Reading List

Authors Like Amanda Ripley

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.

Every book by Amanda Ripley →

10 authors like Amanda Ripley

01
Survival · Closest match

Laurence Gonzales

American · Deep Survival (2003), Surviving Survival (2012), Flight 232 (2014)

Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why (W. W. Norton, 2003) came five years before The Unthinkable and set the template: accident reports and interviews with survivors, read through what stress does to perception and memory. His argument is that most accidents come from mental models that no longer match the terrain — the brain keeps running the map it built last time — and that surviving means acting decisively inside chaos rather than waiting to feel calm. Flight 232 reconstructs the 1989 Sioux City crash minute by minute from the people inside it. He has won two National Magazine Awards, held a journalism fellowship at the Santa Fe Institute and was a Miller Distinguished Scholar there from 2016 to 2020. He is currently writing a biography of Cormac McCarthy.

The single closest book on this page, and the one to read next if The Unthinkable was the Ripley you loved. Same question, same evidence base, five years earlier: crash survivors, accident investigations, and the gap between what people think they would do and what they measurably do. The difference is disposition rather than method. Gonzales writes from the wilderness and the cockpit and is interested in the individual mind under load; Ripley writes from the stairwell and the evacuation plan and keeps pulling the camera back to the system that failed to tell anyone what to do. Read them in either order and the overlap is unmistakable.

— Lisanne
02
Disaster, at its most serious

Sheri Fink

American · War Hospital (2003), Five Days at Memorial (2013)

Fink has an MD and a PhD in neuroscience from Stanford, which is why Five Days at Memorial (Crown, 2013) can follow the clinical decisions hour by hour. It reconstructs what happened inside a flooded New Orleans hospital after Hurricane Katrina, where staff went five days without power in rising heat and a number of patients were injected with morphine and midazolam before evacuation. She won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting for the ProPublica and New York Times Magazine story the book grew out of, shared in a second Pulitzer for the Times's Ebola coverage in 2015, and won the National Book Critics Circle Award for the book. Dr Anna Pou, the surgeon at the centre of it, was charged with second-degree murder; a New Orleans grand jury declined to indict her in 2007, and she has consistently maintained that the care given was appropriate. Apple TV+ adapted the book as a limited series in 2022.

Ripley and Fink were both covering Katrina, and they took opposite exits from it. Ripley went toward the general rule — what the brain does in the first ten minutes, and how to train it. Fink went toward the single institution and stayed there for six years, until she could say what each person did on each day. Read her when the survival-psychology frame starts to feel too clean: Five Days at Memorial is the book that shows what happens when the training, the chain of command and the evacuation plan all fail at once, and ordinary competent people have to invent an ethics on the spot.

— Lisanne
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03
The other reading of disaster

Rebecca Solnit

American · A Paradise Built in Hell (2009), Men Explain Things to Me (2014)

A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster (Viking, 2009) works through the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the Halifax explosion, Mexico City in 1985, 9/11 and Katrina, and argues that the standard picture of disaster — mass panic, looting, a thin veneer of civilisation — is close to the reverse of what the research shows. Ordinary people improvise rescue and mutual aid; the documented danger is what she calls elite panic, the tendency of authorities to fear the crowd and act against it, as when armed men turned back evacuees at the Gretna bridge in 2005. Solnit is an essayist and historian rather than a reporter of scenes, and the book is as much political argument as reconstruction.

The same core finding as The Unthinkable — people do not stampede — pushed to a different conclusion. Ripley uses it to argue for better individual preparation: know the exits, run the drill, expect the freeze. Solnit uses it to argue that the failure is nearly always institutional, and that the useful question is not how to train yourself but who gets in the way of the neighbours already digging. Read her directly after The Unthinkable and you get the argument the two books are having, which neither states on its own.

