So Human an Animal: How We are Shaped by Surroundings and Events by René Dubos
This ground breaking book is a source of ideas that many will say "How obvious!" but forget that it's over forty years old. The success of informed environmentalism can be credited to many brilliant people like Mr Dubos.
The Human Zoo - by Desmond Morris
The Human Zoo examines the nature of civilized society, especially in cities, comparing human inhabitants of a city to the animal inhabitants of a zoo, which have their survival needs provided for, but at the cost of living in an unnatural environment. Morris examines why civilized society is the way it is. He offers explanations of the best and the worst features of civilized society. He examines the magnificent achievements of civilized society, the sublime explorations that make up science and the humanities, as well as the horrible behaviors of this same society such as war, slavery, and rape. This book, and Morris's earlier book The Naked Ape, are two of the early works in the field of sociobiology.
Getting a Grip 2 By Frances Moore Lappe
Why are we as societies creating a world that we as individuals abhor? This is the question at the heart of Getting a Grip 2: Clarity, Creativity and Courage for the World We Really Want. This book shatters tired, right–versus–left dogma and affirms readers' basic sanity — their intuition that it is possible to stop grasping at straws and to grasp instead the real roots of today's crises. Drawing on the latest findings in psychology and anthropology, it addresses topics from the impact of the Obama presidency and the global financial crisis.
A World Waiting to be Born – The Search for Civility By M Scott Peck
This book offers a needed prescription for our ailing society. Our illness is incivility: destructive patterns of self-absorption, callousness, manipulativeness, and materialism so ingrained in our routine behaviour that we do not recognise them. Using examples from his own life, case histories, and dramatic scenarios, Dr. Peck demonstrates how change can be effected and how we and our organizations can be restored to health.
The Act of Creation - Arthur Koestler
It is a study of the processes of creativity and imagination in which Koestler explains that humans are most creative when rational thought is abandoned during dreams and trances. Koestler affirms that all creatures have the capacity for creative activity, frequently suppressed by the automatic routines of thought and behaviour that dominate their lives.
The Center of the Cyclone By John C Lilly, MD
John Lilly gives a sensitive and insightful overview of his work on transcendent consciousness and its ramifications for society. The book looks at the inner life of a dedicated scientist experimenting and exploring inner space - the teeming universe of the human mind!
The Child in the Family By Maria Montessori
This book explains the Montessori philosophy. Emphasising that children from birth on should be treated with respect, the same respect we would have when we have a guest in the house. She talks about the newborn period and one wishes our kids doctors would read it, then she writes about kids and teens and their relationship with their parents.
In this age of instant communication and biotechnology, on this ever-smaller planet, what kinds of problems have we created for ourselves? How do we tackle them in a world where the accustomed methods used by nation-states may be reaching their natural limits? In High Noon, J. F. Rischard challenges us to take a new approach to the twenty most important and urgent global problems of the twenty-first century. Rischard finds their common thread: we don't have an effective way of dealing with the problems that our increasingly crowded, interconnected world creates. Our difficulties belong to the future, but our means of solving them belong to the past.
Person/Planet By Thomas Roszak
Roszak brings together the insights of deep ecology and humanistic psychology. The result is a powerful reassertion of Personalism, the philosophy that has most stubbornly resisted the dehumanising forces of industrial society. As bleak as the environmental fate of the Earth may seem, "Person/Planet" offers a daringly original and hopeful hypothesis: that the Earth herself is already working in the depths of the human psyche to heal our troubled urban-industrial culture.
There is currently an epidemic of 'affluenza' throughout the world - an obsessive, envious, keeping-up-with-the-Joneses - that has resulted in huge increases in depression and anxiety among millions. He asks: why do so many more people want what they haven't got and want to be someone they're not, despite being richer and freer from traditional restraints? And, in so doing, uncovers the answer to how to reconnect with what really matters and learn to value what you've already got. In other words, how to be successful and stay sane.