Here are 32 books that No Place to Hide fans have personally recommended if you like
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I am passionate about words and reading, and I love books that examine and record the chaos and mayhem of human existence. When I think about why I don’t want to die, it’s mainly because I can't bear the thought of missing out on what happens next. I feel privileged to be alive during this strange, fraught time of epochal change and to be able to use my skills as a writer to record not just the facts of what happens but how it feels to witness it all, the sensibility of our time, the recording of which is, I believe, the essence of great literature.
The ultimate dystopia survival story .. if you can call it survival. Although its title is only 10 years after Francine Prose’s book, it was, of course, written decades earlier by Orwell, who was looking across Europe at the totalitarian Soviet Union for his inspiration.
I read this book in junior high and have returned to it many times; contemplating Orwell’s insights about the ways authoritarian politics infect societies and destroy souls is more urgent and relevant now than ever.
1984 is the year in which it happens. The world is divided into three superstates. In Oceania, the Party's power is absolute. Every action, word, gesture and thought is monitored under the watchful eye of Big Brother and the Thought Police. In the Ministry of Truth, the Party's department for propaganda, Winston Smith's job is to edit the past. Over time, the impulse to escape the machine and live independently takes hold of him and he embarks on a secret and forbidden love affair. As he writes the words 'DOWN WITH BIG…
My name is Daniel Robert McClure, and I am an Associate Professor of History at Fort Hays State University in Hays, Kansas. I teach U.S., African diaspora, and world history, and I specialize in cultural and economic history. I was originally drawn to “information” and “knowledge” because they form the ties between culture and economics, and I have been teaching history through “information” for about a decade. In 2024, I was finally able to teach a graduate course, “The Origins of the Knowledge Society,” out of which came the “5 books.”
This book tells the tech-business story of algorithms and data exhaust and the companies who have implemented the dystopian future prophesized by Boorstin, Toffler, Postman, and others. While the book is large, Zuboff’s writing draws you into a world you know and, paradoxically, don’t know.
The work is the final stop of our story about information and knowledge, its chaotic meandering through amusing images and the shock of the future.
'Everyone needs to read this book as an act of digital self-defense.' -- Naomi Klein, Author of No Logo, the Shock Doctrine, This Changes Everything and No is Not Enough
The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called "surveillance capitalism," and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control us.
The heady optimism of the Internet's early days is gone. Technologies that were meant to liberate us have deepened inequality and stoked divisions. Tech companies gather our information online and sell…
I have always been suspicious of government and corporate power, but it was only when my officemate in graduate school started teaching me about digital technologies that I really focused on the power relations involved in institutionalized surveillance. Eventually, I discovered the cypherpunk movement, which opposes surveillance. I wanted to know what they knew, so I started to read everything I could about surveillance. I found that few journalists and almost no academics attended to the powerful message of the cypherpunks, so I decided that I would write the first academic book about the movement, hoping that I could do my part to raise awareness about this crucial issue.
I read Bamford’s work because I wanted to understand the history of the NSA, and I was not disappointed. I loved learning, in excruciating detail, about the surveillance techniques and programs of the NSA before the internet.
This book shattered my impression that the NSA was a responsible agency that turned “bad” during the War on Terror. Bamford showed me that modern-day NSA mass surveillance, as revealed by Edward Snowden, actually represents the normal workings of the NSA rather than merely being an aberration. The most important lesson, though, was that the NSA has worked so hard to suppress the public use of encryption, the most important anti-surveillance technology we have.
In this remarkable tour de force of investigative reporting, James Bamford exposes the inner workings of America's largest, most secretive, and arguably most intrusive intelligence agency. The NSA has long eluded public scrutiny, but The Puzzle Palace penetrates its vast network of power and unmasks the people who control it, often with shocking disregard for the law. With detailed information on the NSA's secret role in the Korean Airlines disaster, Iran-Contra, the first Gulf War, and other major world events of the 80s and 90s, this is a brilliant account of the use and abuse of technological espionage.
I’ve worked with business leaders on pay projects all over the world, at companies like Nike and Starbucks, in places like Brazil, Mexico, Vietnam, Singapore, the UAE, and all over Europe. While many business books are written from a theoretical or academic perspective, I bring an operator’s perspective. I get to work out the ideas in my book, Fair Pay, on a daily basis, and so I wrote the book to be a realistic and practical guide for understanding the perspectives of business leaders, human resources, and the typical employee.
Changing careers from publishing to tech is a path not often traveled. Wiener made this jump from a world legendary for its light pay compensated by romanticism, to an industry best known for generous “perks that landed somewhere between the collegiate and the feudal.” Wiener’s experience makes for one of the most entertaining books I’ve read in years—she is a gifted writer and unafraid to call out the over-seriousness of the tech bro mentality as an ultimately “dreary” worldview.
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES'S 10 BEST BOOKS OF 2020.
