Here are 100 books that The War for Kindness fans have personally recommended if you like
The War for Kindness.
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In all my travel books, I’ve followed my intuition to a destination or into a subject, pairing emotion with intellectual curiosity, travelling to try to know a people, place, idea, or time. So the pivot to navigating the ‘border' between life and death felt like an obvious extension. It’s a frontier that we'll all have to pass, and we’ll not have to worry about forgetting your passport. I began my search for my wife Katrin as a skeptic and ended it with faith in the existence of an afterlife. In sharing this journey, I hope others may be helped to prepare for and to accept the inevitable loss of those whom we love.
Although the therapeutic value of psychedelics is not yet proven, and real risks remain, a new generation of scientists and therapists is today repurposing hallucinogenic drugs.
How to Change Your Mind is a history of psychedelics and a compelling portrait of what could be the future of consciousness. This mind-altering book helped me—a psychedelic novice—to find the courage to embark on a journey to the frontiers of the human mind, and to become re-enchanted with the world.
"Pollan keeps you turning the pages . . . cleareyed and assured." -New York Times
A #1 New York Times Bestseller, New York Times Book Review 10 Best Books of 2018, and New York Times Notable Book
A brilliant and brave investigation into the medical and scientific revolution taking place around psychedelic drugs--and the spellbinding story of his own life-changing psychedelic experiences
When Michael Pollan set out to research how LSD and psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms) are being used to provide relief to people suffering from difficult-to-treat conditions such…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
Awe can make me feel simultaneously insignificant and fully, freshly alive. Witnessing a total solar eclipse or reading a story of remarkable human endurance, it’s easy to feel awestruck. It takes more patience and practice to experience awe in the subtle and ordinary, but it’s there too, in abundance, if I can see the mystery in the familiar. As a writer, longtime meditator, and lover of the natural world, I believe we can’t live meaningfully without wonder. We’re meant to be lit up, humbled, and curious about this life. To me, the world is magic, and we’ve been called on stage to participate in the trick.
This book helped me think more deeply about the relationship between awe and other affirming emotional states, like happiness. (Favorite quote: “It is a civic duty to give people joy.”) It also reminded me, repeatedly, that awe is available for free, all around, all the time. And not just the goosebumps kind.
Sometimes, accessing awe is as simple as approaching whatever I encounter as if for the very first time. Keltner’s book is a look under the hood that doesn’t diminish or deaden its subject but rather revels in it.
"Read this book to connect with your highest self.” —Susan Cain, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Bittersweet and Quiet
“We need more awe in our lives, and Dacher Keltner has written the definitive book on where to find it.” —Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Think Again
“Awe is awesome in both senses: a superb analysis of an emotion that is strongly felt but poorly understood, with a showcase of examples that remind us of what is worthy of our awe.” —Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and author of…
I have dedicated four decades to guiding couples toward deeper intimacy and understanding. My passion for relationship dynamics has driven me to teach couples courses for over 30 years, experiences from which my book listed below was directly inspired. Witnessing countless relationships blossom through improved communication and emotional connection fuels my enthusiasm. I have selected books for this list that personally moved and enlightened me, each contributing unique insights into cultivating richer, more fulfilling relationships and sparking genuine transformations in myself and the couples I've supported.
I love how honest David Brooks is about his own challenges with opening up to people and really leaving them feeling seen and heard. As he reviewed many of his own inadequacies, it allowed me to review the ways in which I might be falling short of my own ideals to leave each person I meet feeling seen and heard.
Since I teach people how to do this in my own workshops, I was constantly able to add David’s insights to my own.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A practical, heartfelt guide to the art of truly knowing another person in order to foster deeper connections at home, at work, and throughout our lives—from the author of The Road to Character and The Second Mountain
As David Brooks observes, “There is one skill that lies at the heart of any healthy person, family, school, community organization, or society: the ability to see someone else deeply and make them feel seen—to accurately know another person, to let them feel valued, heard, and understood.”
And yet we humans don’t do this well. All around us…
A poisonous maiden, a Daoist sex cult, and a violent insurgency.
The polyandrous Yan family in China's rural Shaanxi Province takes in two carpenter brothers. When one brother is convicted of murder after killing their neighbor in a dispute, a constable threatens to expose the family's rumored polyandry and extorts…
I am an Associate Professor of political science at Colgate University. I grew up in a home with tremendous ideological diversity and rigorous political disputes, which caused my interest in learning more about why and how people become their political selves. This interest developed into an academic background in the field of political psychology, which uses psychological theories to understand the origins and nature of political attitudes. Out of this scholarship, I developed a theory about the relationship between closed minds and partisan polarization, which I examine in my book. Now I am looking for ways to create open minds and foster a less polarized community.
In this book, literary theorist Gary Saul Morson describes the competing ways in which Russian ideologues and novelists answered the “timeless questions” about human nature, fate, and politics. Morson’s analysis clearly shows that novelists and poets allow for much more complexity and nuance in their worldviews than ideologues. The famous Russian writers, in other words, appear to excel in the type of open-minded thinking that I argue is conducive to liberal democratic values.
