Social Change

This Naked Mind offers a new, positive solution. Here, Annie Grace clearly presents the psychological and neurological components of alcohol use based on the latest science and reveals the cultural, social, and industry factors that support alcohol dependence in all of us. Packed with surprising insight into the reasons we drink, this book will open your eyes to the startling role of alcohol in our culture and how the stigma of alcoholism and recovery keeps people from getting the help they need.

Because We Say So presents more than 30 concise, forceful commentaries on US politics and global power. Written between 2011 and 2015, Noam Chomsky's arguments forge a persuasive counternarrative to official accounts of US politics and policies during global crisis.

In This Changes Everything Naomi Klein argues that climate change isn’t just another issue to be neatly filed between taxes and health care. It’s an alarm that calls us to fix an economic system that is already failing us in many ways. Klein meticulously builds the case for how massively reducing our greenhouse emissions is our best chance to simultaneously reduce gaping inequalities, re-imagine our broken democracies, and rebuild our gutted local economies.

Most of what we know about how ideas spread comes from best-selling authors who give us a compelling picture of a world, in which "influencers" are king, "sticky" ideas "go viral", and good behavior is "nudged" forward. The problem is that the world they describe is a world where information spreads, but beliefs and behaviors stay the same. When it comes to lasting change in what we think or the way we live, the dynamics are different: beliefs and behaviors are not transmitted from person to person in the simple way that a virus is.

There is one question Canadians have asked Jody Wilson-Raybould more than any other: What can I do to help advance reconciliation? This has been true from her time as a leader of British Columbia’s First Nations, as a Member of Parliament, as Minister of Justice and Attorney General, within business communities, and when having conversations with people. Whether speaking as individuals, communities, organizations, or governments, people want to take concrete and tangible action that will make real change. They just need to know how to get started, or to take the next step.

A five-time Moth GrandSLAM winner and bestselling novelist shows how to tell a great story - and why doing so matters. Whether we realize it or not, we are always telling stories. On a first date or job interview, at a sales presentation or therapy appointment, with family or friends, we are constantly narrating events and interpreting emotions and actions. In this compelling book, storyteller extraordinaire Matthew Dicks presents wonderfully straightforward and engaging tips and techniques for constructing, telling, and polishing stories that will hold the attention of your audience (no matter how big or small).

In May 2016, Fort McMurray, the hub of Canada's petroleum industry and America's biggest foreign supplier, was overrun by wildfire. The multi-billion-dollar disaster melted vehicles, turned entire neighborhoods into firebombs, and drove 88,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon. Through the lens of this apocalyptic conflagration—the wildfire equivalent of Hurricane Katrina—John Vaillant warns that this was not a unique event but a shocking preview of what we must prepare for in a hotter, more flammable world.

In The Precipice, Noam Chomsky sheds light into the phenomenon of Trumpism, exposes the catastrophic nature and impact of Trump's policies on people, the environment, and the planet as a whole, and captures the dynamics of the brutal class warfare launched by the masters of capital to maintain and even enhance the features of a dog-eat-dog society to the unprecedented mobilization of millions of people against neoliberal capitalism, racism, and police violence.

All of us constantly broadcast information to others, even when we don't say a word. Sales professionals broadcast to potential clients in a way that wins new business. Managers broadcast to their teams about projects. Colleagues broadcast to one another about available resources. The messages we choose to broadcast shape others' beliefs in the potential for success and their ability to create positive change.

This stimulating collection of essays in an autobiographical framework encompasses Gerda Lerner's theoretical writing and her organizational work in transforming the history profession and in establishing Women's History as a mainstream field.

The New York Times best-selling author of The No Asshole Rule reads his guide on how to preserve civility, sanity, and success when facing a business world full of difficult people. Since The No Asshole Rule became a national best seller a decade ago, Robert Sutton has been asked, in a thousand different ways, the best way to deal with an asshole. This new guide presents Sutton's signature prescriptive advice.

As a bilingual, biracial man, straddling Black and white, English and French Canada, Stephen Dorsey lives in a world of dualities. In his deeply personal and insightful debut, he offers listeners intimate and unfiltered access to his lived experience of anti-Black racism around the world, including Canada, the United States, and Europe, focusing on his formative years growing up in 1970s Montreal as a Black child in a white family headed by a racist stepfather, and details his personal awakening inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement.

The author of the legendary best seller Influence, social psychologist Robert Cialdini, shines a light on effective persuasion and reveals that the secret doesn't lie in the message itself but in the key moment before that message is delivered.

For business leaders and public figures in any arena, The Speed of Trust offers an unprecedented and eminently practical look at exactly how trust functions in our every transaction and relationship - from the most personal to the broadest, most indirect interaction - and how to establish trust immediately so that you and your organization can forego the time - killing, bureaucratic check - and - balance processes so often deployed in lieu of actual trust.

Not long ago, Naomi Klein had just such an experience—she was confronted with a doppelganger whose views she found abhorrent but whose name and public persona were similar enough to her own that many people confused her for the other. For a vertiginous moment, she lost her bearings. And then she got interested, in a reality that seems to be warping and doubling like a digital hall of mirrors. It’s happening in our politics as New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers find common cause with fire-breathing far right propagandists (all in the name of protecting “the children”).

It turns out giving up your "right" to be offended can be one of the most freeing, healthy, simplifying, relaxing, refreshing, stress-relieving, encouraging things you can do. It's a radical, provocative idea: We're not entitled to get offended or stay angry. The idea of our own "righteous anger" is a myth. It is the number one problem in our societies today and, as Dallas Willard says, Christians have not been taught out of it. But what if Christians were the most unoffendable people on the planet?

Michael Shellenberger has been fighting for a greener planet for decades. He helped save the world’s last unprotected redwoods. He co-created the predecessor to today’s Green New Deal. And he led a successful effort by climate scientists and activists to keep nuclear plants operating, preventing a spike of emissions. But in 2019, as some claimed "billions of people are going to die", contributing to rising anxiety, including among adolescents, Shellenberger decided that he needed to speak out to separate science from fiction.

Instead of thinking about social justice as a process that starts with changing people's minds, Embodied Activism understands our bodies—how we feel in them and relate to others through them—as the sites of transformation.

A paradigm-shifting book in the vein of Sapiens that brings a crucial Indigenous perspective to historical and cultural issues of history, education, money, power, and sustainability - and offers a new template for living. As an indigenous person, Tyson Yunkaporta looks at global systems from a unique perspective, one tied to the natural and spiritual world. In considering how contemporary life diverges from the pattern of creation, he raises important questions. How does this affect us? How can we do things differently?

A social psychologist reveals how to nudge local cultures toward positive structural change by moving people from individual action to collective action.