Named one of the Best Books of 2020 by The Washington Post, The Atlantic, NPR, the Los Angeles Times, ELLE, Esquire, Parade, Teen Vogue, The Boston Globe, Forbes, The Times (UK), Fortune, Chicago Tribune, Glamour, The A.V. Club, Vox, Jezebel, Town & Country, OneZero, Apartment Therapy, Good Housekeeping, PopMatters, Electric Literature, Self, The Week (UK) and BookPage.A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice and a January 2020 IndieNext Pick.
"A definitive document of a world in transition: I won't be alone in returning…
I have always been suspicious of government and corporate power, but it was only when my officemate in graduate school started teaching me about digital technologies that I really focused on the power relations involved in institutionalized surveillance. Eventually, I discovered the cypherpunk movement, which opposes surveillance. I wanted to know what they knew, so I started to read everything I could about surveillance. I found that few journalists and almost no academics attended to the powerful message of the cypherpunks, so I decided that I would write the first academic book about the movement, hoping that I could do my part to raise awareness about this crucial issue.
Westin’s book completely blew me away the first time I read it. I felt like I had discovered a long-lost time capsule containing everything I needed to know about the technological and social changes that created the foundations for surveillance in the United States today.
Since Edward Snowden, I tended to think about surveillance in terms of the internet and the National Security Agency. But Westin showed me that surveillance is much broader—socially and historically—than the NSA’s surveillance of the internet. Westin provided me with a template for analyzing surveillance.
Westin distinguishes physical surveillance from data surveillance, and he examines the difference between corporate and government surveillance. Most importantly, I found his recommendations for protecting privacy in the face of increased surveillance powers incredibly relevant even today.
"He was the most important scholar of privacy since Louis Brandeis."—Jeffrey Rosen
In defining privacy as “the claim of individuals…to determine for themselves when, how and to what extent information about them is communicated,” Alan Westin’s 1967 classic Privacy and Freedom laid the philosophical groundwork for the current debates about technology and personal freedom, and is considered a foundational text in the field of privacy law.
By arguing that citizens retained control over how their personal data was used, Westin redefined privacy as an individual freedom, taking Justice Louis Brandeis’ 19th century definition of privacy as a legal right and…
I have always been suspicious of government and corporate power, but it was only when my officemate in graduate school started teaching me about digital technologies that I really focused on the power relations involved in institutionalized surveillance. Eventually, I discovered the cypherpunk movement, which opposes surveillance. I wanted to know what they knew, so I started to read everything I could about surveillance. I found that few journalists and almost no academics attended to the powerful message of the cypherpunks, so I decided that I would write the first academic book about the movement, hoping that I could do my part to raise awareness about this crucial issue.
I read this book because I studied the cypherpunks, and I found Burnham’s work cited in one of the cypherpunk’s essays. It was published in 1983, but I felt like it could have been published today. I was met with surprises on every page. I had to rethink the nature of surveillance itself.
Written in the wake of the personal computer revolution of the 1970s, Burnham taught me that the computerization of society—with its increasingly networked systems and exponentially growing databases—is fundamentally incompatible with democracy and individual rights.
Even everyday things we now take for granted, like direct deposit and paying with debit cards, feed the surveillance machine. When governments and corporations coordinate to watch us all, we cease to be free citizens and become more like consumers on probation.
The Rise of the Computer State is a comprehensive examination of the ways that computers and massive databases are enabling the nation’s corporations and law enforcement agencies to steadily erode our privacy and manipulate and control the American people. This book was written in 1983 as a warning. Today it is a history. Most of its grim scenarios are now part of everyday life. The remedy proposed here, greater public oversight of industry and government, has not occurred, but a better one has not yet been found. While many individuals have willingly surrendered much of their privacy and all of…
I’m always intrigued by certain kinds of crime stories, but usually not by the crimes themselves. Straightforward whodunits bore me, and simplistic retellings of the hero myth just strike me as wrong. About thirty years ago, I began to wonder why—which crime stories intrigue me and which seem more like exercises in voyeurism. Turns out the stories I really get into wrap me in previously unseen worlds. They offer a fresh take, bring up unexpected considerations, present a new way to view the crime, or demonstrate why what I’d always thought was mistaken or insufficient. Such books present the crime, but contain much more than the crime.
Somehow, I’d never heard of the crime The Burglary details: the 1971 burglary of FBI field offices. And somehow, the burglars remained anonymous for decades.
A reporter forThe Philadelphia Inquirerat the time, Medsger was one of journalists who received copies of the FBI files stolen bythree professors, a daycare worker, a social worker, and others who called themselves The Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI. The stolen files exposed COINTELPRO and other illegal FBI investigations, and fundamentally altered the FBI.
The Burglarytold me the value of detailed research, especially relating a 50-year-old crime, and showed me the essential importance of understanding the society surrounding the crime in order to fully comprehend the crime.
The never-before-told full story of the history-changing break-in at the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, by a group of unlikely activists—quiet, ordinary, hardworking Americans—that made clear the shocking truth and confirmed what some had long suspected, that J. Edgar Hoover had created and was operating, in violation of the U.S. Constitution, his own shadow Bureau of Investigation.
