I write about inequality in international development, American communities, environmental movements, and workplaces. I’ve been doing this reporting for over a decade. I’ve also worked in global health, an experience that has given me a first-hand glimpse into the depths and texture of inequality we have manufactured in our current world, including within the organizations and movements that purportedly challenge such global inequality. As a reader, I’m equally passionate about immersive nonfiction and fiction. I’ll dive into anything that’s driven by a good story.
I should start by saying that Thiong'o has recently been accused, by his son, of beating his former wife, claims I take very seriously (and which has put my reading of Thiong'o’s female characters in a new light).
In this book, I found a sharp, cunning satire of despotic post-colonial governments working with and shaped by international funders and Western policymakers. Having worked in NGOs, I found Thiong'o’s characterization of “development” to be darkly funny and cringe-worthily accurate.
Informed by traditional African storytelling, discover Ngugi wa Thiong'o's masterpiece.
To honour the Ruler's birthday, the Free Republic of Aburiria set out to build a tower; a modern wonder of the world that will reach the gates of Heaven. But behind this pillar of unity a battle for control of the Aburirian people rages. Among the contenders: the eponymous Wizard, an avatar of folklore and wisdom; the corrupt Christian Ministry; and the nefarious Global Bank.
I’ve lived, learned, and loved Russian politics since before the collapse of communism. My Vodka Politicsbook takes a deep dive into Russian history but is ultimately focussed on better understanding contemporary social, economic, and political developments in Russia, where Putin and Putinism are at the core. Having taught graduate and undergraduate courses on Russian and post-Soviet politics for the past fifteen years, I find it essential to keep up-to-date on the latest scholarship. There are many great works out there by gifted journalists, writers, and scholars, many of which illuminate perhaps only part of Russia’s personalized autocracy. The ones I’ve listed here I feel present the most well-rounded picture, from a wide variety of perspectives.
The most recent book on the list, Timothy Frye’s Weak Strongmanbrings together many of the different factors and perspectives from previous readings. Rather than playing to contemporary stereotypes of the omnipotence of the Russian political system and its leader, Frye explores the limits of Putinism. It highlights the importance of maintaining a positive image for Russian public opinion, and how that weighs into the various policy tradeoffs and strategic decisions made by the Kremlin. These more distant, theoretical questions are couched in prescient and timely discussions of Putin’s enduring popularity, the prospects for Russia’s resource-based economy, the role of strategic repression and media manipulation, the roots of frayed relations with the West, and the questionable utility of foreign election meddling and cyber-warfare.
Looking beyond Putin to understand how today's Russia actually works
Media and public discussion tends to understand Russian politics as a direct reflection of Vladimir Putin's seeming omnipotence or Russia's unique history and culture. Yet Russia is remarkably similar to other autocracies-and recognizing this illuminates the inherent limits to Putin's power. Weak Strongman challenges the conventional wisdom about Putin's Russia, highlighting the difficult trade-offs that confront the Kremlin on issues ranging from election fraud and repression to propaganda and foreign policy.
Drawing on three decades of his own on-the-ground experience and research as well as insights from a new generation…
As a surgeon and scientist who has had a lifelong interest in science and science fiction, I can’t help being fascinated by “what if” questions, especially as regards the impact of inventions on human society and the world. As an optimist, I tend to enjoy exploring inventions that benefit mankind much more than those that bring on an apocalypse.
This riveting tale asks “what if” a future technology allows the “bobbling” of spherical volumes of invincible space within which time is stopped. In a misguided effort to stop a war, the Peace Authority bobbles military groups and war-making machinery all around the world with unexpected consequences.
But, for me, the stars of the show are the bobbles themselves, especially when they unexpectedly start popping, releasing people, war machines, and exploding bombs that have been in stasis for decades.
First in a quintessential hard-science fiction adventure, Hugo Award-winning author Vernor Vinge's The Peace War follows a scientist determined to put an end to the militarization of his greatest invention--and of the government behind it.
The Peace Authority conquered the world with a weapon that never should have been a weapon--the "bobble," a spherical force-field impenetrable by any force known to mankind. Encasing governmental installations and military bases in bobbles, the Authority becomes virtually omnipotent.
But they've never caught Paul Hoehler, the maverick who invented the technology, and who has been working quietly for decades to develop a way to…
In 2021 I retired as Schwarz-Taylor Professor of German at Oxford. For many years I had been interested not only in German literature but in European literature and culture more broadly, particularly in the eighteenth century. Oxford is a centre of Enlightenment research, being the site of the Voltaire Foundation, where a team of scholars has just finished editing the complete works of Voltaire. When in 2013 I was asked to write a book on the Enlightenment, I realized that I had ideal resources to hand – though I also benefited from a year’s leave spent at Göttingen, the best place in Germany to study the eighteenth century.
