Here are 100 books that The Empathic Civilization fans have personally recommended if you like The Empathic Civilization. Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.

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Book cover of Envisioning Futures for Environmental and Sustainability Education

Victoria W. Thoresen Author Of Sustainable Development, Education and Learning: The Challenge of Inclusive, Quality Education for All

From my list on what education is and needs to become.

Why am I passionate about this?

I have always been concerned about the happiness and well-being of other people, whether they are friends or strangers, rich or poor, young or old. To me, they are all members of one human family. I became engaged in community actions at an early age, and in addition to my work as a teacher, teacher trainer, and international educational consultant, I have been involved in many efforts to reconcile conflicts, ensure justice, and foster collaboration. My interest in civil rights, as well as my concern for the environment, led me to dedicate much of my time to developing global education and education for sustainable development.

Victoria's book list on what education is and needs to become

Victoria W. Thoresen Why Victoria loves this book

I was impressed by this book because of its comprehensive, diverse, and inspiring articles about how people realize their hopes and dreams for a just, sustainable future for all through the practice of envisioning.

Not only does the book describe many of the steps that might be needed to create desired futures, but it also illustrates how such steps involve education and community-building.

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Book cover of The High House

The High House by James Stoddard,

The Victorian mansion, Evenmere, is the mechanism that runs the universe.

The lamps must be lit, or the stars die. The clocks must be wound, or Time ceases. The Balance between Order and Chaos must be preserved, or Existence crumbles.

Appointed the Steward of Evenmere, Carter Anderson must learn the…

Book cover of Global Teacher, Global Learner

Victoria W. Thoresen Author Of Sustainable Development, Education and Learning: The Challenge of Inclusive, Quality Education for All

From my list on what education is and needs to become.

Why am I passionate about this?

I have always been concerned about the happiness and well-being of other people, whether they are friends or strangers, rich or poor, young or old. To me, they are all members of one human family. I became engaged in community actions at an early age, and in addition to my work as a teacher, teacher trainer, and international educational consultant, I have been involved in many efforts to reconcile conflicts, ensure justice, and foster collaboration. My interest in civil rights, as well as my concern for the environment, led me to dedicate much of my time to developing global education and education for sustainable development.

Victoria's book list on what education is and needs to become

Victoria W. Thoresen Why Victoria loves this book

I love this classic because it combines theory and practice in an encouraging and easy to comprehend manner. Used by pre-service and in-service teachers worldwide, it remains a wonderful source of engaging ideas and activities that help people make sense of today’s complex world.

It helped me understand more clearly why we must become global citizens.

By Graham Pike , David Selby ,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Global Teacher, Global Learner as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

This handbook for teachers explores and develops the theory and practice of global education, as well as offering an extensive range of practical, lively and stimulating activities for the primary and secondary classroom. Cartoons, photographs and diagrams add to the readable presentation of important ideas and issues, and comprehensive follow-up information in the form of names, addresses and suggestions for further reading combine in the aim to make this a valuable volume for all those involved with developing a global perspective in education.


Book cover of Environmental Ethics: A Sourcebook for Educators

Victoria W. Thoresen Author Of Sustainable Development, Education and Learning: The Challenge of Inclusive, Quality Education for All

From my list on what education is and needs to become.

Why am I passionate about this?

I have always been concerned about the happiness and well-being of other people, whether they are friends or strangers, rich or poor, young or old. To me, they are all members of one human family. I became engaged in community actions at an early age, and in addition to my work as a teacher, teacher trainer, and international educational consultant, I have been involved in many efforts to reconcile conflicts, ensure justice, and foster collaboration. My interest in civil rights, as well as my concern for the environment, led me to dedicate much of my time to developing global education and education for sustainable development.

Victoria's book list on what education is and needs to become

Victoria W. Thoresen Why Victoria loves this book

I recommend this book because it effectively shows how ethics are a part of everyday life and must be an integral aspect of education for sustainable development.

I especially like the book's structure, with questions that can easily be identified with and examples that, while coming from Africa, are universal in their application.

By Bob Jickling , Heila Lotz-Sisitka , Lausanne Olvitt , Ingrid Schudel , Dylan McGarry , Blair Niblett

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Environmental Ethics as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

This well-constructed, and highly original, sourcebook integrates educational materials for teaching environmental ethics with theoretical reflections. The book is set to contribute immensely to its aim of taking ethics out of philosophy departments and putting it into the streets, into villages, and on the Earth—to make ethics an everyday activity, not something left to experts and specialists. Context-based activities are presented in almost every chapter.

