Here are 100 books that The Life You Can Save fans have personally recommended if you like
The Life You Can Save.
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I work in the venture capital (finance) space but have a long-time passion for and involvement with charity and philanthropy work, having founded several non-profits including most recently Lever Foundation which works to create a more humane and sustainable food system in Asia. I’m a big believer in and advocate for applying quantitative, analytical thinking and an outcome-focused mindset to efforts to make the world a better place. It’s something I think about every day, and it’s what I write about as well.
Ray Dalio is one of the most successful hedge fund managers of all time. You might ask what that has to do with doing good in the world, but I think it’s abundantly clear that many of the same principles and approaches that lead to quantifiable success in the business world can contribute to increased success in efforts to make the world a better place.
I don’t agree with Dalio on everything, but I found his core messages such as focusing on results, being direct and candid with colleagues, weighing the credibility of someone’s opinion based on their history of performance, and continually reassessing and adjusting our approach, very wise and a way of thinking and working that is too often absent in the charity sector.
"Significant...The book is both instructive and surprisingly moving." -The New York Times
Ray Dalio, one of the world's most successful investors and entrepreneurs, shares the unconventional principles that he's developed, refined, and used over the past forty years to create unique results in both life and business-and which any person or organization can adopt to help achieve their goals.
In 1975, Ray Dalio founded an investment firm, Bridgewater Associates, out of his two-bedroom apartment in New York City. Forty years later, Bridgewater has made more money for its clients than any other hedge fund in…
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…
I work in the venture capital (finance) space but have a long-time passion for and involvement with charity and philanthropy work, having founded several non-profits including most recently Lever Foundation which works to create a more humane and sustainable food system in Asia. I’m a big believer in and advocate for applying quantitative, analytical thinking and an outcome-focused mindset to efforts to make the world a better place. It’s something I think about every day, and it’s what I write about as well.
There’s no way to leave off this list the landmark book by one of the founders of the “effective altruism” movement, Will MacAskill. I think Will did an excellent job of showing how achieving good outcomes when we donate to charity, and how assessing which charities are effective and which aren’t, is a lot more nuanced and tricky than you might think.
A radical reassessment of how we can most effectively help others by a rising star of philosophy and leading social entrepreneur.
'A surprising and often counterintuitive look at the best ways to make a difference . . . MacAskill is that rarest of beasts: a do-gooder who uses his head more than his heart.' SUNDAY TIMES
Most of us want to make a difference. We donate to charity, buy Fairtrade coffee, or try to cut down on our carbon emissions. Rarely do we know if we're really helping, and despite our best intentions, our actions can have ineffective - and…
The world of entrepreneurship has been my driving passion for decades. Why? It is entrepreneurs, despite their many quirks, who make the world a better place. It’s entrepreneurs who create jobs in a world where jobs in many places are in short supply. It’s entrepreneurs who wake up every day with a passion to forge their own path with the freedom to do so. And it’s why I embarked at mid-life on a second career as a business-school professor. It’s why I teach and why I write. The books I suggest here will give you a fighting chance to deal effectively with the challenges you’ll surely find along your entrepreneurial journey.
Zook and Allen are two of the most insightful people I know. I’ve taught their “stuff’ to my students for many years. Entrepreneurship is a journey that’s not for the faint of heart, for there are the inevitable gale-force winds that threaten to blow you off course, as this book so clearly demonstrates.
If every founder would imbue his or her company with the founder’s mentality and follow Zook’s and Allen’s advice about how to keep it in place, we’d have far more long-run successes than today’s daunting failure statistics so sadly display.
A Washington Post Bestseller Three Principles for Managing--and Avoiding--the Problems of Growth Why is profitable growth so hard to achieve and sustain? Most executives manage their companies as if the solution to that problem lies in the external environment: find an attractive market, formulate the right strategy, win new customers. But when Bain & Company's Chris Zook and James Allen, authors of the bestselling Profit from the Core, researched this question, they found that when companies fail to achieve their growth targets, 90 percent of the time the root causes are internal, not external--increasing distance from the front lines, loss…
Dr. Power is promoted to a chair of forensic psychiatry at Allminster University and selected by the Vice Chancellor for a key task which stokes the jealousy of the Deans, and he is plunged into a precariously dangerous situation when there is a series of deaths and the deputy Vice…
I work in the venture capital (finance) space but have a long-time passion for and involvement with charity and philanthropy work, having founded several non-profits including most recently Lever Foundation which works to create a more humane and sustainable food system in Asia. I’m a big believer in and advocate for applying quantitative, analytical thinking and an outcome-focused mindset to efforts to make the world a better place. It’s something I think about every day, and it’s what I write about as well.
