100 Books Like The Gandhian Iceberg

This book helped me release shame after a colleague of mine told me my work wasn’t “science.”

Here’s the truth: to create a healing platform, I needed to tap into ways of thinking that academia sees as “woo woo” and “savage.” I looked to the stars. I meditated. I did rituals and read myths.

Dr. Kimmerer, trained as a traditional botanist, realized that the Indigenous myths and stories she was told as a child contained scientific knowledge passed down for generations by her tribe.

She realized there were scientific truths her community knew for millennia that traditional scientists only discovered within the last 100 years. This is the power of Ancestral Intelligence, disregarded by the same science that ultimately created AI.

What stories, fables, and myths have taught you valuable lessons about the world?

I am deeply troubled by how we are harming the earth, our Mother. I have also been a student of Thich Nhat Hanh’s for over 30 years and now a teacher in his tradition. This is his last book before he passed, and perfect for me, as a spiritual practitioner and an environmental activist. The book is an antidote to my periodic bouts of despair about climate change. It provides penetrating understanding of the suffering on the planet and its root causes in greed, hatred, and the delusion of separateness. I loved his stories, teachings, and practical advice for healing and transforming the roots of suffering that lie deep in my/our consciousness. A profound and moving book that I return to frequently for solace and guidance.

I was hooked from the opening pages! I resonated with the author’s personal stories of how he felt the wrongness of many things as a child like I did. I had an early sense of how broken things were—struggling parents who drank too much, Catholic school that taught me how sinful I was, working-class neighbors who beat their children, clear-cutting of forests near me, and more.

I loved the author’s gorgeous, almost poetic language and short 2-3 page chapters with trenchant headings like Separation, Breakdown, Interbeing, Cynicism, Evil, Miracle. I completely agree with the premise that the ills of the world have an underlying story, what he calls the “story of separation,” which is breaking down, and we are headed towards a new “story of interbeing.”

This book deeply touched me. I gained a larger perspective on climate change. I loved the author's use of poetry that connects humans to “wild” earth and that I/we are expressions of nature and cannot be separate, ever. I marveled that in an indifferent cosmos, humans love the earth.

Hinton believes the cosmos is learning to know/love itself through us. He tracks how the dualistic splitting of humans from nature, heaven from earth, and spirit from the mind has led us to sever our inherent kinship with the earth and cause such damage to our Mother.

We may not be able to pull back from environmental suffering, but the more we love and reconnect with our kinship with everything, the greater the chances of avoiding total collapse. This is an uplifting and relaxing perspective. 

Markowitz starts with the iconic images of Gandhi – Father of the Indian Nation, the modern saint, the apostle of nonviolence, and so on – and unpicks them to show how selective they are. He examines with great insight the way that Gandhi’s image was created in the West from the 1920s onwards, with him often being compared to Christ. Attenborough’s influential film on Gandhi is reviewed in revealing ways. He also examines the many biographies of Gandhi, showing how they have tended to focus on aspects of his message and fail to bring out the huge complexities of the man. 

He shows how Gandhi’s reputation as a serious political and economic thinker was shaped in the West first by pacifists and alternative thinkers, and much later by academic social scientists. He also provides some excellent analysis of Gandhi’s career in South Africa and India. The book is full of… show more.

I consider Mahatma Gandhi one of the greatest peacemakers in history. He showed us how to use nonviolence at every level, even how to get the British empire to leave India peacefully. I have read the entire 100 volumes of Gandhi’s writings and many biographies, and edited my own collection but Fischer is the best and knew Gandhi personally. His biography continues to inspire me forty years after I first read it because he brings out some of Gandhi’s strongest teachings on nonviolence, including the connections with self-denial, prayer, fasting, and being willing to go to prison to stop injustice and war. I think he captures the radical spirit of Gandhi best. This book is my go-to book for peacemaking inspiration.

When I first read this book, I could not put it down. Taylor is a beautiful storyteller, and it’s no surprise that her book was a finalist for the LA Times book award.

Taylor teaches readers that during slavery sometimes revenge was justice or the closest thing to it. Story after story, we are introduced to women who suffered terribly at the hands of their enslaver. But in each case, women fought back, plotted, and sought revenge against their perpetrators.

What I appreciated about the book is that it pushes back against the idea that Black women were passive or even nonviolent. This book gives us a portrait into the personal relationships that ended in bloodshed because of the violence of slavery.

The restorative justice movement didn’t start until after I got out of prison. We were mandated not to contact victims of our crimes. No one can think clearly when they’re under the threat of force and fear, so it took me many years to find true remorse.

When I was ready to write to the victims of my crime, as I reflected on my life while writing my book, I relied on Danielle’s book and Danielle’s personal guidance. She helped me see where I was minimizing or in denial, and I crafted my letter of repair for three weeks.

Her book helped me hold two ideas as true at the same time: I was participating in an act of harm when I was part of the group that robbed a liquor store and caused the man behind the counter to die, and I had to own that I was a… show more.

Along with authors like Alyssa Cole and Talia Hibbert, Courtney Milan is a luminary of romance’s liberatory wing. If love can conquer all, let’s aim it at something worthwhile! This book takes one of humanity’s deepest nonviolent instincts, the desire for one another, and shows how it gives people the strength to support each other through the hard work of building a better world. I want to recommend all of Milan’s books, but from a nonviolence perspective, The Devil Comes Courting stands out because of the way it also wrestles with what reconciliation (the last step in Kingian nonviolence) really means.

The author is perhaps best known as an instigator of the “microhistory” field of study (of which I’m an avid fan and sometime practitioner). But he’s also a chronicler of protest, including one book on the worldwide demonstrations of 1968 and another, Ready for a Brand New Beat, that notes the civil rights impact of Martha and the Vandellas’ "Dancing in the Street". I’ve often felt that I was born late, just missing so many of the cultural convulsions that have informed my writing. With Non-Violence (2006) Kurlansky gives us a historical foundation for the anti-war movement of the Vietnam era.