Here are 100 books that Butler to the World fans have personally recommended if you like
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I’ve worked for two decades as a researcher and campaigner to expose the tax behaviour of unscrupulous multinational companies and wealthy individuals, and the central lesson is that we only make progress when the narrative shifts: when the public and policymakers start to appreciate just how much damage is done to our societies by the professional enablers of tax abuse. These books are real narrative-shifters, showing the world to us in ways we need to see, and making it a pleasure.
I think Treasure Islands may well be the most influential book in tax justice.
Author Nick Shaxson, previously a journalist for the Financial Times and Reuters, became a key member of the Tax Justice Network and wrote this rollicking blockbuster. In a story that spans the globe, Shaxson captures the lurking malevolence of the men – and it is almost always men – who shaped our world so they could profit from selling opportunities for tax abuse and financial crime.
I am the Director of the High Pay Centre, a London-based think tank researching the causes and consequences of economic inequality. In most major economies, the richest 1% of the population now take up to a fifth of all income and something like a quarter to a third of all wealth. These rich jerks aren’t necessarily bad people, at least not in all cases, and we don’t literally need to eat them all. However, such extreme concentration of income and wealth is undeserved and unnecessary, and it should definitely be an overriding priority to share it in a fairer and more even way.
This is an obvious choice, but it’s obvious for a reason–it sets out clearly and rigorously the extent to which the super-rich across multiple different countries suck up an ever-increasing share of aggregate income and wealth.
There’s doubtless some satisfaction from being one of the small proportion of purchasers to get through all 700+ pages, but it’s actually quite readable and peppered with literary references to writers like Jane Austen and Honore Balzac.
A New York Times #1 Bestseller An Amazon #1 Bestseller A Wall Street Journal #1 Bestseller A USA Today Bestseller A Sunday Times Bestseller A Guardian Best Book of the 21st Century Winner of the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award Winner of the British Academy Medal Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award
What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy. But satisfactory answers have been hard…
I’ve worked for two decades as a researcher and campaigner to expose the tax behaviour of unscrupulous multinational companies and wealthy individuals, and the central lesson is that we only make progress when the narrative shifts: when the public and policymakers start to appreciate just how much damage is done to our societies by the professional enablers of tax abuse. These books are real narrative-shifters, showing the world to us in ways we need to see, and making it a pleasure.
Eva Joly is one of the great heroes of tax justice, one of my heroes, a campaigning judge who faced down death threats in order to break the extraordinary corruption case of France’s biggest oil company.
But here, she joins forces with the novelist Judith Perrignon to tell a story of corruption that is sharp, ironic, and intelligent, as it runs from Lagos to London, by way of Paris and St Petersburg.
The head of the Nigerian fraud squad is evacuated from Lagos by secret-service operatives. Meanwhile a junior prosecutor in Nice probes the mysterious death of the wife of a powerful banker and a crusading journalist in St Petersburg pursues a corrupt oligarch and his criminal business empire. The paths of all three cross in London, where they find themselves embroiled in violent events obviously linked to financial and political interests and hunted by the oligarch's men, the Western secret services and goons sent by Nigerian oil magnates. A satirical, intelligent and fast-paced thriller set in the world of high finance…
I am a professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, and I am interested in global capitalism, financial elites, and all aspects of how people broker capital deals. I am a scholar of anti-heroes who studies all of the ways that people play in the gray. My first book, Dealing in Desire, is an ethnography where I embedded myself in several different hostess bars to study the relationship between sex work and financial deal-making. I grew up in California but have lived most of my adult life in Ho Chi Minh City, Houston, Boston, and Chicago.
I love this book because it is one of those rare books written by a woman who trained to become a wealth manager in order to tell a story about how the ultra-rich keep getting richer despite taxes on income, capital gains, property, and inheritance. In her groundbreaking investigations, she follows the money of the ultra-wealthy through some of the most popular offshore tax havens. She also interviews wealth managers to shed light on how they help their clients dodge taxes and creditors and hide money from their families. I am in awe of the author's achievement.
