Tribe

Sebastian Junger argues that the trouble many veterans face after coming home lies less with them or their trauma than with the society they return to. Drawing on history, psychology and his background in anthropology, he contrasts modern life with the small, interdependent groups humans lived in for most of their past. He notes that many veterans with PTSD never saw combat, that suicide and depression rise with affluence, and that Londoners came to miss the closeness of the Blitz. Platoons, he argues, give soldiers a closeness that civilian life rarely matches, and danger can make people feel needed. He also looks at American Indian captives who refused to return home.

Morgan Housel described it as a fascinating study of how and why people bond into tribes and what that does to their thinking and wellbeing, and it appears on Ryan Holiday's list of the best books he read in 2016.