By reading Morson’s book, one sees clearly the importance of Russia’s literary traditions and how their works inform an open-minded outlook on the timeless questions of human existence.
A noted literary scholar traverses the Russian canon, exploring how realists, idealists, and revolutionaries debated good and evil, moral responsibility, and freedom.
Since the age of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov, Russian literature has posed questions about good and evil, moral responsibility, and human freedom with a clarity and intensity found nowhere else. In this wide-ranging meditation, Gary Saul Morson delineates intellectual debates that have coursed through two centuries of Russian writing, as the greatest thinkers of the empire and then the Soviet Union enchanted readers with their idealism, philosophical insight, and revolutionary fervor.
Morson describes the Russian literary tradition as…
I remember experiencing a true nervous breakdown once in high school. I had to leave campus in tears, filled with familiar sorrows and emotions I didn’t recognize as my own. Something was happening and I couldn’t put my finger on it, and it was utterly disorienting. Luckily, a spiritual mentor lived right down the street. She was quickly able to diagnose my experience. “You’re a very strong empath,” she said. I had to learn what that meant, so I devoted many years to learning as much as I could about the empathic experience from psychological, physiological, anthropological, and metaphysical lenses alike.
Oh boy, this monumental book certainly expanded my empathetic mind! The greatest lesson? The fact that true empathy requires a compassionate response. That was an eye-opener! This book has really stuck with me. I remember being entrenched and enthralled with every page while on a writing retreat. I can’t thank the author enough for helping me fine-tune my own books about the empathic experience!
Similar in tone to her well-known The Language of Emotions, this book doesn’t dive too deeply into metaphysical perspectives. Instead, this book is primarily grounded in psychology, history, and science. That is the very reason why we highly sensitive souls benefit from books like these; we are admittedly gullible and easy to manipulate if our empathy is uncontrolled! Understanding our abilities through a grounded psychological lens such as this is crucial for our emotional understanding.
What if there were a single skill that could directly and radically improve your relationships and your emotional life? Empathy, teaches Karla McLaren, is that skill. With The Art of Empathy, she teaches us how to perceive and feel the experiences of others with clarity and authenticity-to connect with them more deeply and effectively.
Informed by current insights from neuroscience, social psychology, and healing traditions, this book explores:
Why empathy is not a mystical phenomenon but a natural, innate ability that we can strengthen and develop * How to identify and regulate our emotions and boundaries * The process of…
Michael Patrick Lynch is Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Provost Professor of the Humanities at the University of Connecticut. His books have been translated into a dozen languages and include On Truth in Politics: Why Democracy Demands It, The Internet of Us, True to Life (Editor’s Choice, The New York Times Sunday Book Review), and Know-it-All Society (winner of the 2019 George Orwell Award). Lynch’s work has been profiled in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Nature, The Guardian, The Washington Post, and many other publications worldwide; his 2017 TED talk has been viewed nearly 2 million times. He lives in CT with his family and one very philosophical dog.
This book gave me a deeper appreciation of how moral intuitions shape political divisions—not as accidents of ideology but as features of human psychology. Haidt’s metaphor of the elephant and the rider helped me see why rational argument so often fails to persuade across political lines: because reason follows intuition, not the other way around.
His mapping of multiple “moral taste buds”—including authority, loyalty, and sanctity—also challenged the narrow moral frameworks that dominate secular discourse. While I don’t agree with everything—particularly his optimistic lean toward moral equilibrium or his underemphasis on structural power—I admire his effort to move us beyond outrage toward curiosity. It’s a valuable guide for understanding why we talk past one another—and how we might start listening instead.
'A landmark contribution to humanity's understanding of itself' The New York Times
Why can it sometimes feel as though half the population is living in a different moral universe? Why do ideas such as 'fairness' and 'freedom' mean such different things to different people? Why is it so hard to see things from another viewpoint? Why do we come to blows over politics and religion?
Jonathan Haidt reveals that we often find it hard to get along because our minds are hardwired to be moralistic, judgemental and self-righteous. He explores how morality evolved to enable us to form communities, and…
Big Ideas... For Small Businesses
by
John Lamerton,
Big Ideas… for Small Businesses is a straight-talking, no-nonsense guide to growing a small business without sacrificing your lifestyle. Written by a former civil servant turned entrepreneur, the book challenges hustle culture and instead champions the idea of an "ambitious lifestyle business" - one that provides freedom and financial stability,…
Guy Beiner specializes in the history of social remembering in the late modern era. An interest in Irish folklore and oral traditions as historical sources led him to explore folk memory, which in turn aroused an interest in forgetting. He examines the many ways in which communities recall their past, as well as how they struggle with the urge to supress troublesome memories of discomfiting episodes.
A concise and lucid sociological treatise that relates forgetting to the transitions and rapid changes of contemporary urban life, which has eroded the ways in which societies traditionally remembered the past.
