The subjects that make up the humanities aren’t niceties of an age gone by. They provide us with vital information and perspective we will need to survive as a species.
In late January, Insight Labs is conducting a strategic session with the leadership of state humanities councils in Illinois and Indiana. To prepare, we asked Labs alumni and other thinkers what one book they would have everyone read to make the world a better place.
Eighty people from various backgrounds answered our query. We displayed the responses along with commentary by the respondents in chronological order at oh-humanities.tumblr.com.
As the titles came in, we aggregated them into the “syllabus” below. As a document, it is not meant to be comprehensive, nor prescriptive. Instead, it is a snapshot of the themes that emerged as a cross-section of intelligent, educated individuals chose books to help confront the problems of the world. Note that the titles are organized by the value the respondent saw in each work, rather than its absolute value.
Six percent of respondents offered books that don’t fit within the humanities and would be more likely found under the Business or Self-help sections. These were excluded from the list below.
The name of the person or people who suggested each text follows in parentheses. A green name indicates an Insight Labs alum; click on the name to learn more about their involvement with our organization.
The Individual in Society
Candide, or Optimism by Voltaire (Jeff Leitner, Insight Labs)
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (Troy Henikoff, Excelerate Labs)
Little Blue Truck by Alice Shertle (Dan Lyne, World Business Chicago)
Oh, the Places You’ll Go by Dr. Seuss (Tim Jahnke, Elkay)
Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow (Katy Klassman, Curated Group)
We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families by Philip Gourevitch (Tanarra Schneider, Manifest)
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (Prajwal Ciryam, Partisans.org)
Recognizing and Remaking the Social Order
Walking with the Wind by John Lewis (Scott Curran, Clinton Global Initiative)
Race Matters by Cornel West (Deborah Harrington)
Wealth and Democracy by Kevin Phillips (Jim Hirsch, Chicago Sinofonietta)
The Art of War by Sun Tzu (Zoe Quan, Qingchu Thinking)
The Trouble with Principle by Stanley Fish (Sean Hogan, College of Lake County Illinois)
Half the Sky by Nicholas D. Kriston and Sheryl WuDunn (Mark Achler, Redbox)
History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides (Murray Lemond, MacArthur Foundation)
The Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire (Geoffrey Banks, Illinois Humanities Council)
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (Kelli Christiansen, bibliobibuli)
If the World Were a Village by David J. Smith (Sarah Elizabeth Ippel, Academy for Global Citizenship)
The Dressmaker of Khair Khana by Gayle Tzemach Lemmon (Andrea Peskind Katz, Great Thoughts)
The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs (Barbara Koenen, City of Chicago)
The Mass Psychology of Fascism by Wilhelm Reich (Jamil Khoury, Silk Road Rising)
Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card (Carolyn Chandler, Manifest)
The Life You Can Save by Peter Singer (Jonathan Wilber)
Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc (Francesca Jarosz, The Mind Trust)
The Human Mind and How It Works (or not)
Lincoln’s Melancholy by Joshua Wolf Shenk (Joe Ballard, Clinton Global Initiative)
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce (Allan Platt, Clareo Partners)
Seeing and Understanding Beauty
The Diary of “Helena Morley,” trans. by Elizabeth Bishop (Jeannie Vanasco)
The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster (Jason Loewith, National New Play Network)
The Sacred Pipe by Black Elk (Carlos Velázquez, Illinois Humanities Council)
Finding or Forging a Path to Truth
Confessions by Augustine (Santiago Ramos, Boston College)
The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien (Andie Thomalla, Facing History and Ourselves)
Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth (Brian Waniewski, Institute of Play)
Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald (Alison Cuddy, Chicago Public Media)
Dubliners by James Joyce (Larry Van Meter, Langston University)
Hope for the Flowers by Trina Paulus (Nancy Goldstein, Compass X Strategy)
The Giver by Lois Lowry (Courtney Klein Johnson, HATCH)
The Inner Voice of Love by Henri J. W. Nouwen (Judy Harvey, Press Publications)
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho (Adam Ollendorff, Will Hoge Band)
The Graduate by Charles Webb (Randy Guillot, Cannon Design)
Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond (Liam Krehbiel, A Better Chicago)
The Good Life and Deciding How to Live It
On the Shortness of Life by Seneca (Howell Malham, Insight Labs)
