The most recommended books on nonviolence

Thomas Merton is perhaps the best-known and most beloved monk in history. His 1948 best-selling autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, inspired millions of people. He went on to write over 100 books on every aspect of the spiritual life, as well as racism, war, poetry, and peacemaking, while spending his days in his Kentucky monastery, until his untimely death in 1968. The third of Jim Forest’s biographies, Living With Wisdom sums up Merton’s story using all his writings, journals, and letters, along with many photos, and offers the best overview of Merton’s shining example of contemplative peacemaking. It will inspire everyone to go deep into the spiritual roots of peace and nonviolence and become authentic peacemakers.  

Building from the scope of world revolutionaries and revolutions, authors build a compelling idea that nonviolent revolution is something everybody may – and should try at home. Balancing the fine line between solid, historically founded cases and an “academic world” and something which is both accessible and inspiring for the common reader. See numerous cases of common people pushing for massive change, and getting inspired.

Along with authors like Alyssa Cole and Talia Hibbert, Courtney Milan is a luminary of romance’s liberatory wing. If love can conquer all, let’s aim it at something worthwhile! This book takes one of humanity’s deepest nonviolent instincts, the desire for one another, and shows how it gives people the strength to support each other through the hard work of building a better world. I want to recommend all of Milan’s books, but from a nonviolence perspective, The Devil Comes Courting stands out because of the way it also wrestles with what reconciliation (the last step in Kingian nonviolence) really means.

Markowitz starts with the iconic images of Gandhi – Father of the Indian Nation, the modern saint, the apostle of nonviolence, and so on – and unpicks them to show how selective they are. He examines with great insight the way that Gandhi’s image was created in the West from the 1920s onwards, with him often being compared to Christ. Attenborough’s influential film on Gandhi is reviewed in revealing ways. He also examines the many biographies of Gandhi, showing how they have tended to focus on aspects of his message and fail to bring out the huge complexities of the man. 

He shows how Gandhi’s reputation as a serious political and economic thinker was shaped in the West first by pacifists and alternative thinkers, and much later by academic social scientists. He also provides some excellent analysis of Gandhi’s career in South Africa and India. The book is full of… show more.

I love reading sci-fi YA books and this book was really talking to me. Peaceful contact or not?

Reading this book by the author – her first – it reminded me of the much-loved movie Avatar, which I also love.

Like in the movie, when Captain Melissa and her crew finally arrived at the new planet, to contact the people living there, they looked peaceful. They find out, that they are telepathic, not only the people, the plants, and animals as well.

After the people of the planet perform a play, they find out, what was really going on there. Not everything you see can be trusted when you look behind the scenes. From the outside, it was all peaceful, but when you touch the plants, they speak to you.

This is a collection of short and accessible essays by writers and activists who practiced and wrote about non-violence. The essays are thought-provoking and hopeful.

They show us alternative ways of thinking and living that are more critical than ever in a world wracked by violence. The news can be debilitating and leave people feeling hopeless. These essays are inspiring and show us how people found alternatives in the past during difficult historical times.

This book is linked to my own work and writing on non-violence, which discusses the spiritual dimensions of non-violence and why this matters for producing lasting change and justice. 

In the 1940s, journalist John Hersey wrote an eye-opening expose on the effects of the atomic bombing of Japan with Hiroshima. In doing so, Hersey began to shape the already-contested memory of why America dropped “the bomb.” Following in Hersey’s footsteps, in the early 1980s Jonathan Schell penned a straightforward warning about the atomic age. After interviewing scientists, policymakers, and intellectuals, he began to pen an accessible essay exposing of what would happen to earth after a nuclear war. The result was Fate of the Earth, and it went on to become one of the most impactful pieces of non-fiction of the decade. It helped to validate scientist Carl Sagan’s controversial “nuclear winter” hypothesis, and inspired an untold number of the public to engage in antinuclear activism. To appreciate the early 1980s as a period of intense nuclear fear, this is a must-read.

We often forget that Dr. King was also a pastor in addition to his civil rights work. However, these two roles were intertwined.

Strength to Love is a collection of sermons that address the revolutionary effect of God’s love on our lives. Receiving holy love motivates us to love our neighbors in many ways, including seeking justice and taking action for their well-being. God’s love is transformative, and seeing this framed in the non-violence philosophy of social change is an inspiring, motivating illustration. 

Pinker’s masterpiece is hugely important for two reasons.

First, it well makes the case that the world is the most peaceful it has ever been. This is so despite what you see on TV. Second, he explains four reasons why: rule of law, rule of reason, rule of women, and international trade.

I have spent the last forty years teaching and promoting international trade. The fundamental truth of human relations is: The first persuasion was coercion; the first sophistication is exchange. We are almost through with coercion in this 21st century.

Readers of Pinker’s book will walk away with a greater understanding of what it takes to create peace in the modern geo-political climate.

The author is perhaps best known as an instigator of the “microhistory” field of study (of which I’m an avid fan and sometime practitioner). But he’s also a chronicler of protest, including one book on the worldwide demonstrations of 1968 and another, Ready for a Brand New Beat, that notes the civil rights impact of Martha and the Vandellas’ "Dancing in the Street". I’ve often felt that I was born late, just missing so many of the cultural convulsions that have informed my writing. With Non-Violence (2006) Kurlansky gives us a historical foundation for the anti-war movement of the Vietnam era.