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Three books in thirteen years, and each one starts the same way: Ripley finds people who came out the far side of something and asks them, in detail, what their body and brain actually did. The Unthinkable (2008) is built on plane-crash survivors, the 9/11 stairwells and a ride in a hurricane simulator, and its finding is that the disaster cliché is wrong — people do not panic, they go quiet, they gather their belongings, they wait for permission. The Smartest Kids in the World (2013) follows three American teenagers through a school year in Finland, South Korea and Poland. High Conflict (2021) tracks a Berkeley lawyer who became a bruising local politician, a Chicago gang leader, a Colombian ex-guerrilla and a synagogue in crisis. She spent a decade at Time covering 9/11, the anthrax investigation and Hurricane Katrina; she qualified as a conflict mediator in 2018; she now co-runs Good Conflict with Hélène Biandudi Hofer and writes for The Atlantic and The Washington Post. The ten writers below are grouped the way her career is: survival, school systems, and the mechanics of a fight.
By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Narrative science · Disasters, schools, conflict · Washington, D.C. · Updated September 2026
Quick answer
If you like Amanda Ripley, the three closest are Laurence Gonzales, whose Deep Survival came five years before The Unthinkable and asks the identical question; Lucy Crehan, a British teacher who did what Ripley did in The Smartest Kids in the World but lived with the teachers instead of the students; and Charles Duhigg, whose Supercommunicators is the nearest thing to High Conflict published since. For the disaster reporting at its most serious, read Sheri Fink. For where conflict resolution actually began, William Ury. And for the writer who thinks the whole premise of ranking school systems is a mistake, Yong Zhao.
10 authors like Amanda Ripley
Where to start if you loved Amanda Ripley
If you loved The Unthinkable, read Laurence Gonzales.
Deep Survival (2003). The same question five years earlier, from the cockpit and the wilderness instead of the stairwell.
If you want disaster reporting at full depth, read Sheri Fink.
Five Days at Memorial. Six years inside one flooded hospital, by a reporter who is also a doctor.
If you loved The Smartest Kids in the World, read Lucy Crehan.
Cleverlands. The same countries, lived with the teachers rather than the exchange students.
If you want the argument against that book, read Yong Zhao.
Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon? The case that the league table is the problem, from someone raised inside the top-scoring system.
If you loved High Conflict, read Charles Duhigg and William Ury.
Supercommunicators for the mechanism, Getting to Yes for where the whole field began.
If you want more reporting like this
My shelf of investigative journalism has the rest.
Frequently asked questions about authors like Amanda Ripley
Who should I read if I like Amanda Ripley?
It depends which Ripley you mean, because her three books are three different subjects. For The Unthinkable, read Laurence Gonzales's Deep Survival, then Sheri Fink and Rebecca Solnit. For The Smartest Kids in the World, read Lucy Crehan's Cleverlands, then Paul Tough, and Yong Zhao for the counter-argument. For High Conflict, read Charles Duhigg's Supercommunicators, Mónica Guzmán's I Never Thought of It That Way and William Ury's Possible. If you only take one, take Gonzales.
What should I read first by Amanda Ripley?
The Unthinkable, and specifically the revised and updated edition published by Harmony on 20 August 2024, which adds material on the pandemic, on the role of social media during emergencies, and on slow-moving disasters such as climate catastrophe. It is the book that shows the method most clearly: survivors, accident investigations, a hurricane simulator, and a finding that contradicts what almost everyone believes about how crowds behave. High Conflict is the one most people are sent to now; The Smartest Kids in the World is the one to read if you care about schools.
Has Amanda Ripley written a new book?
Not a fourth original book, no — but two things have happened that most reading lists have not caught up with. The Unthinkable was reissued in a revised and expanded edition on 20 August 2024 with substantial new material. And on 22 May 2026 MasterClass launched her class The Conflict Playbook, twenty-five lessons running just under an hour, covering the difference between high conflict and healthy conflict, conflict personality types, and what she calls the first five minutes rule. She also writes a Substack newsletter, Unraveled, and co-runs the training company Good Conflict.
Is The Smartest Kids in the World still accurate?
Partly, and the gap matters. The book was published in 2013 and built on PISA, the OECD's three-yearly test of fifteen-year-olds. Since then Finland — the system it treats most admiringly — has fallen a long way: down about 56 points in reading between 2000 and 2022, and about 79 points in mathematics between 2003 and 2022, one of the steepest declines of any participating country. The PISA 2025 results were published on 8 September 2026, covering 91 countries and more than 760,000 students, and Finland is still comfortably above the OECD average in science, at 504 points against an average of 482. So the picture is neither vindication nor collapse. What holds up is the reporting on what a school day feels like in Finland, South Korea and Poland; what has aged is the framing of those countries as fixed models to copy.
What books are like High Conflict?