— Lisanne

Every book by Rebecca Solnit →

Authors like Rebecca Solnit →

04
Older than the genre

Norman Maclean

American · A River Runs Through It (1976), Young Men and Fire (1992)

Maclean taught English at the University of Chicago for more than thirty years and published his first fiction at seventy-three. Young Men and Fire (University of Chicago Press, 1992) is his account of the Mann Gulch fire of 1949 in Montana, in which a blow-up overran a crew of smokejumpers and thirteen men died. He walked the gulch repeatedly into his eighties, measured the slope, timed the run, interviewed the two survivors, and worked out why the foreman's decision to light an escape fire and lie down inside it saved him and was not the cause of the others' deaths. He died in 1990 with the manuscript unfinished; the press completed it editorially and it won the 1992 National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction.

Written decades before anyone called this narrative science, and still the deepest version of what Ripley does. Mann Gulch is the case study behind half the modern literature on how groups fail under sudden threat, including Karl Weick's much-cited work on the collapse of sensemaking, which is part of the intellectual furniture of The Unthinkable. What Maclean adds is time. He was not on deadline, he was not building a takeaway, and he kept going back to the same hillside for years. Read it for the reminder that the survival question is old, and that the answers get better the longer someone stays with them.

— Lisanne
05
School systems · The direct parallel

Lucy Crehan

British · Cleverlands (2016)

Crehan taught for three years at a comprehensive in west London through Teach First, got tired of hearing politicians describe foreign school systems inaccurately, crowdfunded the trip on Unbound with backing from around 400 people in eight weeks, and went. Cleverlands: The Secrets Behind the Success of the World's Education Superpowers (Unbound, 2016) is the result: roughly three weeks in each country, living with teachers rather than in hotels, sitting in the back of classes in Finland, Japan, Singapore, Shanghai and Canada. She reads the research alongside the visits and lands on five principles rather than five countries to copy. She now advises education ministries and works as a consultant to the Education Development Trust.

The book with the most direct claim on The Smartest Kids in the World readers, and it is not a competitor so much as a second angle on the same trip. Ripley put American teenagers into Finnish, Korean and Polish schools and wrote what they saw from a desk; Crehan lodged with the teachers and wrote what the staffroom and the curriculum looked like from the front. Both are sceptical of the copy-Finland reflex and both keep asking what a policy is actually made of before recommending it. Read them together and you have the student's view and the teacher's view of the same argument.

— Lisanne
06
The one who disagrees

Yong Zhao

Chinese-American · World Class Learners (2012), Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon? (2014)

Zhao was born in Sichuan province, took his first degree in English language education there in 1986, and is now Foundation Distinguished Professor in the School of Education at the University of Kansas and a professorial fellow at the Mitchell Institute at Victoria University in Melbourne. He has written around thirty books. Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon? (Jossey-Bass, 2014) argues that China's test-topping system is precisely what a country should not import: it produces excellent scores and, he contends, suppresses the creativity and entrepreneurial risk-taking its own government keeps saying it wants. His broader case against PISA is that its claim to measure the skills modern economies need is unevidenced, that it imposes one largely Western model on very different societies, and that high-scoring systems tend to show lower student interest in the tested subjects.

The dissent this page needs. The Smartest Kids in the World takes the PISA league table seriously enough to build a book on it; Zhao's whole position is that the table is the problem, and he has said so in print since before that book came out. He is not a contrarian without evidence — he grew up inside the system Western reformers admire from a distance, and his objection is to what it costs. Read him second, not first: he is most useful once you already know the argument he is dismantling, and he sharpens rather than cancels it.

— Lisanne
07
American schools, up close

Paul Tough

Canadian-American · Whatever It Takes (2008), How Children Succeed (2012), The Years That Matter Most (2019)

Tough was a senior editor at This American Life and an editor at The New York Times Magazine, and he reports education by following particular children and institutions for years. Whatever It Takes tracks Geoffrey Canada's Harlem Children's Zone; The Years That Matter Most, published in the UK as The Inequality Machine, follows students through American college admissions and argues that higher education now sorts more than it lifts. How Children Succeed (2012) is the exception and the caveat: it rests substantially on grit and on the marshmallow test, and both have since weakened badly. Credé, Tynan and Harms's meta-analysis in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2017 found grit almost indistinguishable from conscientiousness and a weak predictor of performance, and replications by Watts, Duncan and Quan in Psychological Science in 2018 and by Sperber and colleagues in Child Development in 2024 found that marshmallow-test performance does not reliably predict adult outcomes once family background and early cognitive ability are controlled for. His later books are reporting-led rather than built on a single psychological finding.

