Fans pick 100 books like Lords of Poverty

I’ve always paired this book with Promised Land, Crusader State, not only because Mead is such an elegant writer, but I don’t think anyone surpasses him at explaining how and why we lurch back and forth between foreign policies. Mead’s account made such an impression on me when I first read it that it’s left me in a quandary ever since.

If I could recommend only one of these two books to time-strapped officers, which would benefit them more? Here is where, like a good academic, I always punted and told everyone to read both.     

I cherish this groundbreaking book because it clarified to me the role of State bureaucracy behind various social phenomena, among which are: the connection between bureaucrats' power and violent behavior and the profound impact of State agencies on immigrants' integration processes.

The book's theoretical approach, which is based on power-dependence relations, encouraged me in analyzing the absorption of immigrants from Ethiopia (my PhD thesis) in terms of bureaucratic control rather than through cultural background and differences.

Not less important, this book was authored by the late Prof. Emanuel Marx, who was my admired supervisor and a very dear friend for over 40 years.  

This book served me greatly in teaching courses on education and social stratification in Israel.

Its ethnography is fascinating and although it was published some 55 years ago its insights are still compelling and relevant. The book exposes the veiled bureaucratic interests which pull the strings behind the curtains of the educational system rather than ideals of justice and equity.

This critical analysis influenced my understanding with regard to the emergence of discrimination and racism that were the outcomes of concentrating Ethiopian children in separate classes for a long time.    

I think that Riane Eisler's book is a must-read piece for feminists, historians, and social activists working for justice and equality.

The book offered me an original outlook on male dominance in human society over the ages. Learning that women had an immense impact on the emergence of the major religions was exhilarating. The historical descriptions of the evolution of patriarchy demonstrated how it was constructed through the marginalization and exclusion of women from leading positions and by the use of violence.

My work on the sex industry, indicating how the exploitation of women's sexuality served in establishing males' dominance was significantly influenced by this book. 

In 1975, Hilary Callan published a paper on diplomats’ wives using the term incorporated wife.

In this edited volume, she and Shirley Ardener applied that concept to a broader set of occupations. I find it brilliant because the term alludes to the idea of marriage as two bodies becoming one while calling out the asymmetry of this corporeality, wives being “drawn into the ‘social person’ of their husbands”, as Callan puts it in the book’s introduction.

The term also connotes the couple as a corporation, which has helped me to think about how diplomatic couples work together. With its collection of articles, the volume acknowledges differences depending on context. At the same time, it shows how one general mechanism – the incorporation of wives – has consequences far beyond the personal.

This book describes two enduring American conceits so brilliantly that I assigned this book in classes whenever I could. The first conceit is ‘enabling ignorance.’  Could there be a more apt description for how we undermined our own efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq? I love this term. His second concept I love is solipsism.

Baritz uses this to refer to our misplaced notion that inside every non-Westerner is an American just waiting to be liberated by us. I remember a very reserved Pakistani Air Force officer who laughed uncontrollably in class as soon as I suggested that if only we unzipped him, his inner American would burst forth. His mirth perfectly underscored Baritz’s point.  

This book boasts the world’s greatest title. With just four words, McDougall’s title describes our trajectory as a country. We started as a beacon and example to others, only to (d)evolve into trying to get others to become more like us. In one sense, our impulse to convert others is laudable; it’s admirable that we want everyone to benefit from capitalism and democracy as much as we do.

But what happens when our values, beliefs, and practices don’t suit others? McDougall does an unparalleled job of revealing the costs to them and to us.   

This one sticks the most of all the books I’ve read on U.S./Afghan relations. Whenever I visited former students serving in Afghanistan, I used to joke that I was there to listen to them vent and vent they did. Even those who most wanted to do right by Afghans felt perpetually thwarted by their higher-ups.

One reason I couldn’t get enough of Partlow’s account is that no matter how frustrated American and Coalition servicemembers were, they had nothing on Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan’s leader. Senior leaders on our side routinely pressured Karzai, persistently trying to get him to do very un-Afghan things. Yet, as Partlow reveals, in large part thanks to Washington’s enabling ignorance, Karzai often resisted quite successfully.    

I strongly recommend this book because it is clearly written, explains the methods of estimation, and provides an excellent overview of the extensive worldwide research on the returns to education based on earnings.

It certainly influenced me. It had a massive impact on World Bank lending policies in support of economic development in developing countries. It replaced the kinds of Bank physical capital investment policies such as those supporting dam construction, projects that included educating only for a few people on how to operate dams, with education sector-wide loans that support primary and junior secondary education of the labor force.

Some of these dams later washed out, and forests were destroyed in support of development. The book shows how the returns to investment in primary and secondary education are higher in developing countries where the labor force is often nearly illiterate than they are to investing in other higher levels… show more.

“I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalization. You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer.”

In 2005, Tony Blair told his party that a new, free-market, globalized form of capitalism was inevitable. Filipino theorist, activists and later politician Walden Bello begged to differ. He believed globalization was a political choice, and one that suited Western elites and their multinational corporations, at the expense of the mass of humanity.

In Deglobalization, Bello sets out to show how things could be different, imagining a more diverse international economy centred on the principle of being as democratic as possible.