I couldn’t agree more with Rutger’s central thesis: that the overlap between those who are most ambitious and success-driven, and those who spend their working hours focused on doing good in the world, is a heck of a lot smaller than it should be.
This is a great wake-up call to the best and brightest who are spending all of that energy, creativity, and intelligence on things that might make them a decent salary but that have no real impact on the world.
From the author of the New York Times bestsellers Humankind and Utopia for Realists—“a more politically radical Malcolm Gladwell” (The New York Times)—comes a bold manifesto daring us to harness our talents and transform our idealism into action, all with the goal of making the world a wildly better place.
A career consists of 2,000 workweeks, and how you spend that time is one of the most important decisions of your life. Still, millions of people are stuck in in mind-numbing, pointless, or just plain harmful jobs.
There's an antidote to this waste of talent, and it's called moral ambition.…
There is still so much to know about Irish girls’ and women’s lives, and I think that’s why I’ve always been drawn to books that explore these themes, whether in fiction or nonfiction. I work as a historian and professor of Irish History at Queen’s University Belfast. I love archival research and often find it really exciting to order a file or box in the archives or pull up a newspaper, not knowing what story it is going to tell or what insight I am going to get of an individual’s world in the written records left behind. I hope that you like my choices!
I love how we can catch glimpses of Irish women’s lived experiences because sources from particular moments in their lives have survived the decades. Although this social history of letters written to the archbishop of Dublin is not specifically a women’s history book, many of those who wrote for help were women and so the book offers a glimpse of their often-difficult lives.
I love how Earner-Byrne privileges the ‘voices’ of letter writers in her book, exploring what they put in writing, as well as what they implied and their silences. I found this a very thought-provoking analysis, pushing me to think about the ways that people frame their narratives and how what they choose to include or exclude about their lives informs historians.
This innovative study of poverty in Independent Ireland between 1920 and 1940 is the first to place the poor at its core by exploring their own words and letters. Written to the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, their correspondence represents one of the few traces in history of Irish experiences of poverty, and collectively they illuminate the lives of so many during the foundation decades of the Irish state. This book keeps the human element central, so often lost when the framework of history is policy, institutions and legislation. It explores how ideas of charity, faith, gender, character and social status…
I am an academic at the University of Oxford who specializes in international political economy, so I study this topic for a living! I am particularly interested in the politics of international cooperation and economic development. Growing up, I traveled extensively in developing countries across Asia and Africa, which inspired in me a deep curiosity about the determinants of sustained economic growth. I also spent much time in Geneva, where my father frequently worked with United Nations agencies. His anecdotes about these institutions each evening made me wonder what caused some of them to perform effectively and others to perform poorly—and how they could be improved.
I have long believed that development economists rely too heavily on reductive formal models that ignore on-the-ground realities and are backed by scant empirical evidence. This book makes a compelling case for observation—particularly in the form of randomized controlled trials that approximate scientific experiments “in the field.”
I admire its rigorous use of the scientific method to critique theoretical approaches that draw much of their legitimacy and influence from technical sophistication and abstraction.
Why do the poor borrow to save? Why do they miss out on free life-saving immunizations, but pay for unnecessary drugs? In Poor Economics , Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, two practical visionaries working toward ending world poverty, answer these questions from the ground. In a book the Wall Street Journal called marvellous, rewarding," the authors tell how the stress of living on less than 99 cents per day encourages the poor to make questionable decisions that feed,not fight,poverty. The result is a radical rethinking of the economics of poverty that offers a ringside view of the lives of…
The Whale Surfaces follows a daughter of Holocaust survivors who tries to deal with trans-generational trauma.
From the age of eleven to 22, she struggles to be ‘normal’ and to conceal the demons haunting her. Her sensitivity to her parents’ past and to injustices everywhere prevents her from enjoying life.…
I am an academic and development practitioner with decades of experience in the classroom and research and development practice. My research niche is in issues of development in the global South, ranging from social conflict/natural resources conflict, political sociology of African development, decolonization of knowledge, to political economy, and globalization studies. In the above capacity, I have, over the years, taught, researched, and ruminated on the development challenges of the global South, especially Africa. I have consulted for many multi-lateral development agencies working in Africa and focused on different dimensions of development. I have a passion for development and a good knowledge of the high volume of literature on the subject.
A colleague recommended this book, and I purchased a used one through Amazon. I found it very good reading on the dynamics of development aid and the regime of corruption and redundancy that often accompany it.
A very interesting and perhaps passionate take on the influence of foreign aid on development in Africa. Portrays the fact that aid can be both counterproductive and engendering of corruption in Africa. It advocates for both a nuanced and strategic deployment of such aid; limitation on aid as the only source of development funding; and enumerated other ways the international community can play a better and result-oriented role in Africa’s development.
