You get plenty of time to read in prison. So far, I’ve read almost 70 books, so being asked to choose my top ten titles is a tough ask. Those I’ve chosen have stayed with me not just because they’re “a good read” but because they’re the most impactful and important: books that hit me in the gut, opened up new understandings, and helped shape a vision for what the hell we do next. Our job is to take these beautiful pieces and turn them into a living whole — a culture, a strategy, a programme that breaks through. The future ahead is terrifying. And yet, in some head-fuck way, that very terror makes the possibility of a breakthrough feel electric.
So here goes…
Recommendations
1. The Matter with Things by Iain McGilchrist
Let’s start with the foundations – the ground-we-stand-on stuff. No question: one of the most important books I’ve read in prison is McGilchrist’s The Matter with Things.
McGilchrist gets the gravity of our situation. He’s laser-focused on the core wisdoms we need: seeing the whole not just the parts; recognising that everything is process and flow; and that the divine and secular, spirit and material, aren’t enemies but complements. He builds from science out into religion and mysticism, shattering the notion that modern science and ancient spirituality are in conflict. They aren’t. We need both to survive.
2. Theology and Social Theory by John Milbank
This foundational text challenges the arrogance of secular reason and invites us to see theology as a serious intellectual tradition capable of reimagining society. It’s about recovering the sacred as central to political and cultural life. Milbank invites us to think beyond binaries and embrace multiple ways of seeing and knowing. These kinds of transcendent modes are critical to any serious revolutionary project in the 21st century.
3. Modernity and the Holocaust by Zygmunt Bauman
Bauman is one of the greats — a Polish-Jewish socialist and towering sociologist who ended up in the UK after the war. His work rips apart the smug objectivity of social science, which pretends morality is just a social construct and socialisation is always good. In reality, as Bauman shows, socialisation created the Holocaust.
In Nazi Germany, it was conformity that allowed genocide — not a lack of it. Morality didn’t come from society, it came from within individuals who refused to go along with it. Bauman zeroes in on “proximity” — the distance from the suffering of others that enables barbarism. It hit me hard because my own research at King’s College London focused on the same thing, completely independently.
Proximity breaks down dehumanisation. Disconnection allows it to flourish. We need social designs that build closeness, community, and care. Bauman saw that modernity — with its complexity and instrumental rationality — was leading us to disaster. We see it now as the death project of global carbon emissions.
4. Soldiers of God in a Secular War by Sarah Shortall
It’s not exactly a fashionable title, but it’s one of the most important books I’ve read. So important, I read it twice in prison.
It’s a deep dive into how 20th-century Catholic thinkers responded to the Church being booted out of state power in the late 1800s. That crisis forced a radical return to early Christian traditions — ones that refused the idea of religion being pushed into the private, symbolic, or subjective.
The core message? If God is God, then God has to be everywhere — including politics. The world can and must be remade with the divine present in every moment. The challenge is how to make that real. Catholic social movements made a decent go of it, creating a “personalist” alternative to fascism and Marxism, though not without complications. Still, the impulse to re-enchant the world with the wonders of spirituality— that’s where it’s at.
5. Lev Shestov: Philosopher of the Sleepless Night by Matthew Beaumont
Now for something a bit more fun (in a Russian existentialist sort of way). Shestov is your go-to guy for destroying all illusions. He’s anti-necessity, anti-certainty, anti-bullshit — and Beaumont brings him alive beautifully.
Fleeing the Russian Revolution, Shestov ended up in interwar Paris, raging against science, reason, and the pretensions of philosophy. You can know nothing that matters. Words are a distraction. Anything can happen. He’s the dark prophet of unpredictability, showing why neoliberalism — with its fantasies of objectivity, control, and progress — is completely deranged. Shestov knew it wouldn’t end well. And now here we are.
6. States and Social Revolutions by Theda Skocpol
This is the go-to academic take on how revolutions happen. Skocpol isn’t messing around. Her point: elites always screw things up eventually, and revolutions become inevitable. They’re not made, they come.
It’s eerily prescient. Just like before the French Revolution, today’s ruling class is gutting the state — refusing to pay for it, grinding down its capacity. Sound familiar? Hello, Mr Trump.
