Books like Making History

This book peeled back the curtain on the hidden costs of the things we buy. Leonard explains where our stuff comes from, where it goes when we throw it away, and how the entire system is designed to keep us consuming.

It’s a deeply researched but incredibly engaging read that makes you rethink your everyday choices. If you’ve ever wondered why things aren’t made to last anymore, this book gives you the answers.

As the author and philosopher Heather Widdows makes clear, one of the big reasons why appearance has come to mean so much to us, and we spend so much time, energy, and resources on upgrading our looks, is because physical beauty has wrongly become conflated with worthiness and character.

In other words, we assume if you look good, you’re a good, moral person. In this comprehensive yet fast-paced read (which laid an academic groundwork for a lot of the reporting in my own book), Widdows connects the dots between ethics and beauty and makes the case for why we should resist the increasing demands of beauty ideals. 

If you love villains, you’ll love this book (plus all these villains are real).

Psychopathic dictators, Russian arms dealers, ultra-violent warlords, and corrupt French presidents all show the evil oil can inspire—and the ruin it can bring to a country. I had to put this book down a few times; the depravity around oil can shock even those of us who think we’ve heard it all.

Fitzgerald’s mastery of the English language is beautiful to behold. This book is one of the most eloquent expositions of the control of his prose while at the same time confronting his greatest weakness in life: an inability to find happiness and true love that loves him back. Set on the French Riviera, Tender is the Night is honest and painful. It’s an insight into Fitzgerald’s melancholy world of excess.

This is both fantastic to be a part of and tragic. The tragedy and the beauty are juxtaposed in the most fantastic way–this makes this book one of my favorite romances. I read this book for pure enjoyment. Each sentence makes me smile with its beauty and its profundity. 

There is so much understandable suspicion about how organisations use or misuse your personal data that it's hard to see the many potential benefits of data sharing. This book restores a little faith in technology and those who develop it for public benefit.

It is a compelling read, learning how data can be used for good and bad, with many references to the author’s personal journey, from working in customer services to being an internet entrepreneur before becoming a researcher.

This little book packs a punch!

Neal Wood was a respected scholar of political thought and he wrote this book to be accessible to many readers, motivated by his conviction that the thorough embrace of capitalist competition was degrading the character and culture of the United States.

When reading this, I could not help but think about the writings of Black Americans in the nineteenth century, who argued that greed was one of the main reasons for slavery. Wood offers a sober reminder that it is useful to think about the consequences, intended and not, of our nation’s choices and priorities.

I loved this no-nonsense take on consumer culture. Listen, I love to shop. I love an outfit. But Aja Barber’s writing was a necessary wake-up call when it came to my spending habits—what’s driving them and how they are impacting the planet.

It’s easy to think the world’s environmental and social issues driven by consumerism can’t be fixed with individual choice, so why bother changing? While that’s true on some level, I feel spiritually (and financially) lighter when I am buying less and caring better for what I already own.

This book helped me finally break some shopping habits I wasn’t proud of and gave me a framework to continue questioning which of my habits are driven by our consumer culture rather than my own genuine desires. 

We often think about intervention as questions of states intervening against other states, violating their legitimate sovereign claims.

This book complicates this picture. It focuses on less violent and risky types of intervention, by a variety of actors, showing how intervention can vary in how much it opposes institutions and how coercive it is.

One example Rafanelli gives is of Tostan (an international NGO that runs community empowerment programs in Western Africa) that works against practices such as female genital cutting and child marriage.

This significantly complicates the simplistic picture of intervention, often proposed by those wanting to reject measures to tackle human rights abuses. Such forms of intervention might be required to help protect democracy globally.

When it comes to delivering principled criticism against the Olympics, Helen Jefferson Lenskyj is the OG. Today, activism against the Games crops up in just about every prospective Olympic host city. These dissidents often lean on the insights that Lenskyj has been making for decades.

In this book—one of several books she has written on the Games—Lenskyj zeroes in on the oversimplified pro-Games propaganda that emerges with metronomic regularity from the International Olympic Committee and decimates it with credible counterfactuals.

Her work on anti-Olympics activism has long set the standard.

This book is a lovingly and expertly written biography of an underappreciated but vastly significant economist, Herman Daly. Professor Daly was an early proponent of ecological economics, and his work is becoming increasingly important and relevant if we want to stop climate breakdown.

One of the main reasons we are approaching climate breakdown is because neo-liberal economic theories and the economic system they have led to through trade agreements and the like rely on false or oversimplified assumptions—like pollution is free or that any resource constraints can be met by new inventions. The fact that neither is true—and the policy implications that set out from that conclusion - are persuasively documented in this biography.

The book is about economics and a great economist who brilliantly and convincingly demonstrated that the Planet and human resource demands on it must be included in our economic analysis and rules. As such, the biography… show more.