"A timely account of how the 1% holds on to their wealth...Ought to keep wealth managers awake at night." -Wall Street Journal
"Harrington advises governments seeking to address inequality to focus not only on the rich but also on the professionals who help them game the system." -Richard Cooper, Foreign Affairs
"An insight unlike any other into how wealth management works." -Felix Martin, New Statesman
"One of those rare books where you just have to stand back in awe and wonder at the author's achievement...Harrington offers profound insights into the world of the professional people who dedicate their lives to…
In my graduate studies, I had a fantastic professor who was able to make the politics of international criminal justice one of my favorite subjects. The intersection of law, politics, peace, and conflict pulled me in. But the fact that it also touches on human rights, state sovereignty, and the prevention of mass atrocities got me hooked. I ended up doing extensive research on the International Criminal Court and how it interacts with UN peace operations, and I have subsequently been teaching peace and justice at Leiden University. I publish regularly on these topics as well and am the associate editor of International Peacekeeping, one of the leading journals on international conflict management.
Many authors who write about international criminal justice forget that those who are the subject of criminal investigations have their own interests and goals in how they respond. The states in which these investigations take place try to use the courts and tribunals for their own purposes, like neutralizing opposition or presenting themselves as good international citizens.
In this book, Clark reports on his decade-long investigation into the effect of the ICC on politics in African states, especially the DRC and Uganda. I love how he draws on a variety of sources and hundreds of interviews to produce a detailed and nuanced story.
There are a number of controversies surrounding the International Criminal Court (ICC) in Africa. Critics have charged it with neo-colonial meddling in African affairs, accusing it of undermining national sovereignty and domestic attempts to resolve armed conflict. Here, based on 650 interviews over 11 years, Phil Clark critically assesses the politics of the ICC in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, focusing particularly on the Court's multi-level impact on national politics and the lives of everyday citizens. He explores the ICC's effects on peace negotiations, national elections, domestic judicial reform, amnesty processes, combatant demobilisation and community-level accountability and reconciliation.…
I’m a British writer with a passion for the stories of history, both real and imagined. I have always been fascinated by tales and relics of the past, old ruins, ancient buildings, mythology, and the uncanny power of the natural world. All these things connect us to the ghosts of the past. So, I write historical fantasy novels based in the England I explored growing up, but brushed with the shadow of the supernatural, magic, witchcraft, and seductive illusion. I also write straight historical fiction under the name Samantha Grosser.
I devoured this book from beginning to end, and the rest of my life was no more than an irritating distraction until I could return to it again. It really does have everything I have ever wanted in a novel. It’s profound, thought-provoking, addictive, moving, heartbreaking, political, and a damn good story.
It explores so many themes that are dear to my heart: the power of language for good and for evil, the exploitation of colonialism and empire, dark academia, politics, and the joys and heartbreak of friendship, all wrapped in an utterly compelling world of magical realism.
Honestly, I’m slightly obsessed with how good it is, and I’m heartbroken I can’t ever read it for the first time again.
I’m a Stanford professor who became fascinated
with oil and everything it does to for us and to us. For years I traveled the
world talking to the people who know petroleum: executives in the big oil companies,
politicians and activists, militants and victims, spies and tribal chiefs. Blood
Oil explains what I learned and how we can make our oil-cursed world better
for all of us.
If you love villains, you’ll love this book (plus all these villains are real).
Psychopathic dictators, Russian arms dealers, ultra-violent warlords, and corrupt French presidents all show the evil oil can inspire—and the ruin it can bring to a country. I had to put this book down a few times; the depravity around oil can shock even those of us who think we’ve heard it all.
Each week the oil and gas fields of sub-Saharan Africa produce over a billion dollars worth of oil yet this rising tide of money is not promoting stability or development but instead is causing violence, poverty and stagnation. "Poisoned Wells" exposes the root causes of this paradox of poverty from plenty, and explores the mechanisms by which oil causes grave instabilities and corruption around the globe. Shaxson's access as a journalist to the key players in African oil results in an explosive story.
