Books like The Ship of Dreams — picked by fans

I’ve always thought of this book as a gay “bodice-ripper,” though a bit on the darker side. And it’s the darkness that haunts me still some two decades after first reading it.

The love story, if one can call it that, verges on and then outright plunges into brutal obsession between the two main male characters, and even though I knew I shouldn’t, I rooted for them.

Beyond the intensity of the relationship between the main characters, the writing, steeped in the history of the English Revolution, is wonderful–strong and brutal and raw and visceral. I’ve returned to this novel repeatedly over the years, and its impact never lessens. Truly a marvel of a novel. 

Enormously useful to me while researching for Blasted Things, was The Great Silence: 1918-1920 Living in the Shadow of the Great War. Taking us through chapters entitled feelingly with nouns: from Wound and Shock, through Resignation, and finally to Hope, Trust and Acceptance, Nicolson provides a chronological account of the period between the 1918 Armistice and the burial of the Unknown Soldier in 1920. It’s addictively readable, the history enriched by the recounted experiences of ordinary people from all walks of life, giving a rounded sense of the time, filled with detail about culture, music, the movies, fashion, class and so much more. This book provides a marvellously concrete and detailed account of the sensibility of a short and fascinatingly complex period.

January 1901: Queen Victoria is dead and her subjects nervously await a new king and a new century. Two families—the aristocratic Colemans and middle-class Waterhouses—meet at their adjoining plots in London’s elegant Highgate Cemetery. Their five-year-old daughters form an immediate bond. The lives of the two families entwine over the next decade as they struggle with social change, betrayal, and grief. Surprisingly, Highgate offers a release from the confining decorum of their everyday lives. The two girls play among the graves with a gravedigger’s son, while adult members of their households indulge in forbidden liaisons there. Chevalier’s crisp prose creates rich character portraits and vivid historical scenes with only a few strokes. This slim novel resonated in my mind long after I finished it. 

Another nonfiction book, Healing Resistance does a splendid job showing the philosophical connections between nonviolence on an interpersonal level and nonviolent social change movements. Drawing on the tradition of Kingian nonviolence, this book is a useful starting place for anyone who wants to understand what nonviolence is and isn’t as well as how it works. It’s also chock full of recommendations for other books and is a great jumping-off point for further reading. Sometimes nonviolence doesn’t look like what we expect.

Leave it to Anand to throw down and tell it like it is!

I found this book SO refreshing, given my work in philanthropy and fundraising, and how much people operating in this world can fall into making excuses for extremely bad (and ridiculous) behavior. 

I read this as part of a book club with several colleagues and friends from work (all of whom worked in or adjacent to philanthropy), and our discussions about each chapter ended up feeling like therapy sessions.

I super appreciated Anand’s singular ability to call things out for what they are, and I feel like the book made a lasting impact on me in terms of emboldening and sharpening my analysis of how we can and should reimagine how we fund.

Because Lear is a philosopher and a psychoanalyst, his book has a more academic flavor than the others on my list. But because he’s a philosopher and psychoanalyst attentive to lived experience, his book draws us into the devastating loss suffered by the Crow Nation, and especially by Plenty Coups, their last great chief, when their culture was stripped from them. This was, of course, an irreparable trauma from which it was impossible to recover. But instead of trying to retrieve what was unrecoverable, Plenty Coups turned to the unknowable, unprecedented future with the “radical hope” that it could be charged with transcendent meaning for his people. Perhaps the spiritual life, especially in these crisis-ridden days, consists in learning how to practice such hope.

The basic laws of ecology should be taught to every child in the world. Food webs, watersheds, the hydrological and carbon cycles, population dynamics, and sustainable harvest are fundamental to our survival. 

Catton’s book explores population ecology and applies these lessons to human beings. He rejects racist historical tropes and misinformation alike, laying out the reality of human overshoot of the planet’s carrying capacity. This book is sobering, and should be required reading for every person in any position of leadership in the world today.

Historians rightly stress that social movements and broad forces, often decades in the making, shape history, but Weisbrot and Mackenzie note that many of the monumental reforms of the 1960s that continue to define our society today resulted primarily from decisions made by liberal presidents, members of Congress, and the Supreme Court. 

They vividly convey the confidence in government as a force for good that lay at the core of liberal thinking. They are sympathetic to much of the liberals’ efforts, yet they also acknowledge their shortcomings.    

Joanna Macy is an environmental activist and a scholar of Buddhism and deep ecology. Her writing is at once direct and gracious, inviting us to explore new ways of understanding ourselves and our world. Central to her message of hope is what she calls the "Great Turning," a revolution in which humankind will turn from industrial capitalism, which seeks infinite growth through extraction, to a sustainable civilization of compassion and interdependence. This new edition of Active Hope, co-authored with Chris Johnstone, acknowledges that the Great Turning may in fact happen in the midst of a massive societal and ecological collapse, a "Great Unravelling." Yet, even in the midst of collapse, we can find deep hope by investing heart, mind, and strength in the Great Turning. "What's the best we can hope for? And how can we be active in making that more likely or even possible?"

Cambodia, Joel Brinkley writes, is the most dangerous country in the world. The first one falls in love with it, then it breaks one’s heart. Cambodia’s Curse is a book of two tales. Brinkley’s retelling of the war years is a little revisionist but the chapters on the post-war reconstruction, the dirty politics, the lack of opportunities for ordinary people, and the venality of the government that remains in place to this day rightly and masterfully lay the blame for countless missed opportunities to create a more equitable society both into the hands of the international community’s attempts to create ‘democracy’ and Hun Sen’s regime.