Books like Radical Hope — picked by fans

Why include on this list the diaries of a secular Jewish woman who is in the grip of self-centered anxieties and an unusual, if not bizarre, relationship with her analyst? Because spiritual transformation begins and evolves in uncanny ways, leading one to find transcendence where one never would have expected it. Etty’s diaries and letters allow us to follow the process by which she became so profoundly lucid and open-hearted that she was able to see the humanity even in the Nazis organizing extermination.

It’s not possible that Tolstoy died and lived to tell about it, but that's what this book feels like.

As Ivan Ilych’s illness progresses, the reader sees how shallow his relationships are, and how fruitless is his striving to “get ahead.” As I read this book, I felt the vast chasm between the living and the dying, how alone Ivan is in his suffering. Ivan Ilych is no hero: he is an everyman. He squarely faces the pointlessness of his life, and ultimately throws off the things of no importance.

Through his experience I anticipated my own death, and felt how important it must be to live my life remembering that all the stupid stuff doesn’t matter. What does matter is my relationships with God and with other humans. Everyone who expects to die someday should read this book.

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.

A cruise ship is, perhaps, the least likely of all possible venues for the beginning of a spiritual breakthrough. But this is where spiritual transformation starts for Avey Johnson, the 64-year-old African American woman who is the central character in this Marshall novel. Breakthroughs are often set in motion deep down inside us, below the surface of our ordinary awareness. In fact, a real breakthrough can’t happen unless it goes all the way down in us. I know of no book that conveys this truth more effectively.

Philipp Blom has an exceptional mind. This book looks at the fourteen years prior to the outbreak of the First World War with a depth and breadth you won’t find anywhere else. It somehow captures the broad, transdisciplinary rush to knowledge, to comprehend the new, that at a deep level characterized this period. You learn something or get a fresh perspective on almost every page and you begin to understand the pre-war years for what they were - a powderkeg of change ready to burst across almost every established boundary.

With deep research in both French and English sources, Gauvreau offers a convincing explanation for the dramatic flight from traditional Catholicism that occurred in Quebec during the 1960s. He shows that young reforming Catholics, whose number included the future prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, successfully critiqued the stultifying conservatism, unthinking nationalism, and intellectual sterility of the province’s traditional alignment of church and state. Gauvreau also details the reasons why the reformers’ hopes for a reformed, but reinvigorated Catholicism were frustrated by trajectories they themselves had set in motion. The result was to transform Canada’s most actively religious province into its most secular, and to do so in less than a decade.

Another nonfiction book, Healing Resistance does a splendid job showing the philosophical connections between nonviolence on an interpersonal level and nonviolent social change movements. Drawing on the tradition of Kingian nonviolence, this book is a useful starting place for anyone who wants to understand what nonviolence is and isn’t as well as how it works. It’s also chock full of recommendations for other books and is a great jumping-off point for further reading. Sometimes nonviolence doesn’t look like what we expect.

My dear colleague Simon Anholt is the founding father of the idea of the city, region or nation as brand.

He created the Anholt Ipsos Nation Brands Index and the Good Country Index; has written extensively on the subject; and has inspired me throughout my career. In his latest book The Good Country Equation he clearly proves – through the data that he’s collected – that for places to be admired, they have to be admirable.

In other words, places are respected for what they contribute to humanity and the planet, not for their propaganda. This is obviously an important discovery that forces governments and their stakeholders to focus on meaningful strategy, policy and cooperation as opposed to image promotion.

I also enjoyed reading Simon’s book as he shares his personal experiences as a government advisor.

This book features 70 stories of women and nonbinary people who are making a difference in the world. I was delighted by the vast array of people covered in the book, which begins with a foreword by Canadian pop duo Tegan and Sara. Teens will be excited to find leaders from every part of society profiled in the book: performers, politicians, professors, and more. I could start name dropping, but I won’t—because it’s much more fun for you to dig into the book and be surprised by how many really famous people are working hard to change the world.

This book takes you on a long tour through a pivotal decade in the emergence of the second wave of feminism in the United States of America via oral history, detailing actions, bios, and anecdotes of key figures. For the first time, I heard the ‘behind the scenes’ dynamics, interpersonal links, and public and private differences between many familiar figures such as Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, Shirley Chisolm, and many, many other not-so-well-known but leading feminists.

This is a gripping account of determination, leading thinking, differences of opinion, and risky activism in the USA in a tricky decade for women, which had a profound effect on how second-wave feminism developed not only in America, but globally. I was gripped.