Here are 100 books that More from Less fans have personally recommended if you like
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Many believe the planet's energy needs can be provided carbon-free, with solar, wind, and water carrying the load. Coal, oil, and natural gas use will fade away. It’s an appealing vision. But the numbers don’t back it up for seven billion people, many looking in on the comfortable lifestyles of the wealthy countries and thinking: “What about us?”. Humanity needs a mix of energy sources, and nuclear energy is a carbon-free power source that can deliver at scale. I’m a nuclear physicist by training, recently retired from North Carolina State University, with interests in cosmology, energy research and policy, science education, and neutron and neutrino physics.
Putting in the numbers is what Gates does in his book. Climate change is real, no question. How to address it is where the controversy comes in. I really like that from the outset, Gates proposes five questions to consider whenever climate change is discussed: what fraction of the annual carbon dioxide emission are you removing? What’s your plan for cement? How much electrical power will be needed, what’s the cost, and how much space will it take up?
But he’s optimistic that zero emissions can be reached. He argues there are many options to explore, including nuclear, and says, contrary to much of the news reporting, don’t focus on 2030; focus instead on 2050 to give the best solutions time to emerge.
In this urgent, authoritative book, Bill Gates sets out a wide-ranging, practical - and accessible - plan for how the world can get to zero greenhouse gas emissions in time to avoid a climate catastrophe.
Bill Gates has spent a decade investigating the causes and effects of climate change. With the help of experts in the fields of physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, political science, and finance, he has focused on what must be done in order to stop the planet's slide toward certain environmental disaster. In this book, he not only explains why we need to work toward net-zero emissions…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
I've spent over 15 years as an organizational coach, watching businesses struggle with challenges nature has solved and been fine-tuning over billions of years. This frustration led me to a six-month biomimicry programme where I researched and studied how natural systems actually organize themselves. As a circular economy professional and organization in action of the Doughnut Economics Action Lab, I've seen how businesses attempting sustainability transitions often fail not from lack of technical knowledge but from organisational structures that impede evolution. These books have been my companion on my journey from recognizing the problem to discovering nature's proven solutions, and ultimately writing my own book to share those research insights with others facing similar challenges.
Raworth articulates something I'd felt but couldn't express: that our current economic models are fundamentally flawed, simultaneously transgressing planetary boundaries whilst leaving billions below social foundations.
Her doughnut framework—depicting the safe and just space between social foundations and ecological ceilings—clarifies the "why of work.”
I love how she challenges conventional economic thinking with such clarity and wit. When she explains why GDP growth can't be our goal, or why economies are embedded within society and nature (not the other way around), it feels both radical and obvious.
As a member organization of the Doughnut Economics Action Lab, I've seen how this framework helps businesses understand their purpose beyond profit.
This book provides the destination; my work explores the organizational navigation, the concrete patterns and structures that enable businesses to actually operate in that safe and just space.
800-CEO-Read "Best Business Book of 2017: Current Events & Public Affairs"
Economics is the mother tongue of public policy. It dominates our decision-making for the future, guides multi-billion-dollar investments, and shapes our responses to climate change, inequality, and other environmental and social challenges that define our times.
Pity then, or more like disaster, that its fundamental ideas are centuries out of date yet are still taught in college courses worldwide and still used to address critical issues in government and business alike.
As an economist at the European Commission, Adjunct Professor in Paris, former fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and now a first-time author, I thrive at the intersection of academia, think-tanks, and policy-making. My academic soul leads me to seek answers to the big questions: what is economic growth and how does it relate to the success of civilization, to science and technology, to people’s wellbeing, and to nature. My practical focus leads me to draw the policy implications of all this for how we ought to fight climate change. My critics accuse me of being an optimist. I take it as a compliment: the future of humanity is in our hands.
We intuitively understand that decarbonization and social justice are deeply interwoven as 21st-century challenges.
Dr. Chancel’s book shows us in great detail how this is the case, and therefore why it is important to keep inequalities in mind when designing policies to accelerate the decarbonization of the economy. After all, the poor are also more exposed to the catastrophic events associated with climate change.
But perhaps my greatest takeaway was looking at the problem the other way around, meaning that Chancel also shows us how tackling social inequalities can actually help us address some environmental challenges.
A hardheaded book that confronts and outlines possible solutions to a seemingly intractable problem: that helping the poor often hurts the environment, and vice versa.
Can we fight poverty and inequality while protecting the environment? The challenges are obvious. To rise out of poverty is to consume more resources, almost by definition. And many measures to combat pollution lead to job losses and higher prices that mainly hurt the poor. In Unsustainable Inequalities, economist Lucas Chancel confronts these difficulties head-on, arguing that the goals of social justice and a greener world can…
This book is an elegiac meditation on the will to survive. Tor, a beluga whaler, and his wife, Astrid, a botanist specializing in Arctic flora, are stranded during the dark season of 1937-38 at his remote whaling station in the Svalbard archipelago when they misjudge ice conditions and fail to…
As an economist at the European Commission, Adjunct Professor in Paris, former fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and now a first-time author, I thrive at the intersection of academia, think-tanks, and policy-making. My academic soul leads me to seek answers to the big questions: what is economic growth and how does it relate to the success of civilization, to science and technology, to people’s wellbeing, and to nature. My practical focus leads me to draw the policy implications of all this for how we ought to fight climate change. My critics accuse me of being an optimist. I take it as a compliment: the future of humanity is in our hands.
