Books like Never Married — picked by fans

If you’re looking for a balanced and warm-hearted ‘cradle to grave’ survey of women’s lives in the past, I think this is the best.

The authors describe the experiences shared by all women, and explain the huge gulf in other areas of life between the worlds of rich and poor. As well as the obvious themes of childhood, courtship, marriage, parenting, and old age, they explore women’s work (both paid and unpaid), their friendships and cultural lives, and their involvement with politics and religion.

And I love the fifty well-chosen illustrations that bring each of these topics to life.

I found this book fascinating. The guilds of early modern London were a male-only ‘closed shop’. But Laura Gowing’s pioneering study shows how resourceful women found ways to exploit loopholes and carve out a role in the world of skilled trades and crafts.

A guild member’s widow was permitted to continue her husband’s trade (provided she didn’t remarry), and she might take on a female apprentice and use the signing-on ‘premium’ to grow her business. Once the apprenticeship was completed, the young woman would now have the skills to set up on her own in the suburbs or provinces where guilds had no control.

I liked the case-studies where Gowing has been able to reconstruct individual lives to bring this new world vividly to life.   

Men thought women had no place in politics, but when England was engulfed in civil war in the 1640s women couldn’t opt out.

Ann Hughes explores the lives of those trapped in cities and castles under siege, or left to support their families when their husbands went off to war, perhaps never to return. I like the way she widens the scope of her book to show, for example, how both Cavalier and Roundhead propagandists exploited gender images, mocking their adversaries as effeminate cuckolds.

Hughes demonstrates too how the war broke down gender barriers, just as the twentieth-century world wars were to do. Women found a new voice, and played new roles, unparalleled until modern times. 

I love this book because it gives us the stories of two intelligent young women caught up in the turmoil of the civil war, told in their own words. Both belonged to royalist families, and they endured the hardships and dangers that came from being on the losing side.

Halkett’s vivid memoir focuses on her early life as a spirited young woman who engaged in forbidden and risky romantic liaisons. She even joined one lover in a hazardous plot that enabled the king’s younger son (the future James II) to escape from the Tower of London. It reads like the storyline of a historical novel!

Just like the United States has been fixated in Cuba since its creation as a nation, American historians have obsessed with the history of Cuba for decades, but most have focused on the 20th century, or gone back as far as the 18th century. Alejandro de la Fuente and his collaborators take the reader back to the first century of the Spanish colonization of the island and describes the transformation of Havana from a sleepy port town in the northwest of the island into one of the most important ports in the Spanish empire and the Atlantic world. The book combines great narrative history with abundant tables and graphs about trade, naval traffic, and urban expansion.

This graphic novel is framed as an interview biography with Charlie, a 72-year-old Singaporean comics creator, as he reflects on his life. We see sketches from his old journals, and more interestingly, comics from his long and robust career. His comics start off as whimsical heroic tales about a boy and a giant robot. But as Charlie matures, he takes in the politics of Singapore—the protests, wars, and changing government. As he digests this world around him, his comics change, from action comics to comic strips to satire to autobiographical to, well, all over the board. We see his thoughts on a turbulent, evolving Singapore laced within these comics—sometimes subtlely, often overtly—as well as glimpses into his relationships and his financial struggles. This masterfully told story falls amongst my favorite comics.

The papers in this book follow on from an article in Vanity Fair, "Of the 1%, for the 1%, by the 1%". Mimicking Abraham Lincoln’s famous definition in his Gettysburg Address.

A central argument that runs throughout the book is that the growing inequality in the US is chosen, not by its peoples, but by its government. The implication is that the rising inequality and its causes are a threat to US democracy. The book sees a great divide opening between the mass of its citizens and a plutocratic class whose income, and relative position, continues to improve. The book documents how governments have pursued policies that only benefit the 1%.

The title of this book is doubly surprising. Is North Korea enterprising? And North Korea “in the world economy”? Isn’t it the hermit kingdom? Hastings picks up a theme that was central to our work on the famine: that the socialist sector in North Korea has undergone a secular decline while households and entrepreneurs have constructed a complex market economy that is partially above ground, partly below it. But Hastings goes further, showing how that market economy is integrally tied to China. And the book has the added attraction of focusing attention on lucrative black markets that range from amphetamine to counterfeited one hundred dollar bills. 

No one can deny that the story of Singapore is a modern-day miracle. From a third-world port city in the mid-20th century to the first-rate nation we know today, Singapore has adopted progress as a creed. Lee Kuan Yew, the very founder of modern Singapore, reflects on his achievements and the many challenges he’s faced along the way in this enticing book.

You might think this book is a bit left field in the arena of leadership, given its title. I think it cuts to the heart of the big question all leaders, whether of organisations or nations, should be considering, that of economics and economy.

What really resonated with me is the exploration of the subject from holistic and spiritual, or consciousness, perspectives and how this encourages thinking more deeply about the confines and constraints our economic systems place on us, the compromises that ensue in decision-making and, most importantly, the choices we need to consider more carefully from an ethical and human values standpoint.

This is a topic central to human survival and well-being, a must-read for leaders.