100 Books Like Lend Me Your Ears

I love this pre-social-media collection of moral quandaries and relationship-based solutions presented in story form. Much of it is about addiction to substances, but it applies to all kinds of addictions, undermining our ability to deal with dangerous subjects.

I’ve told stories from these pages, and most of my ideas come from reading stories that inevitably remind me of a perfect story from my own life. Stories about release, gratitude, humility, tolerance, and forgiveness offer antidotes to the kind of problems that linear mechanical reasoning can’t solve.

For me, investing in a constant stream of moral stories supports the vital behavioral norms we need as groundwork for developing trusting relationships.

Yes, it says for writers, but this book is a great resource for in-person storytelling. On these pages are thousands of ideas on how you can show, not tell.

Comb through ideas on how to express a character’s emotion with posture, tone, and mannerisms. Don’t just say, “he looked guilty.” Look up “guilt” and find ways to indicate guilt without telling people what to think. Have your guilty character “avert her eyes,” “shift her feet,” “pull at her collar,” or “suddenly lose her appetite.” I regularly flick through this book to train my imagination on the sensory cues that make a story come alive.

Before Lakoff wrote about politics, he compiled this treasure trove of the metaphors humans recruit to grapple with moral concerns. For instance, early in the book I learned how to take a listener “in front” of a problem, “behind it” “inside it” as well as “outside it” so they might vicariously experience four points of view instead of one.

Engaging the body embeds regular intelligence with sensory wisdom.

If you are working on a story that feels boring, dive into this book of quotations (or any book of quotations, really) to prompt ideas on delivery. The process of jumping in and out of a wide variety of points of view invigorates my creativity.

I look up themes from my story and see what I can find that will make it more memorable: a turn of phrase, an example of brevity, or one more ingenious way to challenge conventional wisdom. It’s like a thesaurus but better.

Not a book about Thucydides, but a selection of the speeches – one of the most striking aspects of his approach to history is the way he includes set-piece debates, not so much as accurate transcripts of what was actually said as a means of exploring issues of war, peace, democratic deliberation and so forth. If you already own a copy of Thucydides, this may not be of much interest (unless you’re obsessive enough to compare Hanink’s translations with others), but if you’re new to the topic this may be a good place to start: the speeches are more accessible than the lengthy battle narratives, they’re the main basis for Thucydides’ reputation as a thinker about political issues, as well as the source of some memorable lines, and Hanink’s introduction does a good job of explaining all of this.

Thucydides, along with Herodotus a generation earlier, created history as we know it. Herodotus added to narrative the analysis of cause: ‘why’ as well as ‘what’. Thucydides added different levels of causation: the immediate reasons for the war and the long-term causes. He studied how the dynamics of fear and power drive states into warfare. He took the gods out of history (it is hard to remember how radical that was). He studied the corruption of moral language and behaviour under the pressure of conflict. In Pericles’ Funeral Speech he set out the theory of Athenian democracy (Pericles would have denied that our own society was democratic—a challenging thought). Thucydides’ eye is not exactly cold, but it is unblinking: no historian seems so free of illusion.

This is a timeless – and timely – account of the war between Athens and Sparta. 

Thucydides explores power, fear, security, and human nature—forces still central to international relations today. The concept of the "Thucydides Trap", where a rising power threatens an established one, is often cited in current discussions of U.S.-China relations.

While offering a foundational realist view of power politics and the cyclical nature of conflict, Thucydides also prompts us to ask whether such outcomes are inevitable. I find his work especially relevant today as we seek ways to temper zero-sum thinking and foster a more stable international order.

Understanding the neurochemical and neuropsychological drivers of dominance and insecurity is essential if we are to escape the trap – not by repeating history, but by learning from it.

Thucydides of Athens (c. 455-400 BC) was an Athenian aristocrat of supreme intelligence and a failed politician who turned his 20 years of political exile to excellent account by turning himself into the most acute analyst and historian of the great Atheno-Peloponnesian War of 431 to 404. Thucydides was born within the world’s first democratic political state but was out of sympathy with the rule of the majority, the masses – except when they themselves were kept in check and did what they were advised by a superior statesman of the unique calibre of Pericles (c. 493-429).

Thucydides outlived the end of that War, which was a major defeat ultimately for his own home city by the Spartans aided financially by the old enemy, the Persians. But he did not live long enough to complete his History, which breaks off in mid-sentence in what we call the summer of 411… show more.

Written around twenty-five centuries ago, this remains the seminal work of history, political science, man as he is, war, and diplomacy. The author expressly intended that it be “a work for all time,” and so it remains. Moreover, it serves still as an example of a civilization ruining itself, as Europe did in the Great War. Thus, it continues to warn.

This book is important, authoritative, and compelling because it demonstrates that a conservative historian can be comfortable with revisionist history. Kagan, a Yale historian noted as a leading academic traditionalist, terms Thucydides “the first revisionist historian” not because he was like today’s leftists but because he took issue with his pioneering predecessor, Herodotus. In his great history of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides threw down the gauntlet over which was the “best” and “right” way to do history. He thought its subjects should be politics, warfare, the relation between states, and—a surprise?—men. His views held the field for centuries. The Framers of the Constitution were its legatees. So were we until the late 20th century, when social and cultural subjects gained attention. This wonderful book shows why.