Why are we sometimes unable to remember events, places and objects? This concise overview explores the concept of 'forgetting', and how modern society affects our ability to remember things. It takes ideas from Francis Yates classic work, The Art of Memory, which viewed memory as being dependent on stability, and argues that today's world is full of change, making 'forgetting' characteristic of contemporary society. We live our lives at great speed; cities have become so enormous that they are unmemorable; consumerism has become disconnected from the labour process; urban architecture has a short life-span; and social relationships are less clearly…
As an experimental social psychologist, who has conducted years of empirical research on bullshitting behavior and bullshit detection, I’ve found compelling evidence that the worst outcomes of bullshit communications are false beliefs and bad decisions. I’m convinced that all of our problems, whether they be personal, interpersonal, professional, or societal are either directly or indirectly linked to mindless bullshit reasoning and communication. I’m just sick and tired of incompetent, bullshit artists who capitalize by repackaging and selling what I and other experimental psychologists do for free. It’s time the masses learn that some of us who actually do the research on the things we write about can actually do it better.
James Alcock is the only social psychologist I know who could write a clear, accessible, and comprehensive volume on the psychology of belief—particularly how our thoughts and feelings, actions and reactions, respond not to the world as it actually is but to the world as we believe it to be. No matter how much you think you know about beliefs, and no matter what you actually believe, any reader will find surprises in Alcock’s treatise, such as why so many people cling to beliefs that are foolish, self-destructive, and wrong, believing them to be wise, self-protective, and right. Belief convinced me that faulty beliefs, arising from misapprehension about the cause of a disease, misperceptions of an enemy’s actions, misreading a lover’s motive, misconceptions about which, if any, gods are real, can lead to irrational, maladaptive, and sometimes deadly actions.
An expert on the psychology of belief examines how our thoughts and feelings, actions and reactions, respond not to the world as it actually is but to the world as we believe it to be.
This book explores the psychology of belief - how beliefs are formed, how they are influenced both by internal factors, such as perception, memory, reason, emotion, and prior beliefs, as well as external factors, such as experience, identification with a group, social pressure, and manipulation. It also reveals how vulnerable beliefs are to error, and how they can be held with great confidence even when…
Jim Tamm was a Senior Administrative Law Judge for the State of California with jurisdiction over workplace disputes. In that role, he mediated more school district labor strikes than any other person in the United States. Ron Luyet is a licensed psychotherapist who has worked with group dynamics pioneers such as Carl Rogers and Will Schutz. He has advised Fortune 500 companies for over forty years specializing in building high-performance teams. Together they wrote Radical Collaboration and are excited to share this list with you today.
Yale professor Marissa King shows how anyone can build more meaningful and productive relationships based on insights from neuroscience, psychology, and network analytics. She explains that the quality and structure of our relationships has a great impact on our personal and professional lives. Our social connections profoundly affect our experience of the world, our emotions, and our personal and professional success.
'full of wisdom and entertaining anecdotes' The Economist
'fascinating' Financial Times
Social Chemistry will utterly transform the way you think about 'networking.' Understanding the contours of your social network can dramatically enhance personal relationships, work life, and even your global impact. Are you an Expansionist, a Broker, or a Convener? The answer matters more than you think. . . .
One of 2021's Most Highly Anticipated New Books--Newsweek One of The 20 New Leadership Books--Adam Grant One The Best New Wellness Books Hitting Shelves In January--Shape.com A Next Big Idea Club Nominee __________
The problem is not with the actions young women take but with the toxic, sexist conditions they are responding to.
Tanenbaum found, based on six years of interviews with young people ages 14-30, that young women are navigating a culture littered with gendered dress codes, revenge porn, and sexually explicit…
I’m a program host with The Shift Network and have interviewed hundreds of experts on the topics of ancestral healing, mediumship, and the “veil between the worlds.” I was drawn to these topics because of my discoveries of ancestral trauma in my family tree, including an ancient curse and a fiery mine disaster. Eventually, I realized we ALL have generational trauma. Just watch the news—we’re all acting out from inherited trauma, and we need to heal our own stuff in order to heal the global condition. I feel like it’s my life’s work to heal my family’s trauma-based dysfunctions and spread the word to others doing the same work.
Not only do I love Thomas Hübl’s vibe, but I also really appreciate his writing and the way he comprehends the effects of generational trauma. From reading his work, I’m able to see the big picture of humanity and how we must all work together to release global traumas if we’re ever going to get along.
Much of his work focuses on Holocaust victims, survivors, and their families. Even though my family is not directly affected by this horrible chapter in human history, I learned so very much about the dynamics of generational trauma from his work.
What can you do when you carry scars not on your body, but within your soul? And what happens when those spiritual wounds exist not just in you, but in everyone in your life?
Whether or not we have experienced personal trauma, we are all - in very real ways - impacted by the legacy of familial and cultural suffering. Recent research has shown that trauma affects groups just as acutely as it does individuals; it bridges families, generations, communities, and borders. "I believe that unresolved systemic traumas delay the development of the human family, harm the natural world, and…
