Here are 100 books that The Politics of Resentment fans have personally recommended if you like
The Politics of Resentment.
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For my psychology podcast, I’ve interviewed many political and psychology experts on the subject of political polarization and conflict resolution. That led to me writing my book Defusing American Anger. I believe extreme us-vs-them polarization is humanity’s biggest problem: I see it as an existential threat not just to specific nations, including America, but to humanity as a whole, especially as our weapons and technologies get more powerful. And I think we need more people working on reducing our seemingly natural tendency to always be fighting with each other.
Talisse does a great job putting our divides in the context of the fundamental problem of democracy.
How can we maintain democratic principles when we see the "other side" as very wrong, or even as dangerous? Should we maintain those principles? What do we owe our fellow citizens even when we see them as very flawed?
In addition to these hard and important questions, Talisse focuses on a less examined negative aspect of polarization: us-vs-them animosity makes us less able to get along even with people who are politically similar to us. We become more fractured even on "our side," and less able to do the basic work of politics.
Democracy is not easy. Citizens who disagree sharply about politics must nonetheless work together as equal partners in the enterprise of collective self-government. Ideally, this work would be conducted under conditions of mutual civility, with opposed citizens nonetheless recognizing one another's standing as political equals. But when the political stakes are high, and the opposition seems to us severely mistaken, why not drop the democratic pretences of civil partnership, and simply play to win? Why seek to uphold properly democratic relations with those who embrace political ideas that are flawed, irresponsible, and out of step with justice? Why sustain democracy…
The dragons of Yuro have been hunted to extinction.
On a small, isolated island, in a reclusive forest, lives bandit leader Marani and her brother Jacks. With their outlaw band they rob from the rich to feed themselves, raiding carriages and dodging the occasional vindictive…
Conflict and disagreement have always interested me. I was a middle child, so I naturally fell into the role of peacemaker. But I also had strong opinions, and I always thought I knew the right answer. The pursuit of education, love, and a career brought me to rural Montana, an Asian metropolis, and everywhere in between. These experiences deepened my fascination regarding how people could have such different beliefs, and how we are to live together despite those differences. A PhD in Science and Technology Studies, supervised by a political scientist, sent me on the path to diagnosing what ails American democracy, and what the cure might be.
This book is a classic. I recommend it to all my students. While the events discussed are dated: Three Mile Island, silicone breast implants, the Exxon Valdez oil spill, I found the lessons to be perennial.
Lawrence Susskind and Patrick Field show that when companies or government agencies focus on defending themselves during a crisis and fail to take responsibility, public confidence is only further eroded. I really enjoyed that, in the end, Dealing with an Angry Public is a practical guide to restoring and keeping trust, one that professionals in nuclear energy, public health, and other controversial fields would do well to read and understand.
Some portion of the American public will react negatively to almost any new corporate initiative, as Disney discovered when it announced its plans to build an historical theme park in Virginia. Similarly, government efforts to change policy or shift budget priorities are invariably met with stiff resistance. In this enormously practical book, Lawrence Susskind and Patrick Field analyze scores of both private and public-sector cases, as well as crisis scenarios such as the Alaskan oil spill, the silicone breast implant controversy, and nuclear plant malfunction at Three Mile Island. They show how resistance to both public and private initiatives can…
Conflict and disagreement have always interested me. I was a middle child, so I naturally fell into the role of peacemaker. But I also had strong opinions, and I always thought I knew the right answer. The pursuit of education, love, and a career brought me to rural Montana, an Asian metropolis, and everywhere in between. These experiences deepened my fascination regarding how people could have such different beliefs, and how we are to live together despite those differences. A PhD in Science and Technology Studies, supervised by a political scientist, sent me on the path to diagnosing what ails American democracy, and what the cure might be.
Despite ever louder calls to “follow the science,” vaccine skepticism only seems to be rising.
Maya Goldenberg’s arguments helped me see why handwringing over the “war on expertise” fails and how we could do better. She shows that the crisis is rooted in declining public trust of medical institutions. Vaccine Hesitancy helped open my eyes to a critical fact: Medical skepticism is a rational response to a history of research scandals, corporate misconduct, and discrimination.
