Books like Humanitarian Reason

Life Beside Itself is a startling book not only because of what it reveals about the history of settler-colonial government care imposed upon Arctic communities during the tuberculosis crisis (1940-60s) and the suicide crisis (1980s onwards) but for the raw emotional proximity that it provides to the individuals whose lives were changed by policies that, ironically, were derived from care itself.

It is a well-researched book that unnerved me with the haunting emotional intimacies its ethnographic and imagistic approach brought through the pages. The intractable longing of a young man waiting each year at the harbour for the ship, the C.D. Howe, that took his grandmother away to a southern hospital is just one of the things in this book that wounds its readers by recounting different forms of care.

I loved that Hamilton’s unpacking of the etymology of security led right to the notion of care.

This book had a shaping impact on how I think about care and its ties to security – a relation that continues to animate my interests. I learned that my cares (affections, attachments, worries) may mobilize me to enhance my security, which also may be done inadvertently at the expense of someone else’s. To put it another way, when we seek security, we are seeking to let go of our cares or to care less.

Security attends to the “inflated focus” on security as an instrument of control in contemporary cultural life and does so richly, drawing upon cultural forms such as fables, literature, and art in a beautiful and provocative text.

Starting with the public claim that Canadian society exhibits social indifference to the racialized and gendered violence connected to murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls, Granzow interrogates the presumed absence suggested the word indifference, showing that it hides something present and active: a social investment and authorization of this violence as part of the maintenance of the settler-colonial state.

Looking at the city of Edmonton historically, ways that this investment – or commitment – has materialized are elaborated, including a policing initiative (Project Kare) that collects demographic information on individuals expected to be subject to (colonial) violence and the former Charles Camsell Hospital that incarcerated Indigenous peoples from where many disappeared. This impacted my thinking on the contradictions inherent to the notion of care and the place I call home.

Our elders are maps to our history and lands. My grandmother taught me how to navigate America with grit and care and inspired my work in community.

This book narrates how to learn by honoring our ancestors, using the example of the Anishinaabeg tribes in Canada: how to draw maps and re-envision the world from the perspective of people without PhDs but who hold centuries of knowledge.

As an academic, I was taught that people outside of the university were sources of data that we could use to generate theory. I had to learn that everyday people hold powerful theories of the world that PhDs would do well to honor and uplift, especially if we want our knowledge to make the world a better place.

When was the last time you asked an elder the history of where you live and come from: the good, the bad, and the uncomfortable?

I devoured this book.

Yes, it’s nonfiction, but it has everything I love about great Silicon Valley fiction: big tech insider energy, corporate absurdity, bizarre culture, powerful people behaving badly, and the feeling that the decisions being made inside an office might eventually affect everyone outside it.

It’s sharp, wildly entertaining, and exactly the kind of tech-industry drama I’d happily take to the beach.

I’ve read lots of books about the future of business and the future of capitalism, but this book deeply inspired me. Mackey and Sisodia articulate with clarity and conviction what I’ve long believed—that purpose and profit are not mutually exclusive but, in fact, must go hand in hand.

I particularly connected with their emphasis on conscious leadership and the need for a higher purpose to guide business strategy. It reinforced my own thinking and sharpened my understanding of how critical it is for leaders to align values with actions. I saw clear parallels with the approach I have developed, and it affirmed for me that embedding purpose isn’t just desirable—it’s essential.

I’ve never forgotten the Milgram experiment—but I’d never turned it inward until I read this book. It forced me to ask: Do I ever follow instructions just because they’re expected? That question unsettled me—in a good way.

This book helped me recognize the quiet moments where obedience can blur into complicity. And more importantly, it gave me tools to pause, reflect, and re-anchor my values. What stayed with me most was the reminder that ethical clarity doesn’t have to happen in isolation. Community and collaboration are essential—not going it alone is a value I didn’t realize I’d been craving.

I like to think I’m a good person—and this book reminded me that being one doesn’t make hard decisions any easier. What it did give me was permission to stop expecting clarity all the time. I appreciated how it showed that ethical choices aren’t always about right vs. wrong but sometimes right vs. right.

It helped me see that moral discomfort isn’t a failure—it’s a sign that I care. And that these decisions, while messy and imperfect, are survivable. That meant something to me. I didn’t walk away with all the answers, but I did walk away feeling braver.

In this beautifully written study of Lincoln’s pre-presidential years, the political ethicist William Lee Miller, a warm and generous friend as well as a gifted scholar, argued that to “appraise Lincoln fairly” one “should not compare him to unattached abolitionists in Massachusetts or to anyone a century and a half later” but rather to “other engaged politicians in the Old Northwest in the 1850s,” who were far more skeptical about racial equality than Lincoln was.

Miller observed that Lincoln was consistently “cordial and welcoming in his treatment of individual African-Americans,” but that he was more than that. In Miller’s words, Lincoln’s interaction with those Blacks demonstrated “a racially inclusive egalitarianism.” Miller’s companion volume, President Lincoln: The Duty of a Statesman is an equally insightful examination of Lincoln’s presidential years.

This is hands down the best book on transnational feminism that I’ve ever read!

I have recommended this book to so many people that I’m planning on hosting a book club. Zakaria opens the book with her own experience attending a happy hour with a group of white women that ends on a particularly awkward note.

Zakaria is not only challenging white feminists, but she is also calling out all people who subscribe to white feminism and how it does more harm than good. What is white feminism you ask? Pick up this book and let Zakaria tell you.