Skip to main content

Non-Fiction Reading

These are the non-fiction books that have most informed my thinking on the topics I write about:

The Climate Crisis

Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, All Art is Ecological, and Dark Ecology - Timothy Morton

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate - Naomi Klein

Regenesis: Feeding the World without Devouring the Planet - George Monbiot

The Shock of the Anthropocene - Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz

The Uninhabitable Earth - David Wallace-Wells

The Ecological Other: Environmental Exclusion in American Culture - Sarah Jaquette Ray

Rainforest: Dispatches from Earth's Most Vital Frontlines - Tony Juniper

When the Rivers Run Dry: The Global Water Crisis and How to Solve it - Fred Pearce

Planet on Fire: A Manifesto for the Age of Environmental Breakdown - Laurie Laybourn-Langton and Mathew Lawrence

Activism

Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds - adrienne maree brown

The Fire Next Time - James Baldwin

Pedagogy of the Oppressed - Paolo Freire

Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology - David Graeber

Black Resistance to British Policing - Adam Elliot-Cooper

Rest is Resistance - Tricia Hersey

The Autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr. - Martin Luther King Jr., Edited by Claybourne Carson

The Power of Nonviolent Resistance - M. K. Gandhi

The Intersectional Environmentalist - Leah Thomas

Why You Should be a Trade Unionist and Always Red - Len McCluskey

How to Blow Up a Pipeline - Andreas Malm

Common Sense for the 21st Century - Roger Hallam

Feminism

all about love: new visionsthe will to change: men, masculinity and loveAin't I a Woman?, and Outlaw Culture - bell hooks

Feminism, Interrupted: Disrupting Power - Lola Olufemi

On Violence and On Violence Against Women - Jacqueline Rose

The Transgender Issue: An Argument for Justice - Shon Faye

Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men - Caroline Criado Perez

Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women - Kate Manne

None of the Above: Reflections on Life Beyond the Binary - Travis Alabanza

Racial Justice

Don't Touch My Hair - Emma Dabiri

Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire - Akala

Why Indigenous Literatures Matter - Daniel Heath Justice

The Autobiography of Malcolm X - Malcolm X and Alex Haley

Freedom is a Constant Struggle - Angela Y. Davis

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave - Frederick Douglass

Capitalism

The Communist Manifesto - Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

No Logo and The Shock Doctrine - Naomi Klein

Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? - Mark Fisher

Who Really Feeds the World? The Failures of Agribusiness and the Promise of Agroecology - Vandana Shiva

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism - Shoshanna Zuboff

Platform Capitalism - Nick Srnicek

Private Island: Why Britain Now Belongs to Someone Else - James Meek

Art

Ways of Seeing - John Berger

The Prometheans: John Martin and the Generation that Stole the Future - Max Adams

How to Write an Autobiographical Novel - Alexander Chee

The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable - Amitav Ghosh

How Plays Work - David Edgar

Obedience, Struggle and Revolt: Lectures on Theatre - David Hare

The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within - Stephen Fry

Science, Maths and Technology

The Order of Time, Seven Brief Lessons in Physics, Reality is Not What it Seems, and Helgoland - Carlo Rovelli

Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality - Manjit Kumar

Behave: The Biology of Humans at our Best and Worst - Robert Sapolsky

Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy - Cathy O'Neill

Imagining Numbers: (particularly the square root of minus fifteen) - Barry Mazur

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Things Got Bitter

 Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon is sunbathing in Cyprus. Once invited to address the Oxford Union , the millionaire (who now goes by the name 'Tommy Robinson') is lounging in a five-star hotel, scrolling through his phone, sending messages to thousands of ardent followers. He had fled the UK after breaching a court order, after losing a libel battle in 2021. This wealthy, powerful, criminal terrorist, fleeing supposed political persecution in his home country in order to reap the benefits of a safer place abroad, is a figurehead of the anti-Muslim violence currently burning across the UK. He doesn't speak the local language, he's got a history of criminally stalking and harassing a woman , assaulting a police officer, and his libel case was against a 15 year-old. Naturally, this man, and all his followers, believe that powerful foreign terrorists are a great danger to our children, and that the best way to protect women is to close borders. Were the government of Cyp...

Things Can Only Get Bitter

About a week ago, I got a knock on the door. A man from the Labour party was here to ask if I'd given any thought to who I'd be voting for in the upcoming general election. I said "Green, this time." The man said, "I see - and had you maybe thought about why you're not giving your vote to Labour?" "I'm more on the Corbyn side of the party than the Starmer side, politically," I replied. The man looked about to give a pre-prepared response, and then stopped. He sighed, shook his head, and said: "Me too..." And this appears to be where the British Left stands, in the run-up to the election. On the one side, those ready to vote for a party who are currently throwing everything they've got at electing just  4 MPs into parliament; and on the other side, disillusioned Corbyn supporters suddenly stating that principles don't matter as much as winning elections. This election is about 'stopping the Tories'; the problem is, ...

Finally, a President with Some Conviction(s)!

 It should go without saying: this election result is really bad, actually. Kamala Harris, proud supporter of ongoing genocide though she may be, enthusiastic participant in the police state and generally vapid vessel for status-quo Democratic complacency though she may be... she's not a rapist with an endorsement from the KKK . In fact, her entire campaign, based stupidly, fatally, on the one selling point - "I'm not Trump" - does at least highlight the raw fact that Trump is indeed a particularly repulsive bit of bile for the American electorate to spew up into the blood-soaked walls of the "White House". Those who voted for Harris as a means to avoid the full-blown meltdown of democratic order Trump will inevitably unleash are not, actually, all terrible people who don't care a jot for the lives of Palestinians - many will be principled and active organisers against Israel who simply fear for what will happen to trans people, migrants, all women in Am...