While it acknowledges foundational theories in environmental ethics, and the work that they continue to do, it wholeheartedly embraces a growing body of literature that emphasises contextual, process-oriented, and place-based approaches to ethical reflection, deliberation,…


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Book cover of December on 5C4

December on 5C4 by Adam Strassberg,

Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!

On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…

Book cover of De Bono's Thinking Course

Victoria W. Thoresen Author Of Sustainable Development, Education and Learning: The Challenge of Inclusive, Quality Education for All

From my list on what education is and needs to become.

Why am I passionate about this?

I have always been concerned about the happiness and well-being of other people, whether they are friends or strangers, rich or poor, young or old. To me, they are all members of one human family. I became engaged in community actions at an early age, and in addition to my work as a teacher, teacher trainer, and international educational consultant, I have been involved in many efforts to reconcile conflicts, ensure justice, and foster collaboration. My interest in civil rights, as well as my concern for the environment, led me to dedicate much of my time to developing global education and education for sustainable development.

Victoria's book list on what education is and needs to become

Victoria W. Thoresen Why Victoria loves this book

I and those around me often find themselves stuck in thought patterns that merely reinforce the status quo. De Bono’s suggestions about alternative ways of thinking stimulate one’s imagination, creativity, and critical thinking, all of which are sorely needed in this time of conflict and confusion.

Taken together with systems theory, de Bono’s methodology is a valuable key to innovation. 

By Edward De Bono ,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked De Bono's Thinking Course as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Transform your thinking!

Is the way you think like the colour of your eyes - something you are born with and cannot alter? Or is thinking a skill that can be improved with practice, like swimming, tennis or cooking?

In this practical book, Edward de Bono lays out some simple but powerful tools with which we can optimize our thinking, decision making and problem solving. Most of the errors of thinking are errors of perception and that is precisely where these tools help.

Learn:

How to enhance your thinking processes by developing your perception How to make the most of…


Book cover of Age of Anger: A History of the Present

Jeremy Appel Author Of Kenneyism: Jason Kenney's Pursuit of Power

From my list on understanding the political moment we’re in.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’m a journalist in Edmonton, Canada, who covered former premier Jason Kenney’s rise through Alberta politics, in which he tapped into the populist zeitgeist of Donald Trump and Brexit, and his eventual implosion. I have a newsletter on Substack, "The Orchard," where I cover the intersection of politics, the media, and corporate power. Through my journalism, I’ve developed a keen interest in this age of mass discontent we find ourselves in, with right-wing political and economic elites promising to blow up the entire system they embody while feckless liberal politicians seek to tinker around the edges to make the established order more palatable. 

Jeremy's book list on understanding the political moment we’re in

Jeremy Appel Why Jeremy loves this book

In this book, Pankaj Mishraj describes how the failures of secular modernity led to the rise of revanchist movements seeking to provide those left behind with a common sense of purpose.

I greatly appreciated the international scope of Mishraj’s analysis, with which he reveals how the growth of reactionary, theocratic, and xenophobic populist politics across the globe are manifestations of the same sense of malaise.

He convincingly argues that these tensions are as old as modernity itself. Rather than engaging strictly with the same old historical and sociological sources to make his case, the author refreshingly engages the poets and novelists of the era he describes.

By Pankaj Mishra ,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Age of Anger as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

LONGLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE 2018

NEW STATESMAN BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2017

'The kind of vision the world needs right now...Pankaj Mishra shouldn't stop thinking' Christopher de Bellaigue, Financial Times

'This is the most astonishing, convincing, and disturbing book I've read in years' Joe Sacco

'Urgent, profound and extraordinarily timely' John Banville

How can we explain the origins of the great wave of paranoid hatreds that seem inescapable in our close-knit world - from American 'shooters' and ISIS to Trump, from a rise in vengeful nationalism across the world to racism and misogyny on social media? In Age of…


Book cover of Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought

Peter J. Verovšek Author Of Memory and the Future of Europe: Rupture and Integration in the Wake of Total War

From my list on memory and postwar Europe.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am an international political and critical theorist interested in the way that key events and experiences from the past continue to affect politics in the present. I was born in the US but moved back to Slovenia when I was in high school, before returning to the states to attend Dartmouth College as an undergraduate, and Yale University for my doctoral studies in political science. This international, bi-continental background – as well as my own family’s history of migration following World War II – has fueled my interest in twentieth-century European history, collective memory and European integration. 