I honestly believe that had public officials paid attention to books like Vaccine Hesitancy, the government’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic would not have torn Americans apart.
The public has voiced concern over the adverse effects of vaccines from the moment Dr. Edward Jenner introduced the first smallpox vaccine in 1796. The controversy over childhood immunization intensified in 1998, when Dr. Andrew Wakefield linked the MMR vaccine to autism. Although Wakefield's findings were later discredited and retracted, and medical and scientific evidence suggests routine immunizations have significantly reduced life-threatening conditions like measles, whooping cough, and polio, vaccine refusal and vaccine-preventable outbreaks are on the rise.
This book explores vaccine hesitancy and refusal among parents in the industrialized North. Although biomedical, public health, and popular science literature has…
At five years old, Kasiel was found with the pointed ends of his ears cut off. Despite that brutal start, he’s lived twelve peaceful years with the man who took him in. Keeping his hair long over his mutilated ears helps him hide the fact that he is Vanrian, a…
I’ve been doing research on polarization for most of my career as an economist and have focused on affective polarization in US politics since 2015. As a behavioral economist, I’m interested in how false and biased beliefs contribute to affective polarization. As a microeconomist I’m also generally interested in economy—not “the economy,” but the efficient use of resources—and affective polarization leads to a lot of wasted time and resources. This happens in politics at all levels, and in relationships of all types—neighbors, colleagues, spouses, siblings—as we all know from experience. So, I’m hoping to try to understand this bias better and cut down on it where we can.
This book is quite different from the others on my list in that the author is a total outsider to politics: Elwood is a former professional poker player.
But it’s the book that resonates with me the most as it directly makes the case that affective polarization is bad for the country and is to a large extent misguided—and citizens across the spectrum should actively try to overcome and fight it. Elwood writes informally and engagingly while still referring to tons of academic research and tackling many thorny recent issues in detail.
If there was one book that I would ask my most polarized fellow Americans to read carefully this would probably be it. Poker champs tend to be astute observers of human psychology—think Annie Duke and Maria Konnikova—and Elwood maintains this tradition.
This is a book about our American divides by Zachary Elwood, host of the psychology podcast People Who Read People. Learn more about this book and its author at www.American-Anger.com.
"I can’t think of anyone I’ve seen who better practices what they preach, who better lives their ideals about depolarization. His book has an earnest, vulnerable, plainspoken style which parallels his speaking style in his podcast. He seems throughout to anticipate negative reactions from readers on both the left and the right..." - from a review by David Foster at KnowTheSystem.org
America is deeply divided. We don't just disagree on…
From an early age I have been drawn to dark themes in stories. I always wanted to hear the dark fairy tales when I was a kid. My mother is from Finland originally, so I was weaned on Finnish folk tales and the Finnish mythology, the Kalevala, which has very many dark stories. Being a graphic novelist myself, I tend to favor morally ambiguous, darker broken characters in my stories. Happy characters make for boring stories I believe. There needs to be conflict for there to be drama. And there needs to be drama to make interesting stories.
An amazing personal tale of someone who went to high school with, what was to become, infamous serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. What makes it so good, in my opinion, is, that it doesn’t become sensationalist in any way. It clearly shows how a vulnerable, very disturbed child could fall through the cracks in 70’s America. It is drawn in a cartoony style, which helps to create a distance from the reader to the incredibly dark and sad subject matter. It works amazingly well as it is told from the perspective of Dahmer’s classmates. Well recommended!
My Friend Dahmer is the hauntingly original graphic novel by Derf Backderf, the award winning political cartoonist. In these pages, Backderf tries to make sense of Jeffery Dahmer, the future serial killer with whom he shared classrooms, hallways, libraries and car rides. What emerges is a surprisingly sympathetic portrait of a young man struggling helplessly against the urges, some ghastly, bubbling up from the deep recesses of his psyche. The Dahmer recounted here, although universally regarded as an inhumane monster, is a lonely oddball who, in reality, is all too human. A shy kid sucked inexorably into madness while the…
Twenty-one years ago, I moved off the grid. As a city-dweller who didn't even go camping, I'd never considered myself a country woman, but I felt called to the woods. I wanted to learn practical skills like how to split wood and bake bread, and I wanted to reduce my carbon footprint. Now, because of our lifestyle, we don't run microwaves, toasters, or dishwashers, and it’s been 20 years since I’ve had a clothes dryer. Living this way has changed me. My relationship with the environment has evolved over the years, and I don’t think I’ll ever stop learning about the different ways experiences in nature can help us humans to grow.