The Little Prince (Liora Bresler, University of Illinois)
Practical Wisdom by Barry Schwartz and Kenneth Sharpe (Pablo Montagnes, University of Chicago)
The Road by Cormac McCarthy (Ryan Lewis, Illinois Humanities Council)
“The Second Coming” by W. B. Yeats (Kristina Valaitis, Illinois Humanities Council)
Siddharta by Herman Hesse (Patrick O’Connell, Restore Community Church)
Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl (Al Gini, Loyola University; Anna Belyaev)
Meno by Plato (Mitch Jones, Food & Water Watch)
“Two Trains Running” by August Wilson (Kate Lipuma, Writers’ Theatre)
Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein (Amanda Lannert, Jellyvision)
Self-Reliance and Other Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson (Alan Jacobson, ex;it)
Humankind in the World
Out of the Silent Planet by C. S. Lewis (Andrew Benedict-Nelson, Insight Labs)
The Sacred Balance by David Suzuki (John Syvertsen, Cannon Design)
The Lorax by Dr. Seuss (Meagan Adele Lopez, SocialKaty)
The Complete Stores by Franz Kafka (Jim Jacoby, Manifest)
Grappling with Changing Times
Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky (Bryan Campen, Manifest Digital)
The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt (Kelvin Chin, Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice)
The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis (Nigel M. de S. Cameron, Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies)
The Shock of the New by Robert Hughes (Cheryl Delio-Malham, Studio DelCorpo)
Empathy and the Lack Thereof
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (Frank Maugeri, Redmoon Theater)
Plays Well with Others by Allan Gurganus (Matt Elwell, ComedySportz)
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater! by Kurt Vonnegut (Ryan Blitstein, SCE)
Ubu Roi by Alfred Jarry (Deanna Shoss, Jewish Child and Family Services)
Plainsong by Kent Haruf (Jaye Hilton, Weber Shandwick)
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (Ruth Lednicer, Chicago Public Libraries; Keira Amstutz, Indiana Humanities Council)
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (Jim Newcomb, Boeing)
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman (Katie Watson, Northwestern University)
The Great Human Traditions (and What to Do With Them)
The Bible (Mark Hattas, Geneca; Paul Nelson, St. Vincent Indianapolis Hospital)
The Torah (Rabbi Debra Nesselson)
The Complete Works of Shakespeare (Angel Leitner, 10,000 Blankets)
Glencoe World History (Emerson Spartz, Spartz Media)
The Power of Myth (Stephanie Pace Marshall, Illinois Math & Science Academy)
The Elements of Euclid (Arun Srinivasan, Fieldglass)
The New York Times Guide to Essential Knowledge (Gerald Haman, SolutionPeople Innovation)
Creation by Gore Vidal (Narimon Safavi)
The Ambitions of Curiosity: Understanding the World in Ancient Greece and China (Graham Webster, EastWest Institute)
Notable Dissents
I’d have to say this blank sketch book/notebook.
The increased reflection (deep thinking, random musings, scribbles, capturing quotes and passages from other readings, etc) that this blank book would invariably foster and cultivate has countless ripple effects.
These kinds of books were once common place in our society. In fact, they were called just that: common place books. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonplace_book Why did this fall out of fashion? We were on to something so grand!
The books/writers that would be on my larger list (if I were allowed such a thing) are actually reflective, repository books of this nature: The Pillow Book, by Sei Shonagon. (Japanese,11th century) Les Essais by Montaigne. (French, 16th century) How powerful it is to see that regardless of gender, age, demographics, or century born, we are all uncannily the same inside.
If anything can change, unite and elevate the world, I believe it is that message.
Mae Hong, Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors:
This was a very challenging and interesting question that I wrestled with for quite a while, and in the end, my answer is that I do not agree with the premise of the question and therefore have no book to recommend. I truly do not mean to sound snarky but here is my rationale:
I found myself mulling over such possibilities as “The Bible” or “Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.” I could reasonably make a case for each, but in the end, I do not believe a single piece of writing, idea, framework or view of the world and its problems can “Solve Them All.”
To think that it is possible grossly underestimates the complexity of the world and the uniqueness of its 7 billion inhabitants. I think problems can only be “solved” through the messy, iterative, unpredictable practice of combining/picking-choosing/testing/failing/tweaking/improvising of many ideas and visions.