnosed as young children with severe special needs. What these books brought me and my boys was pride, hope, and inspiration that from a rough beginning, there can be a bright future. Actually, in some cases, these stories share it’s due to a rough start that the person ended up becoming a better person.

While my son Tanner was little and I read stories to him from the Chicken Soup for the Soul… show more.