Books like The Resilience Dividend — picked by fans

This book grabbed me with the horrific opening scene and made me think about how this planet is moving into a climate-threatening situation.

I loved the way Robinson made me feel what it was like to live in a heat-ravaged world. I liked the main character, the head of the Ministry for the Future, because she was believable. She was smart, compassionate, and politically savvy, the kind of person you could trust in this position.

I like that the climate threat is the canvas upon which the characters need to react. For me, it is very relevant to our current situation.

More than any other writer, Flynn explained the value and need for resilient critical infrastructure. He distinguished between foreseeable and unforeseeable threats, and made clear that we can reduce the risk and impact of both. Since 9/11, anything purporting to discuss protection/security and resilience was skewed to terrrorism, giving scant consideration to more fundamental changes in our world. Flynn brought this broader perspective to the fore, and I would like to believe he influenced political and academic thinking. I fear he was the Cassandra to the business community, who are only now starting to understand the risks they face. I made this book core reading for all the infrastructure courses I teach. It is clear, simple, and sets each concept in context with an unambiguous call to action.

There are some excellent books on risk like Bernstein's Against the Gods. The majority are insipid reads and over-simplistic. This little book stands out for its simple, clear, condensed overview of risk in theory and practice. It doesn't try to simplify to the point of complicating the subject; it presents the inherent complexities without drama. I made it required reading for my risk & resilience students and employees. It offers a sense of how risk changes with interpretation and how the perception can itself influence the occurrence and impact. If this idea of risk perceptions and how it influences decision-making strikes a chord with you, you might wish to explore more of Baruch Fischhoff's work—it is utterly fascinating and will forever change how you buy vehicle insurance and salmon.

Not easy reading, it may well slide down your "must read" list. However, resilience is an ecological concept. C.S. Holling, co-author of Panarky, coined the term resilience in a 1973 ecological science paper. The practical application of resilience, specifically operational resilience, and its relationship to adaptation and protection, has evolved greatly over the last 20 years. Nonetheless, Panarchy gets to the raw ingredients of these multi-domain ideas. It remains an invaluable touchstone for those exploring nature-based solutions as tools of protection and resilience planning for disaster risk reduction. It is a fascinating reminder of how quickly the world and emerging practices can change, yet the fundamental concepts endure. It reminds me of the essential value of books and how reading and internalizing an argument is so much more intellectually nourishing than today's tendency to graze information.

This is the obvious recommendation, but a ‘must read’ nonetheless. 

Whereas Cialdini’s text focuses on our response to messaging (on risk or otherwise), Ripley’s book focuses on our response to the incident itself (…and so where the former leaves off, the latter picks up).

The Unthinkable gives readers a deep look into our own psyche to prepare us for how we are likely to response when faced with physical or mortal danger. Nobody knows exactly how they will respond in a high-hazard incident because so many instinctual processes take over.

But as Ripley so effectively explains, it is possible to know what these phenomena look like so that when we are experiencing them we can adjust accordingly to be more effective responders.

Amanda Ripley’s approachable journalistic style effectively turns a collection of meaningful risk management messages into a hard-to-put-down page-turner. 

Pynchon’s Against the Day stages a form of pantheism in which everything bears some form of consciousness, which, like nature, has no border. Cyprian considers that “the earth [might be] alive, with a planet-shaped consciousness”; and it is “as if silver were alive, with a soul and a voice.” Pynchon’s characters live in a pantheistic universe in which everything is part of nature and alive—where the wind tries to wake them and the world has a consciousness. Pynchon updates Melville in Mardi, in which, e.g., a character asks, “Think you there is no sensation in being a tree? Think you it is nothing to be a world? [The world of] Mardi is alive to its axis.” In ATD, “the steel webwork was a living organism”; even an “egg yolk [can be] perhaps regarded as a conscious entity.” Consciousness can’t be confined to people: all entities have the… show more.

We can all think of cities that have been hit by some horrible events – envision Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, hit by atomic weapons. Or the Oklahoma City bombing that leveled a whole block. Yet these cities not only survived, but thrived. In chapters written by different experts from around the world this book shows how resilient cities are to shocks and disasters. I especially liked the way that the authors focus on the way that we memorialize and remember the past, trying to learn lessons from shocks and bringing those emotions and learning into the present.

McEwan is one of my favorite writers, and as I was reading this, I was trying to figure out why I love his work so much.

There's just something so immersive about it: the way he uses language, the vividness of his characters, the descriptive and emotional accuracy and density of his moment-by-moment storytelling.

What We Can Know is a love story interwoven with a tense, high-stakes "thrillerish" plot powered by a heart-pounding narrative drive and sense of cold inevitability similar to those found in the author's other great novels, like Amsterdam and Atonement.

What sets this book apart from the others is its speculative, futuristic angle. To say more would be to spoil the fun, so I'll leave it there. Read this book, you won't regret it!

I don’t really consider myself a history buff, but I do love hearing a funny story where someone screws something up, and, apparently, I really love a funny story where someone screws something up that has immense historical consequences.

And, boy howdy, there is apparently no shortage of screw-ups causing major inflection points in history. I certainly laughed out loud multiple times while reading this book, and one time in particular I was so animated that my dog was concerned enough to come check on me.

This is no cosy dystopia. I was shocked by the violence and ruthlessness of the protagonists. This is a prescient novel, written 64 years before COVID-19, about a virus that emerges from China and ravages the world. Instead of infecting humans, the virus kills all grass. Brutal decisions are made, and any sense of law and order disappears.
We were a gnat’s whisker from this happening in the UK, and I was impressed with Priest’s vision. The book cracks along at a good pace, too.