100 books like The Revenge of Geography

This book is also heavily dog-eared. It is full of chin-dropping facts about how we got here and why we need systems change to address climate change. The climate crisis is clearly exposed, but it is ultimately a positive book.

Klein explains how policies and actions to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions also offer an opportunity to reduce inequalities, redefine democracy, and bring back thriving local economies. The "market" can’t fix the climate crisis. We can use this crisis to reweave our relationship with nature and with each other to create a better world.

This book is a must-read for understanding the politics, economics, and undercurrents that have delivered us to the crisis we are now in.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading nine of Westerman's books, some of them twice. This is literary contemporary history. Aside from a place, a period, and a prism through which to look, Frank combines award-winning literary skills with a journalistic journey. His stories are both big and small, personal and universal. Here he follows a fascinating 20th-century journey of the so-called ‘most pure’ horses of Europe. Through that story, you will find yourself cantering through the nature versus nurture debate that defined much of Europe’s recent history. On top of all that, I also recognise his journey through life, from his studies to ‘development’ work to foreign journalism to literary non-fiction writing on the big issues at the people & places interface. 

As the great Asian renaissance gathers momentum in the 21st century, many young Asians will begin to rediscover their own cultures and civilizations, just as the West did in its first cultural renaissance in the 15th century. Few understand classical Indian civilization as well as Amartya Sen does.

Since Asian cultures are associated with despotism and Western cultures with individual liberties, Sen says, “The claim that the basic ideas underlying freedom and tolerance have been central to Western culture over the millennia and are somehow alien to Asia is, I believe, entirely rejectable.” Living up to the spirit of the title of his book, Sen demonstrates in this book that he’s an argumentative Indian and Asian. Argumentative Asians will eventually win the argument with the West. 

Politics, nature, society, identity, money, work, energy...Monbiot doesn't only touch a whole lot, I almost always agree with him. This selection of his best essays is like a box full of brain candy and one should treat it accordingly: do not swallow it all in one go. In one of his small-group talking rounds right after a big lecture, I witnessed his never appease-able hunger to bounce ideas off, get to the bottom of things, identify flaws in assumptions that most of us didn't even know we had. Monbiot doesn't allow social or political conventions to get in his way. His goal is clear: unpacking the reality of the world of today, no matter how dark this needs to be. 

I was drawn to this book for its depth of thought and critical perspective on bordering as a process. Paulina Ochoa Espejo covers the rich ground of political geography, mixing philosophical considerations of human place-making and how borders are integral to that process.

I returned to various chapters of this book whilst writing about other topics and regions. The book pulls readers from their comfortable perspectives and compels both fruitful and necessary reconsiderations of borders. 

This is the go-to book for the early Communist movement in Iran. Unlike the Arab countries of the Middle East, where Communism slowly spread in the early decades of the twentieth century, Iran experienced Communism as Soviet foreign policy in a direct manner. Bordering the Soviet Union, northern Iran was the subject of early attempts to spread the Communist creed in the aftermath of the October Revolution. Zabih’s book tells the story of those early inroads and the Iranian activists supporting the new ideology. The early attempts failed, but by the 1940s, the Communist Tudeh Party had emerged as a popular mass party. Zabih’s narrative is lucid, and his research is based on Soviet and Iranian materials. 

A Mountain of Crumbs is a memoir by Elena Gorokhovoa, a Russian girl, who grew up under the Soviet Union. Even though a religious ideology imposed more restrictions on women in Iran, I found Gorokhova’s vivid descriptions of her life and struggles similar to mine. It reminded me that authoritarian regimes are all similar in nature: controlling and overbearing. They nurture a controlling culture too. People, unknowingly, become a mirror image of the regime, just like Gorokhova’s mother. 

Stephan Orth has a lot of nerve. The author of Couchsurfing in Iran, he decides to take his talents to Russia, stopping in places no tourist would dare to go and getting to know actual Russian people. And then he writes a funny, insightful, mind-bendingly entertaining book about them. Who does this guy think he is? Do yourself a favor: Read his book and find out. Stephan is a fabulous tour guide of the real Russia and its people.

In respect of covert post-war aerial intelligence gathering there is a great deal of rumour, misinformation, and disinformation.

What I like about Listening In is that the authors have undertaken thorough research and rather than speculating have compiled what is otherwise spread around in the public domain: occasionally, for example, US sources give more detail of RAF operations than British sources. The book gives details of probing and overflight missions, including some American ones, and includes numerous diagrams, maps, and photographs.

The book is also a good example of the publishing values of Hikoki Publications.

Great writers of the past are revered in Iran, none more so than Hafiz. One of the most magical places in the country is the garden around his alabaster tomb in Shiraz. Dominic Brookshank whisks one far from the Western present into an extraordinary world of high culture in Shiraz in the fourteenth century.

He has helped me understand Hafiz’s ghazals, short lyric poems full of cryptic allusions. I am still dumbfounded at what they reveal of small elite gatherings of the court, at which wine is drunk (and praised), and Hafiz casts rapt, homoerotic gazes at young males. What an extraordinary disjunction with ordinary life in the Islamic world!