I love how this book starts—a young mother escaping her seemingly perfect life in the middle of the night, wearing a nightgown with infant in tow. Rachel Clayborne drives through the night to her grandmother’s lake house in northern Wisconsin, where we learn all the ways that being reasonable has led her to a miserable life.
Hassinger is particularly skilled at describing those intimate moments between a nursing mother and her young, and her protagonist, Rachael, is achingly aware of what she gave up to gain this wonderful experience of motherhood. One of my favorite scenes between Rachel and her first love, Joe, culminates with him telling her, “Did it ever occur to you that you can’t always get what you want? Even if you know what that is?” I love a story that grapples with that.
Undone by motherhood, judged by her husband, thirty-two-year-old Rachel Clayborne flees with her baby in the middle of the night for the one place on earth that's been her refuge: her grandmother's lakehouse in northern Wisconsin. Hoping to reconnect with a former, healthier self, she instead faces a confused and dying grandmother, her ever-present nurse who seems bent on thwarting each of Rachel's desires, and a changed ex-boyfriend-her first and most passionate love. As a constant rain threatens the nearby dam, Rachel struggles to discern what's happened to the past, who she's become, and what kind of a life she…
Resonant Blue and Other Stories
by
Mary Vensel White,
The first collection of award-winning short fiction from the author of Bellflower and Things to See in Arizona, whose writing reflects “how we can endure and overcome our personal histories, better understand our ancestral ones, and accept the unknown future ahead.”
In the ‘60s, everyone was reading—or claiming to have read—Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. I faked reading it, to appear cool. The idea of a road trip, though—characters running away, running toward, or often both—and the self-discovery that ensues—was so intriguing, I made it the heart of the novel I first drafted decades ago. I wrote about a middle-aged woman who flees her life to find a lost love and her lost youth, then put the manuscript away. For 30 years. When I retired from my social work career, I pulled it from the closet, revised it, and became an author at 74.
When this astonishing debut novel about a complicated mother-daughter relationship came out, I wondered if the author had met my mother. Because Adele August believes there’s nothing for her in her small Wisconsin town, she sets off for Los Angeles with her twelve-year-old daughter and a dream—Ann will be a child star; Adele will make a wealthy marriage; they’ll live the lives they were meant to. Simpson’s writing is gorgeous: “My mother and I should have both been girls who stayed out on the porch a little longer than the rest… who strained to hear the long-distance trucks on the highway... girls who looked at the sky and wanted to go away… but who finally sighed, and calling the dog with a mixture of reluctance and relief, shut the door and went home.” Reality can’t live up to Adele’s delusions; mother-child roles are often reversed; but love underlies this tangled…
A national bestseller—adapted into a movie starring Natalie Portman and Susan Sarandon—Anywhere But Here is the heart-rending tale of a mother and daughter. A moving, often comic portrait of wise child Ann August and her mother, Adele, a larger-than-life American dreamer, the novel follows the two women as they travel through the landscape of their often conflicting ambitions. A brilliant exploration of the perennial urge to keep moving, even at the risk of profound disorientation, Anywhere But Here is a story about the things we do for love, and a powerful study of familial bonds.
I’m a writer who grew up in the Midwest, moved away for a while, and has now raised my own kids here. I love reading other writers' takes on what kinds of stories they see unfolding here. As I get older, I realize that great stories can grow out of the ground anywhere, with the right amount of sunshine, darkness, and water.
This is another book that rings deep and true for me.
The writing is amazing, and the book is full of quirky characters who have secrets. When those secrets start to come out, the people have to deal not only with the pieces of their current lives but also with starting their past ones back together.