Because the speed at which the atmosphere is warming is unprecedented in human history, we are prone to assume we are facing an unprecedented climatic challenge. However, this is not entirely true.
Archeologists Fagan and Durrani remind us that, at least locally, the climate has changed several times in the past, profoundly affecting the history of civilizations that were less advanced than ours. Some societies were able to deploy technical and social innovation to buffer environmental shocks. Others proved too rigid, slow and eventually collapsed.
To me the lesson is clear: history can be an important ally when charting the policy path ahead in a warming world.
Human-made climate change may have begun in the last two hundred years, but our species has witnessed many eras of climate instability. The results have not always been pretty. From Ancient Egypt to Rome to the Maya, some of history's mightiest civilizations have been felled by pestilence and glacial melt and drought.
The challenges are no less great today. We face hurricanes and megafires and food shortages and more. But we have one powerful advantage as we face our current crisis: the past. Our knowledge of ancient climates has advanced tremendously in the last decade, to the point where we…
I’m an economist, now in my fiftieth year as a professor at Harvard. While much of my work has focused on economic policy – questions like the effects of government budget deficits, guidelines for the conduct of U.S. monetary policy, and what actions to take in response to a banking or more general financial crisis – in recent years I’ve also addressed broader issues surrounding the connections between economics and society. Several years ago, in The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, I examined the implications of our economy’s growth, or stagnation, for the social, political, and ultimately moral character of our society. My most recent book explores the connections between economic thinking and religious thinking.
Bell, one of the greatest sociologists of the twentieth century, argues that having the right culture is essential for capitalism (or any other economic or political system) to flourish – and I certainly agree. But he goes further: he worries that over time the economic gains that capitalism delivers end up undermining the cultural conditions that allow capitalism to flourish in the first place. His book is about the role of culture more broadly, not religion in particular, but religion certainly fits within the overall argument.
With a new afterword by the author, this classic analysis of Western liberal capitalist society contends that capitalism,and the culture it creates,harbors the seeds of its own downfall by creating a need among successful people for personal gratification,a need that corrodes the work ethic that led to their success in the first place. With the end of the Cold War and the emergence of a new world order, this provocative manifesto is more relevant than ever.
My fascination and emotional connection with animals have been lifelong. However, it wasn't until my second year as an undergrad student that I realized that human-animal relationship could be examined from philosophical, historical, and anthropological perspectives. Over the past couple of decades, the conversations around the roles of non-human animals in diverse cultural, social, and material contexts have coalesced under the interdisciplinary field known as Animal Studies. I draw upon this literature and use my training in law and PhD in the history of science to explore the ties between knowledge and ethics in the context of animal law.
This is an extraordinary study about life in and around the strait between the Pacific and Arctic oceans, home for Iñupiaq, Yupik, and Chukchi people and many other lively things, before and after the arrival of Russian and American colonial powers.
I admire the nuanced way in which Demuth exemplifies how capitalist and communist resource management transformed not only human but also animal cultures (whales, for example, strategize against whaling ships).
Along the Bering Strait, through the territories of the Inupiat and Yupik in Alaska, and the Yupik and Chukchi in Russia, Bathsheba Demuth explores an ecosystem that has long sustained human beings. Yet when Americans and Europeans arrived, the area became the site of an experiment and the modern ideologies of production and consumption, capitalism and communism were subject to the pressures of arctic scarcity.
Demuth draws a vivid portrait of the sweeping effects of turning ecological wealth into economic growth and state power over the past century and a half. More urgent in a warming climate and as…
Tina Edwards loved her childhood and creating fairy houses, a passion shared with her father, a world-renowned architect. But at nine years old, she found him dead at his desk and is haunted by this memory. Tina's mother abruptly moved away, leaving Tina with feelings of abandonment and suspicion.
As a surgeon and scientist who has had a lifelong interest in science and science fiction, I can’t help being fascinated by “what if” questions, especially as regards the impact of inventions on human society and the world. As an optimist, I tend to enjoy exploring inventions that benefit mankind much more than those that bring on an apocalypse.
This riveting tale asks “what if” a future technology allows the “bobbling” of spherical volumes of invincible space within which time is stopped. In a misguided effort to stop a war, the Peace Authority bobbles military groups and war-making machinery all around the world with unexpected consequences.
But, for me, the stars of the show are the bobbles themselves, especially when they unexpectedly start popping, releasing people, war machines, and exploding bombs that have been in stasis for decades.