Charles Duhigg's Supercommunicators (2024) is the closest — same structure, same braid of reported narrative and behavioural research, and it arrives at a similar answer about listening. Mónica Guzmán's I Never Thought of It That Way (2022) gives you the practical script for a family argument. William Ury's Possible (2024) is the same argument from a mediator with fifty years of practice behind him. If you want the academic source Ripley leans on most heavily, it is Peter T. Coleman's The Way Out (2021), from the Difficult Conversations Lab at Columbia; it is drier than the rest of this page but it is where a good deal of the research comes from.
What books are like The Unthinkable?
Laurence Gonzales's Deep Survival (2003) is the direct predecessor and asks the same question about who lives and why. Sheri Fink's Five Days at Memorial (2013) is the deepest single case study of institutional collapse in a disaster. Rebecca Solnit's A Paradise Built in Hell (2009) reaches the same conclusion about crowd behaviour and draws a political rather than a personal lesson from it. And Norman Maclean's Young Men and Fire (1992) is the book the whole field grew out of — a thirteen-man fire crew in Montana in 1949, investigated by a retired professor over more than a decade.
Is Amanda Ripley's research reliable?
Her own method is reporting rather than original experiment: she interviews survivors and practitioners, reads the incident reports and the literature, and cites her sources. That is a more durable footing than much of the surrounding genre. It is worth knowing, though, that several well-known books in the same space rest on findings that have not held up. The grit research popularised by Angela Duckworth was found by a 2017 meta-analysis in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology to be nearly indistinguishable from conscientiousness and a weak predictor of performance. The marshmallow test failed to hold in a large 2018 replication in Psychological Science and again in a 2024 study in Child Development that followed participants to age 26. Ego depletion, which underpins part of Charles Duhigg's The Power of Habit, produced essentially no effect in a 23-laboratory pre-registered replication published in 2016. None of that is an accusation of bad faith against any of those authors; it is the reason to prefer the reported books on this page to the ones built on a single striking result.
Who is Amanda Ripley and what does she do now?
She is an American investigative journalist based in Washington, D.C., who graduated from Cornell in 1996 and spent a decade at Time, where her reporting on 9/11, the anthrax investigation and Hurricanes Katrina and Rita contributed to two National Magazine Awards. She is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and writes for The Washington Post. She trained as a conflict mediator in 2018 and has trained journalists through the Solutions Journalism Network. She co-founded the media and training company Good Conflict with the journalist and documentary filmmaker Hélène Biandudi Hofer, who previously ran the network's Complicating the Narratives project. Since May 2026 she has also taught The Conflict Playbook on MasterClass.
Are there writers like Amanda Ripley who write about education?
Yes, and they split neatly. Lucy Crehan's Cleverlands (2016) is the closest match in method: a British teacher who lived with teachers in Finland, Japan, Singapore, Shanghai and Canada and wrote up what she found. Paul Tough reports American schools and colleges from the inside over long periods, most convincingly in The Years That Matter Most (2019). Yong Zhao, who grew up in the Chinese system Western reformers admire, argues that the international rankings the whole comparison rests on are misleading. Tracy Kidder's Among Schoolchildren (1989) is the older classic of the form — one teacher, one fifth-grade class, one year.
Which writers disagree with Amanda Ripley?
Yong Zhao most directly. The Smartest Kids in the World takes the PISA league table as a reasonable starting point for asking what works; Zhao's position is that PISA's claim to measure the skills modern economies need is unevidenced, that it exports one narrow model to very different societies, and that the systems at the top of the table pay for their scores in student interest and risk-taking. Rebecca Solnit disagrees more gently and about a different book: she reaches the same conclusion as The Unthinkable about how crowds actually behave in a disaster, then argues that the useful response is institutional rather than personal preparedness. Both are worth reading precisely because they take Ripley's evidence seriously and part company over what to do with it.
Sources
- The Unthinkable (Revised and Updated), Harmony, 20 August 2024 — Penguin Random House
- “The Conflict Playbook” launches on MasterClass, PR Newswire, 22 May 2026
- Good Conflict — founders and team
- Book excerpt: “High Conflict” — CBS News
- PISA 2025 Results (Volume I): Future-Ready Students — OECD, September 2026
- Finland’s PISA 2025 results — Finnish Government, 8 September 2026
- Marcus Credé, Michael Tynan and Peter Harms, “Much Ado About Grit”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2017
- Sperber, Vandell, Duncan and Watts, “Delay of gratification and adult outcomes”, Child Development, 2024
- Hagger et al., “A Multilab Preregistered Replication of the Ego-Depletion Effect”, Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2016
- Amanda Ripley — Wikipedia
List last reviewed 5 September 2026.
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“We feel increasingly certain of our own superiority and, at the same time, more and more mystified by the other side.”
— Amanda Ripley, High Conflict (Simon & Schuster, 2021).
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