One summer evening, Lib Hanson is confronted by her painful past when Matt Marlow, the forty-year-old son she abandoned as an infant, shows up on her porch. Fiercely independent, Lib has never revealed her son's existence-or her previous marriage-to her husband, Jack. Married nearly three decades but living in separate houses (to the confusion but acceptance of their neighbors), they enjoy an ease and comfort together in small-town Anthem, Wisconsin. But Jack is a stickler for honesty, and Lib's long-dormant secret threatens to unravel their lives.
When ten-year-old Charlie Taylor arrives at Jack's workshop shortly thereafter, he's not the first…
My favorite books as a child were the ones where kids went off on wild, impossible adventures alone, figuring things out, learning important lessons, and finding they were more capable than they thought. Wisdom, truth, insight, inspiration… those are the treasures found in these fantastical places. I’ve written (and told) stories all my life, but it wasn’t until I was in my fifties that my goal of publishing a book was realized. And now I have four more coming out (Lord willing!) within the next year and a half. It’s never too late. Unless you’re dead, then you blew it. So don’t stop trying, whatever your goals are.
While again, it’s not a magical world, it might as well have been. I was transported and transfixed to a different time and place. I could smell the linen baking dry in the sun as it hung in the open air and open fires that crackled and sparked as bacon sizzled on a cast iron pan. I shivered as they woke up one morning covered in a blanket of snow. I tasted the Christmas orange that was received with such joyful excitement. It made me want to like fruit–which, sadly, didn’t stick.
More importantly, it made me recognize the beauty of being grateful for things I took for granted. The mark of a good story is if you want to read it again as an adult, and I’ve read and reread this series more than once.
Classic tales by Laura Ingalls Wilder about life on the frontier and America's best-loved pioneer family.
Inside the little house in the Big Woods live the Ingalls family: Ma, Pa, Mary, Laura and baby Carrie. Outside the little house are the wild animals: the bears and the bees, the deer and the wolves. This is the classic tale of how they live together, in harmony mostly, but sometimes in fear ...
The timeless stories that inspired a TV series can now be read by a new generation of children. Readers who loved Anne of Green Gables, Little Women, and Heidi…
After her mother is killed in a rare Northern Michigan tornado, Sadie Wixom is left with only her father and grandfather to guide her through young adulthood. Miles away in western Saskatchewan, Stefan Montegrand and his Indigenous family are displaced from their land by multinational energy companies. They are taken…
I’ve only ever lived in small Midwestern towns. I grew up there, raised my kids there, recovered from a divorce there, remarried there. I’ve had the same best friends for 40 years. I’ve paid and bartered for my classmates’ trade services. I’ve argued with them in churches and cafes, rooted for and against their kids at high school basketball and football games all over the state. We’ve celebrated and buried each other’s loved ones. I’ve run hundreds of miles of Wisconsin trail, soaked in her waters, marveled at her sunsets. It’s as home to me as my own body, and I’ll never tire of reading about it.
I was working part-time at an independent bookshop in 2008 when this book arrived in the latest shipment. In addition to the title—named for Driftless Region near where I grew up—the author’s personal comeback story was a novel in itself: Iowa Writers Workshop graduate Rhodes published three books in quick succession in the 1970s, then promptly fell off the face of the earth until, decades later, fledgling Milkweed Editions tracked him down and learned he’d been paralyzed in a motorcycle accident but was still very much alive (and writing) in a small farmhouse in rural Wisconsin. Hooked, I read the book—and was moved to my core.
Nobody captures the particular quirkiness, heart and faith of the people that make up tiny Wisconsin communities better than Rhodes.
“A fast-moving story about small town life with characters that seem to have walked off the pages of Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology.”—The Wall Street Journal
The few hundred souls who inhabit Words, Wisconsin, are an extraordinary cast of characters. The middle-aged couple who zealously guards their farm from a scheming milk cooperative. The lifelong invalid, crippled by conflicting emotions about her sister. A cantankerous retiree, haunted by childhood memories after discovering a cougar in his haymow. The former drifter who forever alters the ties that bind a community. In his first novel in 30 years, David Rhodes offers…