First in a quintessential hard-science fiction adventure, Hugo Award-winning author Vernor Vinge's The Peace War follows a scientist determined to put an end to the militarization of his greatest invention--and of the government behind it.
The Peace Authority conquered the world with a weapon that never should have been a weapon--the "bobble," a spherical force-field impenetrable by any force known to mankind. Encasing governmental installations and military bases in bobbles, the Authority becomes virtually omnipotent.
But they've never caught Paul Hoehler, the maverick who invented the technology, and who has been working quietly for decades to develop a way to…
I was one of those kids who wanted to understand everything. Early on, I worked at a research laboratory and majored in biology. When studies in religion and philosophy offered an even deeper level of inquiry, I turned to archeology, anthropology, psychology, and linguistic analysis. Over the years, I was a counselor for people at the end of life, taught college philosophy, and a cultural approach to religion. I have traveled throughout western Kenya, Guyana, New Zealand, Alaska, and Labrador. I also listened for the stories of the people. Additionally, I have sailed for more than forty years. I write about what I know, and about what still puzzles me.
Rule #1: Writers should write what they know. Many science fiction readers know Isaac Asimov as a prolific genre author. First and foremost, however, he is a scientist, a biochemist by training. In this book, Isaac and Janet Asimov share essays on diverse scientific subjects from life on earth to discoveries in space. For me, I searched the book for everything from the fate of the dinosaurs to the height of sea-level rise in case of a major melt-down of Antarctica and Greenland.
In this book, imagination runs a parallel reality. It is a place where a writer or a reader will see a jumping-off place from the real world to dystopia.
A treasury of 121 tales from the authors of Frontiers contains remarkable stories about humankind, the secrets of planet Earth, the vast expanse of outer space, and the mysteries of the universe. 15,000 first printing. $15,000 ad/promo.
I’m a historian with a strong science background who paid my way through college and grad school as a network engineer and Perl programmer. My most recent work, like Nation of Deadbeats and my new book Oceans of Grain, are international financial histories of the world that look at the world through the lens of commodities, international trade, and labor.
Felix Gilman’s The Half-Made World is a brilliant steampunk allegory about what philosopher Jürgen Habermas calls the colonization of the life-world for a faithless utilitarian reason. Gilman imagines a war that pits defenders of wonder, magic, and voodoo against soulless drones seeking gain through environmental degradation. This is a common enough trope in science fiction but what brings it to another level is Gilman’s personification of wonder and magic in a sleazy, violent anti-hero who is frequently possessed by demons. Gilman embodies the colonizers of the world as monstrous, dragon-like railway engines who order men around using telegrams. The innocent reader who will decide the fate of the world is a brilliant, female doctor who is trying to cure herself of her opium addiction. Gilman’s understanding of the rhythm of nineteenth-century language is amazing. His characters each have unique voices and his beautiful prose suggests that Gilman has spent years…
The world is still only half-made. Between the wild shores of uncreation, and the ancient lands of the East lies the vast expanse of the West---young, chaotic, magnificent, war-torn.
Thirty years ago, the Red Republic fought to remake the West---fought gloriously, and failed. The world that now exists has been carved out amid a war between two rival factions: the Line, enslaving the world with industry, and the Gun, a cult of terror and violence. The Republic is now history, and the last of its generals sits forgotten and nameless in a madhouse on the edge of creation. But locked…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
I have had a long, fruitful career as a business leader, entrepreneur, and inventor in the energy and chemicals industry with seven scientific patents. I'm the founder/CEO of Chem Systems, Inc., lectured at MIT about entrepreneurship and innovation, and recently wrote a book exploring industrial inventions tracing back to the Industrial Revolution. All inventors share the same qualities: they see opportunities, stay persistent, and maintain their faith in the value of their innovation. The books on this list celebrate those qualities and honor the innovators who embody them. The authors highlight the common threads binding past, present, and future together, showing how humanity's progress depends on innovation.
I'm fascinated by the connection between our modern world and how we got here, and this book takes a deep dive into just that. Johnson looks at the most common objects we often accept as if they've been a part of life forever (such as eyeglass lenses), and traces not only how they were created, their impact on our lives.
I find Johnson's writing incredibly informative without being pedantic and always entertaining. He's got an eye for unintended consequences and pays homage to the spirited determination innovators tend to have. As an inventor I note his appreciation for those brilliant mistakes that turn into brilliant technologies, a great lesson in the value of taking chances.
From Steven Johnson, the bestselling author of Where Good Ideas Come From, comes How We Got to Now, the companion book to his five-part BBC TV series.
How did the advent of refrigeration help create the golden age of Hollywood? How did the invention of flash photography help shift public opinion on the plight of New York's poorest inhabitants and bring about social reform? And what about our battle against dirt? How did that help create the microchips in our smartphones and computers?
In How We Got to Now, Steven Johnson traces six essential innovations that made the modern world;…