This is an original view of the Enlightenment by one of the most exciting of its current historians. The Enlightenment urged people to think for themselves; intellectual authority resided ultimately within the individual. It valued the emotions as highly as reason; emotions included what philosophers called ‘the passions’, not just sympathy with others, but individual desires and appetites. The Enlightenment was also a period of increasing material prosperity, in which some thinkers still praised the virtue of frugality, while others pointed out that luxury and self-indulgence were necessary to drive the modern economy. These arguments, displayed here with energy and clarity, are with us still.
A provocative history of the changing values that have given rise to our present discontents.
We pursue power, pleasure, and profit. We want as much as we can get, and we deploy instrumental reasoning-cost-benefit analysis-to get it. We judge ourselves and others by how well we succeed. It is a way of life and thought that seems natural, inevitable, and inescapable. As David Wootton shows, it is anything but. In Power, Pleasure, and Profit, he traces an intellectual and cultural revolution that replaced the older systems of Aristotelian ethics and Christian morality with the iron cage of instrumental reasoning that…
Since I was a tween, I’ve been fascinated by romance. That happily ever after has always taken my breath away. Growing up in Detroit, Michigan, suspense and mystery have always surrounded my life, and intertwining these two elements in my own stories was a norm, but reading them was required and loved. I’m a part of several groups that focus on these genres and I share my readings with them along with my own group on Facebook. I know you will enjoy reading these books as much as I have.
As a long-time fan of this author, I always find myself in his
characters and very much engrossed in the story.
This story was filled
with deep suspense wrapped around a good romance, and it kept me turning
pages until the end. I received this book at a conference from the
author and I was so engrossed in this book I finished it by the time I was
home from the event.
This masterpiece by celebrated New York Times bestselling author Walter Mosley is the mysterious story of a young Black man who agrees to an unusual bargain to save the home that has belonged to his family for generations.
The man at Charles Blakey's door has a proposition almost too strange for words. The stranger offers him $50,000 in cash to spend the summer in Charles's basement, and Charles cannot even begin to guess why. The beautiful house has been in the Blakey family for generations, but Charles has just lost his job and is behind on his mortgage payments. The…
My interest in empires began as an undergraduate taking a course in International Political Economy. We were asked to view poverty and ‘underdevelopment’ in the historical perspective of European colonization but asked to see development economics as something entirely new. I couldn’t see the difference. I have since become fascinated not just by the world historical recurrence of this particular type of politics, but also why our understanding of it is occluded through repeated framing of global politics via the nation state. Unless we understand this global history we are at risk of misdiagnosing contemporary problems, and repeating historical patterns. Moreover, we can’t build a world that is truly non-imperial without sustained comparative study.
This book is part of a new genre of global history and provides enough of a historical sweep to acquaint the non-historian with a view that is not dominated by the nation state as its unit of analysis and Europe as the apex of world historical change.
It’s an accessible work that fills in a lot of gaps in world historical knowledge that often exist because our myths of historical change (like modernization or development) keep us focused on ‘the west’ and ‘the state’.
From my point of view, it’s no longer politically acceptable to be ignorant of history in India, Africa, or the Middle East, by way of example, before European colonization. Viewed through the lens of empire, world history looks very different, and this book shows how doing so is a myth-busting exercise.
Empires--vast states of territories and peoples united by force and ambition--have dominated the political landscape for more than two millennia. Empires in World History departs from conventional European and nation-centered perspectives to take a remarkable look at how empires relied on diversity to shape the global order. Beginning with ancient Rome and China and continuing across Asia, Europe, the Americas, and Africa, Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper examine empires' conquests, rivalries, and strategies of domination--with an emphasis on how empires accommodated, created, and manipulated differences among populations. Burbank and Cooper examine Rome and China from the third century BCE, empires…
Women’s empowerment is my passion and my purpose, which is why I founded Women Connect4Good, Inc., a 501(c)3 foundation to help support other organizations that work to advance women and girls. Our name says it, and our work proves it. Women make phenomenal leaders, and while I can do a lot through my foundation to promote women’s leadership, we can all do something in our day-to-day lives to help women lead. Every day we can do something to support another woman, or partner with another woman, like the women who’ve written the books I’ve reviewed here – friends, colleagues, and fierce advocates for equality on every level. We are all lifting as we rise.