I’m a communication professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University, a social media user, and a mom. After Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, I wrote an op-ed for CNN arguing that he’d won the election on social media, and I just never stopped writing. A few hundred op-eds and a book later, I’m still interested in what social media is doing to us all and the issues women are up against in our society. My book allowed me to explore how social media is impacting every single aspect of the lives of women and girls and exactly what we can do about it. I wrote it as a call to arms.
Quinn’s description of their abuse by online trolls is one of the most harrowing I’ve ever heard. I think it’s an incredibly important account of how dangerous it can be to be a woman on the internet (Quinn is now nonbinary).
One thing that really stood out to me is that, despite everything, Quinn still thinks the internet is an amazing place. This had a big influence on my view that women shouldn’t stop using social networks even though they’re so toxic. Social networks are also places where women can empower ourselves (Quinn developed their career and overcame the challenges of dating as a queer teen online), and we need to be able to wield this power.
You've heard the stories about the dark side of the internet--hackers, #gamergate, anonymous mobs attacking an unlucky victim, and revenge porn--but they remain just that: stories. Surely these things would never happen to you.
Zoe Quinn used to feel the same way. She is a video game developer whose ex-boyfriend published a crazed blog post cobbled together from private information, half-truths, and outright fictions, along with a rallying cry to the online hordes to go after her. They answered in the form of a so-called movement known as #gamergate--they hacked her accounts; stole nude photos of her; harassed her family,…
I am a history professor at Boston University, where I teach and write about modern American popular thought, political culture, trade, travel, and war especially in urban and transnational contexts. I enjoy histories that are based on deep and creative bodies of research and that push past timeworn myths and clichés about the American past.
There are lots of stories about spies, and there are great histories about American missionaries.
But Sutton brings them together in a refreshing way, revealing the moral and political conundrums that arose once the United States turned to (mostly) men of faith to do undercover wartime work, from showering North Africa with propaganda and rescuing Doolittle’s downed raiders from China to stealing secrets and plotting assassinations.
What makes a good missionary makes a good American spy, or so thought Office of Special Services (OSS) founder "Wild" Bill Donovan when he recruited religious activists into the first ranks of American espionage. Called upon to serve Uncle Sam, Donovan's recruits saw the war as a means of expanding their godly mission, believing an American victory would guarantee the safety of their fellow missionaries and their coreligionists abroad.
Drawing on never-before-seen archival materials, acclaimed historian Matthew Sutton shows how religious activists proved to be true believers in Franklin Roosevelt's crusade for global freedom of religion. Sutton focuses on William…
I’m a historian of modern Germany. As a teacher and a writer, I seek to get my students and readers to empathize with the people of the past, to think and even feel their way inside those people’s experiences. Because empathy is not sympathy, one can and should empathize with people one finds unsympathetic. We need to empathize with Nazis in order to understand how they and other Germans—human beings not unlike ourselves—could have committed the worst crimes in modern European history, not least the Holocaust.
This book is based on reports, reflections, and correspondence of prison chaplains who interacted with imprisoned Nazi perpetrators awaiting trial and, in some instances, execution.
What the prisoners confessed to the clergy and, even more, the criminal behavior they failed to acknowledge I find so revealing. The prisoners felt guilty for individual personal transgressions (like cheating on their wives). Here, they had chosen to sin. But they felt no guilt about their participation in genocide since they saw themselves as having acted perforce on behalf of the community of the “Volk.”
Kellenbach brings this astonishing fact home in a way that is simultaneously horrifying and empathic. After reading her book, I finally came to understand what Adolf Eichmann meant when he claimed that he was “the victim of a fallacy” at his trial in Jerusalem.
The Mark of Cain fleshes out a history of conversations that contributed to Germany's coming to terms with a guilty past. Katharina von Kellenbach draws on letters exchanged between clergy and Nazi perpetrators, written notes of prison chaplains, memoirs, sermons, and prison publications to illuminate the moral and spiritual struggles of perpetrators after the war. These documents provide intimate insights into the self-reflection and self-perception of perpetrators. As Germany looks back on more than sixty years of passionate debate about political, personal and legal guilt, its ongoing engagement with the legacy of perpetration has transformed its culture and politics.