It begins in 1971 in an America being split apart by the Vietnam War . . . A small group of activists—eight men and women—the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI, inspired by Daniel Berrigan’s rebellious Catholic peace movement, set out to use…
I am a political scientist, a professor emeritus at Webster University, with scholarly publications about Latin American and U.S. politics. My interest in conspiracy theories was piqued by a reviewer who dismissed my book on the “democratic façade” of U.S. politics as a “conspiracy theory.” I took umbrage and denied being a “conspiracy theorist.” Years later, conversing with a colleague about Oliver Stone’s JFK, I dismissed his doubts about the lone gunman theory as a conspiracy theory. He asked whether I would similarly dismiss questions about official stories regarding assassinations in South Asia or Latin America. This all set me on the path to studying the role of conspiracies.
A positive NY Times review “in brief” of this “journey through the Deep State” caught my attention and mind immediately.
Most political scientists and top-tier journalists, like Ms. Howley, want no part of any association with the “deep state,” yet here was Hawley straying from the usual tone of dismissal, disdain, or stigma about the idea.
As I started reading about Reality Winner’s harrowing experience, I first thought I had mistakenly taken it for non-fiction. In fact, Winner’s name and her experiences are all too real. If there is any paranoia in Winner’s encounter with the deep state, it is to be found in the darker world of the national security state, not Hawley or her subject.
A NEW YORK TIMES TOP TEN BOOK OF THE YEAR A VANITY FAIR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
“Riveting and darkly funny and in all sense of the word, unclassifiable.”–The New York Times
A wild, humane, and hilarious meditation on post-privacy America—from the acclaimed author of Thrown
Who are you? You are data about data. You are a map of connections—a culmination of everything you have ever posted, searched, emailed, liked, and followed. In this groundbreaking work of narrative nonfiction, Kerry Howley investigates the curious implications of living in the age of the indelible. Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs…
I have been writing for many years, and my main preference is political thrillers with criminal overtones. I first became interested in politics when I worked at several political conferences in the 60’s and 70’s. I have been involved in several criminal cases, including my own, and within my family, I have a nephew in the police force. For many years I have had the opportunity to mix with the upper tiers of society as well as the criminal classes and this has given me great insight into creating my characters and plots.
This is one book I really could not leave alone. An experienced political journalist loses his sister in a road accident, but the journalist thinks her death has something to do with some government secrets she knew about.
I was drawn into this story from the start. Peston’s style is first person central and it holds the readers attention. He turns what could be a simple plot into a complicated plot with the main protagonist digging out secrets while risking his own life. I loved this one. There are a lot of very realistic passages from a writer well-schooled in the political world.
THE HUNT FOR A KILLER LEADS ALL THE WAY TO THE TOP...
'Brilliant' - THE TIMES 'Cracking' - DAILY MAIL 'Winning' - SUNDAY TIMES 'A hell of a read' - OBSERVER 'Enthralling' - FINANCIAL TIMES 'Enjoyable, intelligent' - GUARDIAN 'A romping thriller' - INDEPENDENT 'A rollicking read' - EVENING STANDARD 'A gripping thriller' - DAILY EXPRESS 'Fascinating' - DAILY MIRROR 'Gripping' - RADIO TIMES 'Compelling' - THE SUN
THE BIGGEST THRILLER OF THE YEAR FROM BRITAIN'S TOP POLITICAL JOURNALIST, ROBERT PESTON. ________________________
1997. A desperate government clings to power; a hungry opposition will do anything to win. And journalist Gil…
I learned from a young age to question everything. The law always interested me, but I was an impatient high school graduate who instead completed a journalism cadetship in Sydney, Australia. I always loved police reporting and the ability to get inside the ‘real’ story where few others could. There is a certain pleasure observing the lives of (witting or unwitting) criminals and an element of “there by the grace…” too! I’ve always empathised with the underdog and the Drug Grannies were indeed just that. I believed there was more to their story. Earning their trust was important. I threw myself into their fight – more an activist than a journalist!
This is a memoir by a former narcotics agent who writes about a major drug importation masterminded by a combination of crooks and cops (though it is hard sometimes to work out who was who!).
On a broader scale, Operation Jungle also details the high-level corruption which existed in Queensland under disgraced senior police and politicians in league with each other. Shobbrook – as a brave, serving narcotics agent who transferred into the Australian Federal Police – “ratted” on the corrupt police and politicians before the Australian Royal Commission of Inquiry into Drugs, and so sealed his fate.
Australia was not ready for the truth. Instead of treating his evidence with respect, the author was forced out of the Australian Federal Police in 1980. It’s a gripping, thrilling true story.
A gripping blend of memoir, true crime, and corruption in the tropics. In the late 1970s, criminal mastermind John Milligan and his associates conspired to import heroin into Far North Queensland via a remote mountain-top airdrop. In a story that is stranger than fiction, it took them three trips through dense jungle to locate the heroin, but they only recovered one of the two packages. When narcotics agent John Shobbrook took on the investigation of this audacious crime, codenamed ‘Operation Jungle,’ his career was on the rise within the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. What he discovered unwittingly set in motion…