7. The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran by Charles Kurzman
If Skocpol gives us the structural take, Kurzman gives us the chaos. His study of the 1979 Iranian Revolution shows how everything can change overnight.
Everyone thought the Shah’s regime was unshakable. But it fell like a house of cards. Mobilisation happened because mobilisation happened — a cascade, a feedback loop, with religious students kicking it off. They weren’t trying to win or avoid death — they acted from transcendental belief. And once the tipping point hit, the whole country joined in.
It’s a reminder: just because a regime looks stable doesn’t mean it is.
8. Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira
This one packs a punch. Machado de Oliveira comes from an indigenous Brazilian background, had a brutal early life, and went on to become a top academic in Canada. Hospicing Modernity is a raw, original fusion of two worlds — and a brutal indictment of our dying culture.
The book challenges the entire structure of Western thought, including its radical wings. It forces us to reckon with grief, death, and the end of the world as we know it — not as a metaphor, but as lived reality. A painful but essential read.
9. The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle
Let’s end with something practical. I read a bunch of books on deliberative democracy and citizens’ assemblies. Most of them were — let’s be honest — painfully dull. All stuck in the narrow worldview of academic political science: humans as little utility-maximising machines.
What actually matters — like how people come to love and trust each other through deliberation — is shoved into the footnotes. Seriously.
But then I found The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle. What a joy. Straight-up insights into how teams work: people respond to encouragement and vulnerability; teams beat solo geniuses; leaders do best by being open and human. It’s all there — the culture we need to build revolutionary movements.
10. Your turn…
All the elements for a new civilisation are already here. The new is waiting to be born, but it’s weighed down by the dying old. Don’t we all feel it? So it’s your turn to write the stories of the Revolution in the 21st century, because it’s an incredible time to be alive.
Get me out of prison, please — there’s so much to do.
Poem of the Month
Extinction Rebellion, London Occupation
by Leslie Tate
(With acknowledgments to Adlestrop, Edward Thomas)
I remember
where we nested on trucks
with our talons drilled into metal
as we sent up wild cries calling to our children,
and they gathered,
rising from their bedrooms
and playgrounds and schoolrooms
to fold their wings around the wounds
and consecrated body of Earth our host.
How we made tarmac into garden,
seeding ourselves in the night
and easing up next morning
through drains and cracks
to release soft balsamic fragrance
and love-repeat blooms
unlocking who we are.
Yes, I remember how we offered ourselves,
sitting cross-legged on stony ground
held together by our songbooks and testimonies
and the rising tide of quiet
on the bridge and in the Square,
and in the silent wait at the Circus for leaf-boat rescue.
And in that minute, as I watched, the air became an Arch,
the sun told the truth; the traffic stopped
and the trees and protestors stood tall
raising a dream-song space with their bodies,
while all the birds
of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire
sang emergency.
This poem appears in the collection Ways to be Equally Human in which Tate tells the story of coming out as a non-binary person, from being ‘othered’ in gendered toilets to stepping up on stage and action with Extinction Rebellion. The book takes us on a journey through childhood dreams and gender dysphoria into personal growth. Tate comments this poem is, “A reflection on the April XR occupation of London. It took a long time to write; I didn’t read it until I was MC-ing a stage during the July and October uprisings.” It evokes the mood of the Spring London Rebellion in 2019 in an act of remembrance. This free verse poem reflects the peace brought to the centre of town, weaving into it the other life of plants and birds and lyrically expresses the sense of belonging and becoming that protest can bring.
Leslie Tate is a non-binary author and University of East Anglia graduate who interviews creative and community-active people weekly on radio and in writing at leslietate.com. Leslie played the lead role in Heaven’s Rage, a film screened at international film festivals. Leslie hosts Extinction Rebellion stages and has been shortlisted for the Bridport, Geoff Stevens and Wivenhoe poetry prizes. Ways To Be Equally Human is Leslie’s fourth book.
Contact our Librarian if you would like themed book lists to support teaching about climate change.
We’re always looking for contributors to our growing collection of literature to explain and explore the climate and biodiversity emergency. If you’re a writer or poet and would like to share your work or ideas, please get in touch! Contact mattroselibrary@gmail.com for prose or poetsrebelxr@gmail.com for poetry.