Basic Books Gifts for Grads
Explore Basic’s motivational and inspirational books for your graduate to take on the world.
An acclaimed philosopher and new father argues that engaging with beauty can make life worth living.
“Lyrical…refreshingly off-beat…A performative case for beauty’s power to render life not just worth living, but worth savouring.”—Times Literary Supplement
An Instant New York Times Bestseller
An Oxford philosopher makes the case for “longtermism” — that positively influencing the long-term future is a key moral priority of our time.
“This book will change your sense of how grand the sweep of human history could be, where you fit into it, and how much you could do to change it for the better. It’s as simple, and as ambitious, as that.”—Ezra Klein
“A Field Guide to a Happy Life provides a user-friendly manual for applying Stoicism to daily life in the twenty-first century.”—Donald Robertson, author of How to Think Like a Roman Emperor
“Pigliucci’s book does an excellent job writing about each stage of wrestling with a philosophical system, starting with what I’d call the “life hack” stage and progressing through the interrogation stage, the reconciling-of-internal-contradictions (especially between the earlier Greek Stoics and the later Roman Stoics) stage and, finally, into the actual adoption of Stoic exercises, of which he offers a large menu.”
—Molly Young, New York Times
“One of the most gripping, suspenseful, intense stories anyone will ever read.”—Chicago Tribune
“The most brilliant and lucid analysis of virtue and well-being in the entire literature of positive psychology. For the reader who seeks to understand happiness, my advice is: Begin with Haidt.”
—Martin E.P. Seligman, University of Pennsylvania and author of Authentic Happiness