The closest American equivalent to what Ripley did in The Smartest Kids in the World, working the same seam from the inside instead of from abroad: what actually happens to a specific child in a specific system, and what the system is optimising for without saying so. He is also the useful contrast in method. Ripley's education book travels outward and asks what other countries do; Tough stays home and asks who American schooling is really for. Start with The Years That Matter Most, which is the strongest of the three and the least dependent on contested psychology.

— Lisanne
08
Conflict · Where the field starts

William Ury

American · Getting to Yes (1981, with Roger Fisher), Getting Past No (1991), Possible (2024)

Ury is an anthropologist by training and co-founder of Harvard's Program on Negotiation. Getting to Yes, written with Roger Fisher in 1981, is the book that put interest-based negotiation into general circulation: separate the people from the problem, look for what each side actually needs rather than what it is demanding, and measure any deal against your best alternative. He has worked as a negotiator in Venezuela, Korea and the Middle East, advised President Juan Manuel Santos during the Colombian peace talks, and started the Abraham Path walking route across the region. Possible: How We Survive (and Thrive) in an Age of Conflict (Harper Business, 2024) is his summary of nearly fifty years of it, and it is explicitly aimed at the same polarised moment as High Conflict.

Ripley is the reporter of this field and Ury is one of the people who built it — her whole account of conflict mediation, including the training she herself took in 2018, descends from the tradition Getting to Yes established four decades earlier. Reading him shows you how much of High Conflict is journalism laid over an existing practice, which is a compliment to both. The pairing to make is Possible and High Conflict back to back: same year of the world, same conviction that conflict itself is necessary and only the high-conflict trap is the problem, one written by the practitioner and one by the person who went out and watched practitioners work.

— Lisanne
09
Curiosity across the divide

Mónica Guzmán

Mexican-American · I Never Thought of It That Way (2022)

Guzmán is a Mexican immigrant and dual US–Mexico citizen, a journalist in Seattle, and Senior Fellow for Public Practice at Braver Angels, the cross-partisan organisation that runs structured red–blue workshops. I Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times (BenBella, 2022) starts from her own household — she is a liberal in Seattle whose parents voted twice for Donald Trump — and builds a set of concrete conversational moves out of it, including how to ask a question you genuinely do not know the answer to. She hosts the Braver Angels podcast A Braver Way.

The most practical companion to High Conflict, and the one written from inside the problem rather than reported from outside it. Ripley diagnoses the trap — the good-versus-evil framing, the conflict entrepreneurs, the understory beneath the stated argument — and Guzmán supplies the sentences you say at a kitchen table on a Sunday. Both are working the same mechanism: that curiosity is a technique rather than a temperament, and that it is the only reliable way out of a fight neither side can win. Read her when the theory has landed and you want the script.

— Lisanne
10
The same method, different subject

Charles Duhigg

American · The Power of Habit (2012), Supercommunicators (2024)

Duhigg won a Pulitzer Prize in 2013 for the New York Times's “iEconomy” series and now writes for The New Yorker. His method is Ripley's: a long reported narrative braided with cited behavioural research until it resolves into a named mechanism. Supercommunicators (Random House, 2024) argues that most conversations are secretly one of three kinds — practical, emotional or social — and that people talk past each other when they are in different ones. The Power of Habit is the one to read with a caveat: part of its case rests on Roy Baumeister's ego-depletion research, and a pre-registered replication run across 23 laboratories, published by Hagger and colleagues in Perspectives on Psychological Science in 2016, found essentially no effect. The habit-loop material itself draws on separate and better-supported neuroscience.

The nearest thing to a new High Conflict published since High Conflict. Supercommunicators works the same territory from the other end: Ripley explains why a disagreement turns into a feud, Duhigg explains why two people fail to connect in the first place, and both land on the same instrument — a specific kind of listening that proves you heard the thing underneath the words. Their structures are nearly identical, right down to the case study that opens as one story and turns out to be about something else. If you finished High Conflict and wanted more of the mechanism, this is it.

— Lisanne

Every book by Charles Duhigg →

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.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

From the bookshelf

“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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