Peter's book list on memory and postwar Europe

Peter J. Verovšek Why Peter loves this book

Hannah Arendt is the most important political thinker of the post-totalitarian moment. While her 1951 Origins of Totalitarianism is more well-known and became a bestseller again after the election of President Donald Trump, in this collection of essays she lays out her ideas about the way that the past helps us to locate ourselves in the present by imagining and reimagining our futures. This book was hugely influential for me during my graduate studies at Yale. Unlike so many political theorists, Arendt is also a wonderfully accessible and engaging writer.

By Hannah Arendt , Jerome Kohn ,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Between Past and Future as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

From the author of Eichmann in Jerusalem and The Origins of Totalitarianism, “a book to think with through the political impasses and cultural confusions of our day” (Harper’s Magazine)
 
Hannah Arendt’s insightful observations of the modern world, based on a profound knowledge of the past, constitute an impassioned contribution to political philosophy. In Between Past and Future Arendt describes the perplexing crises modern society faces as a result of the loss of meaning of the traditional key words of politics: justice, reason, responsibility, virtue, and glory. Through a series of eight exercises, she shows how we can redistill the vital…


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Book cover of Trusting Her Duke

Trusting Her Duke by Arietta Richmond,

A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.

Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…

Book cover of The Climate of History in a Planetary Age

Jeremy Bendik-Keymer Author Of Involving Anthroponomy in the Anthropocene: On Decoloniality

From my list on how we got to climate change and mass extinction.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’m the grandson of a coal miner from a multi-generational, Ohio family. What matters most to me is having some integrity and being morally okay with folks. I never thought of myself as an environmentalist, just as someone trying to figure out what we should be learning to be decent people in this sometimes messed-up world. From there, I was taken into our environmental situation, its planetary injustice, and then onto studying the history of colonialism. This adventure cracked open my midwestern common sense and made me rethink things. Happily, it has only reinforced my commitment to, and faith in, moral relations, giving our word, being accountable, and caring.

Jeremy's book list on how we got to climate change and mass extinction

Jeremy Bendik-Keymer Why Jeremy loves this book

I love how Dipesh’s book shows a historian at the height of his powers explaining how history has become geological. Decades ago, Chakrabarty began as someone arguing for a history that made Europe “provincial”. Now he argues that all human history is relative to planetary time. His writing is infused with humanism and is up to date on Earth System Science.

By Dipesh Chakrabarty ,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Climate of History in a Planetary Age as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

For the past decade, historian Dipesh Chakrabarty has been one of the most influential scholars addressing the meaning of climate change. Climate change, he argues, upends long-standing ideas of history, modernity, and globalization. The burden of The Climate of History in a Planetary Age is to grapple with what this means and to confront humanities scholars with ideas they have been reluctant to reconsider-from the changed nature of human agency to a new acceptance of universals.

Chakrabarty argues that we must see ourselves from two perspectives at once: the planetary and the global. This distinction is central to Chakrabarty's work-the…


Book cover of Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century

Ted Pelton Author Of Malcolm & Jack: And Other Famous American Criminals

From my list on historical 2000s novels that aren’t all the same.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am a professor of American literary history. Still, as an undergraduate, I studied with a charismatic, postmodern French-American fiction writer, Raymond Federman, who, in a theatrical accent, called me by my last name, “Pel-tone.” Atop the Kurt Vonnegut I’d read in high school that gave me my taste for crazy, socially-conscious novels that I have tried myself also to write, I imbibed the books Federman sent my way: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Italo Calvino, Samuel Beckett. In years since, I’ve championed innovative novels through my own small press, Starcherone Books. I am an artist whose greatest passion is discovering writing that makes me see in new ways.

Ted's book list on historical 2000s novels that aren’t all the same

Ted Pelton Why Ted loves this book

I love experiments in the novel form, and this book by the Czech Ourednik startled me from the first words of its opening, a deadpan sentence telling us that the Americans who died at Normandy in 1944 were unusually tall. What follows is an accounting of important and trivial happenings of a hundred years of war-riddled world history in roughly the same number of pages.

Throughout, we read random details, skipping from how often people bathed to psychologists’ recommendations about venting aggression through competitive sports to the changes in human lives occasioned by contraceptives and tear-off toilet paper. Every page is always the tongue-in-cheek narration of absurdities I couldn’t help reading aloud to whoever was nearby. No book is like this one, and maybe no other so profound.

