Books like The Unforgiven — picked by fans

I love this book because of the strange and wonderful 10-year-old female protagonist, a white girl who is “rescued” from Kiowa captivity on the Texas frontier in 1870, a time of Indian raids and pervasive anarchy.

This girl was assimilated into her Indian family and considers her “rescue” a kidnapping; she remembers almost nothing of her family of origin. She is icy-veined, fearless, and creatively violent. The scene where she improvises ammunition from hundreds of dimes (yes, coins) blew my mind.

From this book, I learned about how whites (especially children) who were captured by Indians quickly abandoned their former lives and usually did not want to return if given the opportunity. The language is spare, tough, and beautiful. I did not want this book to end.

This book introduced me to the gritty world of Los Angeles police detective Harry Bosch. I love Bosch’s smarts and toughness, yet beneath his hard exterior lurks a sensitive heart. He is fond of saying, “Everybody counts, or nobody counts,” and he means it.

Whether the victim is a rich businessman or an impoverished drug addict, Bosch pursues justice with the tenacity of a bulldog. Not only that, he makes tough choices with an ironclad sense of right and wrong. After reading it, I devoured everything Michael Connelly has written. I’m that fan who pre-orders his next book as soon as the announcement hits my inbox.

An atypical Western, I loved its unusual, yet believable plot.

A drifter, George Briggs, is hired to bring four women, maddened by the bleakness of the Nebraska plains, east to civilizational care.

Briggs fulfills his contract, guiding them through the threat of Indian attacks and other challenges to safety. A feeling pervaded the story that Briggs had been given one shot at elevating himself above an otherwise unremarkable life and he came through. This is a feature that I love in almost any story–the idea of redemption.

I love to believe that potential exists within me.

A deceptively simple story with subtle social commentary, I loved how the author offered a coming-of-age story about a rural Scot eventually exposed to a wider world and its temptations.

Self-conscious of his puniness as a child, Geordie develops into a behemoth through strength training, his strength carrying him to the Olympics. I loved how Geordie ultimately parried worldly temptations, guided by his moral strength and sense of what was most important in life.

I was also enamored of the story as it struck close to home in terms of my own sense of childhood powerlessness and what I did to combat it.  

This book puts the concept of ethics in negotiations front and center. It is a must-read because ethics in negotiation are essential not only for getting to the contract – but how you will address the business decisions long after the parties come to a formal contract. For me, an ethical framework is a crucial foundation for any business and for contracting. In fact, they are so essential our research at the University of Tennessee advocates contracting parties create a Statement of Intent that formally embeds a commitment to six guiding principles that combined, help contracting parties make more ethical decisions. If you ever wondered what is fair in negotiations, pick up this book; or if you scratched your head when you thought something was not fair, pick up this book. Either way, the insights will help you develop better contracts. 

Baruch Spinoza was the philosophical flower of the Dutch Golden Age. Bertrand Russell called him the "noblest and most lovable of the great philosophers", and I am certainly not going to disagree. Like many of the innovators of the Golden Age, his ideas still seem fresh. Expelled from his Jewish community in Amsterdam for his ‘heresies’, we now find his conception of God as nature highly congenial. We probably share his dislike of ritual and perhaps aspire to his renunciation of materialism. His advice neither to fear nor to hope when it concerns things we can do nothing about is as good now as it was when it appeared in his most famous work, Ethics, in 1677.

Spinoza’s philosophy is hard to approach in the original – his arguments are rigorously constructed in the style of ancient Greek mathematics proofs. But Steven Nadler, as well as producing a towering biography… show more.

This is one of the most imaginative, exciting, and accessible books of philosophy to appear in the past 25 years. Not all of it is about empathy, but one especially terrific chapter is. Fricker argues that we do people a “hermeneutical injustice” when our language and concepts leave no room for a ready way of understanding their experience (her example is how people responded to women who were sexually pressured in the workplace, before the phrase "sexual harrassment" was coined). And the cure for this problem, she says, is empathy:  opening ourselves to the person telling us about their experience, and trying to feel our way into how they understood it, even if we are initially baffled by it.

Paul Thompson is Professor of philosophy and holds the Kellogg chair in agricultural ethics at Michigan State University.

He was the first philosopher to explore the ethics of agriculture. It might be more correct to say he was the first to explore the lack of a specific ethical foundation for agriculture. He is a prolific writer and has published several books and numerous papers on agricultural ethics.

I have met him, read his work, and have benefited from his knowledge.

In the first two sections of Groundwork, Kant derives his great idea that humanity must always be treated as an end and never merely as a means from both common-sense and more abstract philosophy. These are the most inspirational pages in all of modern philosophy.

There are many translations of Kant’s book, but in the Cambridge University Press volume of Kant, Practical Philosophy (1996), one can also read Kant’s application of his basic idea to personal and political morality. He remains a valuable guide even in our troubled times.

This is another important contribution to our understanding of Spinoza as a moral philosopher. It is a denser read than the first three books, but fascinating nonetheless for those already with a little Spinoza under their belt. Rather than concentrating on just the latter parts of the Ethics, where most scholars interested in Spinoza’s moral philosophy focus and where we find the mature discussion of the “free person” who lives under the “guidance of reason”, Sangiacomo is especially concerned with the evolution of Spinoza’s moral thought from his earliest writings to his final, uncompleted work. He considers tensions within, and pressures upon, Spinoza’s understanding of the “Supreme Good” and how to achieve it, and the changes that that account consequently undergoes. Sangiacomo’s thesis is thus both historical and philosophical.