In the past fifty years, more than $1 trillion in development-related aid has been transferred from rich countries to Africa. Has this assistance improved the lives of Africans? No. In fact, across the continent, the recipients of this aid are not better off as a result of it, but worse—much worse.
In Dead Aid, Dambisa Moyo describes the state of postwar development policy in Africa today and unflinchingly confronts one of the greatest myths of our time: that billions of dollars in aid sent from wealthy countries to developing African nations has helped to reduce poverty and increase growth. In…
When I lost a baby late in my pregnancy, I was overwhelmed by grief. And then I learned that tens of thousands of babies died every day from preventable causes. I couldn’t save my own baby, but I wanted to know how to help others. I joined the board of World Vision and then other groups, including Opportunity International, MAP International, and International Justice Mission. I took numerous trips to developing countries and eventually headed a foundation dedicated to maternal health. I listened to the stories of women and tried to tell them to the world through a variety of international publications. I'm forever grateful to those who changed the way I see the world.
Jacqueline Novogratz was a successful young woman with a promising career in banking who wanted to truly understand global poverty and find ways to tackle it.
This book tells not only the remarkable story of a favorite hand-knit blue sweater she donated in Virginia and saw again in Rwanda, but her own sometimes fumbling ways to connect her experiences to women living in poverty.
I love this book for its honesty and how the author shares her own mistakes as well as understandings.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “A book of hope written by a practical idealist who won’t take ‘no’ for an answer when it comes to building a better world.”—Former U.S. senator Bill Bradley
Jacqueline Novogratz left a career in international banking to spend her life on a quest to understand global poverty and find powerful new ways of tackling it. From her first stumbling efforts as a young idealist venturing forth in Africa to the creation of the trailblazing organization she runs today, Novogratz tells gripping stories with unforgettable characters. She shows how traditional charity often fails, but how a…
As a teenager, I visited my uncle, who farmed rice in southern Haiti. I met a community that helped me understand that food is not just about dollars and cents—it’s about belonging, it’s about identity. This experience inspired me to become an aid worker. For the last 20+ years, I have worked to mend broken food systems all over the world. If we don’t get food right, hunger will threaten the social fabric.
I found that this book offers a great overview of the issues. I appreciate how the author breaks down the complex myriad forces shaping our agri-food systems into relatable anecdotes.
The author never gets lost in the numbers and stays focused on guiding the reader through the inequalities and power relations that define our food system. I found Patel’s writing always enjoyable.
"For anyone attempting to make sense of the world food crisis, or understand the links between U.S. farm policy and the ability of the world's poor to feed themselves, Stuffed and Starved is indispensable." —Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma
It’s a perverse fact of modern life: There are more starving people in the world than ever before, while there are also more people who are overweight.
To find out how we got to this point and what we can do about it, Raj Patel launched a comprehensive investigation into the global food network. It…
The Year Mrs. Cooper Got Out More
by
Meredith Marple,
The coastal tourist town of Great Wharf, Maine, boasts a crime rate so low you might suspect someone’s lying.
Nevertheless, jobless empty nester Mallory Cooper has become increasingly reclusive and fearful. Careful to keep the red wine handy and loath to leave the house, Mallory misses her happier self—and so…
Mark Greenside has been a civil rights activist, Vietnam War protestor, anti-draft counselor, Vista Volunteer, union leader, and college professor. He holds B.S. and M.A. degrees from the University of Wisconsin and his stories have appeared in numerous journals and magazines. He presently lives in Alameda, California, where he continues to teach and be politically active, and Brittany, France, where he still can’t do anything without asking for help.
Jean-Marie Déguignet is not your typical Breton peasant. He’s small and puny—and these people aren’t built that way. At nine, a bee caused him to fall and hit his head, leaving an ugly wound that oozed for years and left a deep indentation in his skull when it finally healed. The result was a lifetime interest in bees and a lonely life, as no one wanted to be near him.
A curious and isolated lad, he becomes an auto-diktat, and like many auto-diktats has lots of disparaging things to say about those who are less educated and more successful and powerful than he—especially church and government officials, monarchists, and landlords: ignorant bastards he constantly fought (and lost) who controlled and ruined his life. He’s an anti-cleric in this most Catholic of lands. He’s a Republican in a time and place of monarchists. He understands the world as a scientist, through…
A fascinating document of an extraordinary life, Memoirs of A Breton Peasant reads with the liveliness of a novel and bristles with the vigor of an opinionated autodidact from the very lowest level of peasant society. Brittany during the nineteenth century was a place seemingly frozen in the Middle Ages, backwards by most French standards; formal education among rural society was either unavailable or dismissed as unnecessary, while the church and local myth defined most people's reasoning and motivation. Jean-Marie Déguignet is unique not only as a literate Breton peasant, but in his skepticism for the church, his interest in…