By Patrik Ourednik , Gerald Turner (translator) ,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Europeana as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Tracing the Great War through the Millennium Bug, 1999 through 1900, Dadaism through Scientology through Sierra Leonean bicycle riding and back, award-winning Czech author Patrik Ourednik explores the horror and absurdity of the twentieth century in an explosive deconstruction of historical memory.

Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century opens on the beaches of Normandy in 1944, comparing the heights of different forces' soldiers and considering how tall, long, or good at fertilizing fields the men's bodies will be. Probing the depths of humanity and inhumanity, this is an account of history as it has never been told: "engaging,…


Book cover of The Long Shadow: The Great War and the Twentieth Century

Benjamin Carter Hett Author Of The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic

From my list on the legacy of the First World War.

Why am I passionate about this?

I was a law school graduate heading for my first job when, unable to think of anything better to do with my last afternoon in London, I wandered through the First World War galleries of the Imperial War Museum. I was hypnotized by a slide show of Great War propaganda posters, stunned by their clever viciousness in getting men to volunteer and wives and girlfriends to pressure them. Increasingly fascinated, I started reading about the war and its aftermath. After several years of this, I quit my job at a law firm and went back to school to become a professor. And here I am.

Benjamin's book list on the legacy of the First World War

Benjamin Carter Hett Why Benjamin loves this book

David Reynolds is simply one of the smartest and most original historians operating today. Do we imagine that no one thought much about the poems of Wilfred Owen until the 1960s? Do we think about how important the fiftieth anniversary of the Somme was for the politics of Ireland? This book is packed full of perceptive and original insights about the Great War’s very long legacy.

By David Reynolds ,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked The Long Shadow as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

One of the most violent conflicts in the history of civilization, World War I has been strangely forgotten in American culture. It has become a ghostly war fought in a haze of memory, often seen merely as a distant preamble to World War II. In The Long Shadow critically acclaimed historian David Reynolds seeks to broaden our vision by assessing the impact of the Great War across the twentieth century. He shows how events in that turbulent century-particularly World War II, the Cold War, and the collapse of Communism-shaped and reshaped attitudes to 1914-18.

By exploring big themes such as…


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Book cover of Aggressor

Aggressor by FX Holden,

It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.

The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…

Book cover of The Future of Nostalgia

Judith Glatzer Wechsler Author Of The Memoirs of Nahum N. Glatzer

From my list on anthology that bring sources to light.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am an art historian and was professor of art history at MIT, Tufts, Harvard, and elsewhere. As an undergraduate I studied Jewish history and philosophy and subsequently was assistant editor at Schocken Books focusing on art history and history of ideas. My graduate work was in art history, first in medieval manuscripts and then 19th century French art. I’ve written four books, edited four others, and made 30 documentaries, mostly on art. The French government knighted me “Chevalier dans l’ordre des arts et des lettres.”

Judith's book list on anthology that bring sources to light

Judith Glatzer Wechsler Why Judith loves this book

I met Svetlana in the last two years of her life and was deeply impressed by her brilliance in literature and the history of ideas and cultures. She died, tragically, in her mid 50s cutting short her extraordinary career, from childhood and youth in Soviet Russia to her stellar career as a Harvard professor of comparative literature. Of her seven books, this highly original study of nostalgia has been particularly important.

A ground breaking study about longing in its positive and negative forms, focusing on post-communist cities such as St. Petersburg, Moscow and Berlin, and writers Nabokov, Brodsky, and Kabakov. Erudite, brilliant, and witty, this is a great cross-genre study of our modern condition.

By Svetlana Boym ,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Future of Nostalgia as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Combining personal memoir, philosophical essay, and historical analysis, Svetlana Boym explores the spaces of collective nostalgia that connect national biography and personal self-fashioning in the twenty-first century. She guides us through the ruins and construction sites of post-communist cities-St. Petersburg, Moscow, Berlin, and Prague-and the imagined homelands of exiles-Benjamin, Nabokov, Mandelstahm, and Brodsky. From Jurassic Park to the Totalitarian Sculpture Garden, Boym unravels the threads of this global epidemic of longing and its antidotes.


Book cover of Envisioning Futures for Environmental and Sustainability Education
Book cover of Global Teacher, Global Learner
Book cover of Environmental Ethics: A Sourcebook for Educators

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