Paying penance for procrastination. One unexpected upside to doing these top 5 book reviews years later is that I can see which ideas have really stuck with me.
1. Aphro-ism by Syl and Aph Ko: Explores the connections and interrelations between the structure of racial and species oppressions through a series of essays and letters between two sisters. Syl and Aph render what could be an academic and obtuse topic into pithy essays, resulting in a book that is not only eye opening, but fun to read. The idea I’ve found to be the most enduring is that oppressions are anchored between the idea of a “full” person – usually a straight, white, young, able-bodied man – and the furthest pole away from a full person, which Syl and Aph make out to be the animal.
2. Make it Stick by Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III. Mark A. McDaniel: One of my favorite books for structuring learning. The big takeaway is that you should mix up what you practice (i.e. switching between different types of problems) and space out when you practice. Doing so will feel more difficult, but the learning will be more enduring. The rest of the book expands on these ideas and offers some other supporting material. Reading and rereading parts of Make it Stick has changed the way I practice and engage with books.
3. Her Rage Becomes Her by Soraya Chemaly: Do you want a comprehensive guide to all the barriers and frustrations that women have to deal with in modern American society? Then this is the book for you. The most striking idea that Chemaly presents is that anger is the emotion of change, making a call for women to embrace their anger and find healthy ways to channel it. Chemaly helped me reconceptualize my relationship to anger and hopefully empathize more with the anger of women.
4. Lost Connections by Johann Hari: Hari proposes that a major cause of an increase in depression in modern life is a lack of community and connection. Depression is not simply a malfunction of brain chemistry – it can be a rational response to a depressing situation. Lost Connections made a major contribution to my understanding of the current defaults for housing and community as deeply flawed.
5. Immunity to Change by Robert Keegan: The key point Keegan makes is that we resist changing because our current behaviors are serving some goal exceptionally well. Or as Keegan puts it, we have one foot on the acceleration and one foot on the brake. Changing behavior, then, becomes a matter of understanding the assumptions and needs underpinning the current behaviors and challenging them through experiments. I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of asking what purpose a behavior serves.
Honorable Mention: Systems Thinking for Social Change by David Peter Stroh: Systems thinking offers a way to model systems (which are, loosely, an interconnected set of forces and states – a feedback loop is a simple type of system) that goes beyond a linear, story-based understanding. I appreciated Systems Thinking for Social Change for introducing me to systems thinking and showing some ways in which it can be applied to social change.
Other Contenders: None
The Pragmatic Philosopher 