100 Books Like The End of War

Most books about the future are real bummers. Climate change, war, inequality... the problems seem insurmountable. This book helped me get past those feelings. Yes, we’ve royally screwed things up, but in lyrical prose Ackerman shows us that while it was our ingenuity that led us to screw up the environment, it’s also our ingenuity that can fix it, if we accept the challenge and responsibility. “We can become Earth-restorers,” she claims, “and Earth-guardians.” I like that. 

I’m not a fan of either Doomsday or Pollyanna-ish books, especially in relation to climate change. I’ve read lots of books on this subject, and this is my favorite.

It doesn’t shy away from explaining what’s at stake and what is likely to happen if we don’t stop the escalation of climate-heating gases in our atmosphere, but it offers us a path toward solving this potential catastrophe that we can and must take together.  

This book is great because Norberg is calm, methodical, rational, and optimistic: we have come a long way, we live in the best of times, and let’s get on with it. I love the modern as I’ve said, and appreciate historians who understand that, from a material perspective at least (health, wealth, freedom, and security), most people today are in the top 99.999999 percentile of all the humans who have ever lived.

I so admire (and share) Norberg’s belief in our brilliance and problem-solving skills and admire, too, his arguments which are complex but easy to follow. Modernity gives us plenty to celebrate, and Norberg, I feel, makes this eminently clear.

It is a book that serves as the perfect balance to Barrat’s and to Kurzweil’s. Although the three together will lead to cognitive dissonance, which, in my view, is as healthy as having one’s mind blown periodically.

I love this book on many levels. Utopia is always just out of reach but with the scale of time, one could argue that we’re currently living in a utopia.

Even if we don’t have flying cars, more people have opportunities and access to resources than ever before in recorded history.

This book is for optimists and pessimists alike, as the author does a great job addressing the current issues we face and outlining a future worth building. A future of Universal Basic Income (UBI) and no national borders, where opportunities are shared more equitably.

If everyone read this book I know we’d be one step closer to reaching utopia.

The possibility that Costa Rica did something significant and hugely beneficial by abolishing its military is generally dealt with by ignoring it, but sometimes by making excuses for it—by claiming that Costa Rica secretly really does have a military or claiming that the U.S. military defends Costa Rica, or claiming that Costa Rica’s example is unlike and unuseful for any other country.

We would all benefit from reading this fantastic book. Here, I learned not to ignore what Costa Rica means and learned that Costa Rica does not secretly have a military, that the United States military does not serve any function for Costa Rica, and that many of the factors that probably contributed to Costa Rica’s abolition of its military, as well as many of the benefits that have probably resulted, are probably subject to duplication elsewhere, even though no two countries are identical, human affairs are highly complicated,… show more.

What would we do in a world lacking police, prisons, surveillance, borders, wars, nuclear weapons, and capitalism? Well, we might survive. We might sustain life on this little blue dot a little longer. That—in contrast to the status quo—ought to be sufficient. We might, in addition, do a lot more than sustain life. We might transform the lives of billions of people, including each person reading these words. We might have lives with less fear and worry, more joy and accomplishment, more control and cooperation.

But, of course, the question might be asked in the sense of “Wouldn’t the criminals get us, and the forces of law and order be imperiled, and evildoers take away our freedoms, and sloth and laziness deprive us of updated phone models every few months?” As a way to begin answering those concerns, I recommend this tremendous resource of a book which surveys seven candidates… show more.

The history of militarism isn't one of goodness and glory marred by a "few bad apples," one or two misguided wars. Here is an avalanche of examples. If your mind doesn’t go numb, you will feel—as I did—an urge to take a shower after closing this book.

This is the naming and shaming of names. The author admits that he’s only scratching the surface. But he’s scratching it in many different places, and the result ought to be persuasive for most people, but it was not for me. Sorensen demonstrates how corruption and sociopathic destruction feed off each other, generating the real problem: organized and glorified mass homicide.

This book makes a powerful case that humanitarian war no more exists than philanthropic child abuse or benevolent torture. I’m not sure the actual motivations of wars are limited to economic and strategic interests—which seems to forget the insane, power-mad, and sadistic motivations—but I am sure that no humanitarian war has ever benefitted humanity.

This book makes that very clear. It does not take the approach so widely recommended of watering down the truth so that the reader is only gently nudged in the right direction from where he or she is starting. There’s no getting 90% reassuringly wrong to make the 10% palatable here. This is a book for either people who have some general notion of what war is or people who aren’t traumatized by jumping into an unfamiliar perspective and thinking about it. Refreshing!

This is an excellent series of essays on the small things in life which please the author. Some are more obvious than others, but all are described stylishly and with typical French humour and elegance. I confess that after reading it, I did my own—inevitably inferior—version. But it was an enjoyment just going through the process.

I’ve included Ana, Jan, and María’s book on my list not because it is entirely about neutrality and war (although that theme plays a major part in the book) but because it pushed me to appreciate the effects of the First World War at a more global level. 

The modern name of the war, of course, includes the word ‘world’ in it, but the fighting was primarily European-focused. This book shows, however, that the war had a much wider reach–influencing China, Japan, South America, Mexico, and Africa, amongst other places. For example, the book shows that there was a clash of Empires in Africa–between neutral Portugal and belligerent Germany; and in neutral Argentina, Mexico, and Spain, societies were split down the middle between the rival camps supporting the Allies and the Germans.

I found the book to be a really important demonstration that we need to think differently about wars–the… show more.