Imagine your ideal leadership role where you – and the you who you’ve always known you were meant to be – can fully thrive. Well, imagine no more…Gloria Feldt’s No Excuses can show you the way. This book opened my eyes to how women think about power. We're used to being subjected to power over us and don't want any part of it. But when we change how we view power as the "power to," we can transform our careers and lives to one where we fully thrive beyond what we might have imagined. No Excuses turns power into nine very specific, female-oriented tactics to help women channel their inner strength and power to advance where ever they want—even the c-suite, where we need hundreds more phenomenal women leaders.
An invaluable guidebook, which contends that the most vexing problems facing women today isn't that doors of opportunity aren't open but that not enough women are walking through them
Feminist icon Gloria Feldt pulls no punches in this new book, which argues that the most confounding problem facing women today isn't that doors of opportunity aren't open, but that not enough women are walking through them. From the boardroom to the bedroom, public office to personal relationships, she asserts that nobody is keeping women from parity-except themselves. Feldt puts women's power into an historical context, showing the ways in which…
I graduated early from the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor to come back to my home country and work in Indian politics. Since then I’ve worked with a Member of Parliament, handled campaign design in states across India, and headed data analytics for India’s largest political party. This experience gave me an inside view of how politics operates and how elections are actually won. The fact that this was at a time when Indian politics was going through massive changes with micro-targeting, digital technologies and disinformation gaining ground made the experience even more unique. Based on this experience, my books detail how power is gained, (mis)used, and lost.
Although elections are dependent on how people choose to cast their ballot in the voting booth, politics is much larger than just elections. Political power isn’t just retained by convincing citizens to vote for you, it is sometimes also retained by crushing opposition voices and concocting fake narratives. This book shows how political parties in India have used organs of the state, including the police, investigative bodies, and intelligence agencies to consolidate power. It was a heartbreaking read, but it offered key insights into understanding how political power is actually wielded in the world’s largest democracy.
My writing career has been organized around the old-school journalistic mission to ‘afflict the comforted and comfort the afflicted.’ Often, I take on big targets that other journalists have missed—a case in point being Bill Gates. News outlets have published thousands of one-sided stories about Gates’s philanthropic goals and gifts but seldom interrogate the Gates Foundation for what it is: an unaccountable, undemocratic structure of power. My investigation of Bill Gates, of course, stands on the shoulders of giants. The five books I recommend here paved the way for me to break new ground, expand the story, and hopefully spark a bigger public debate.
Danish scholar Adam Fejerskov spent months in Seattle doing field research, trying to get behind the impenetrable and secretive PR fortress the Gates Foundation has built to guard its humanitarian image. Calling the foundation a “chameleon,’ Fejerskov explores how the foundation publicly presents itself as an innocent philanthropy while actually operating, at turns, like a private company or a political actor.
The book will leave readers troubled by the foundation's enormous power in global affairs and questioning why this power is so unregulated.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has established itself as one of the most powerful private forces in global politics, shaping the trajectories of international policy-making. Driven by fierce confidence and immense expectations about its ability to change the world through its normative and material power, the foundation advances an agenda of social and economic change through technological innovation. And it does so while forming part of a movement that refocuses efforts towards private influence on, and delivery of, societal progress.
The Gates Foundation's Rise to Power is an urgent exploration of one of the world's most influential but also…
I am a lifelong educator who believes that everyone can create a better future by changing behaviors, practicing leadership skills, and improving outcomes across time and place—at home, work, and community. If you believe in lifelong learning, join me in elevating the courage, capacity, and wisdom of people everywhere through Choosing Leadership. This book is an accessible, educational tool that provides a structured approach combining individual written reflection with discussion to create collective wisdom in groups. Together, we can change the global conversation about leadership—from heroic mythic beings called “Leaders” to diverse human beings that I call “Champions.”
I have read most every book written by the wise and prolific scholar Jeff Pfeffer.
I often return to a chapter from this book titled: "The Costs of Power." Among his many warnings about the trappings of power is this one, attributed to Jim March: “You can have autonomy or status, but not both.”
This is a profound juxtaposition to consider when making leadership choices.
Over decades of consulting with corporations and the people who run them and 30 years teaching MBA students the nuances of organisational power, Jeffrey Pfeffer has watched numerous people suffer career reversals even as others prevail despite the odds. The most common mistake: most of us don't have a realistic understanding of what makes some people more successful than others. We tend to subscribe to the just world phenomenon, believing that life is fair, rendering us unprepared for the challenges and competition of the real world. Now, Pfeffer brings decades of research and incredible insights to a wide audience. Brimming…
