Biographies / Personal Stories · Read
Strength in What Remains
It’s no secret that one of my favorite books is Mountains Beyond Mountains, the biography of Dr. Paul Farmer, where Kidder traces Farmer’s adolescent life, formative years in Haiti as[…]
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Featured · Read · Structural Violence as main theme · United States
The Spirit Level
This might be the best book dealing with social issues that I’ve read in a long, long time. It is also the only inequality, poverty, and global health related book,[…]
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Development in Poor Countries · International · Read
The Uses of Haiti
If you want to understand anything about Haiti, you must read this book. Paul Farmer is brilliant, simply brilliant, and this book takes us for an informative trip back in[…]
Featured · International · Read · War / Conflict
Witness to War
I stumbled onto this book serendipitously, browsing on Amazon for books related to books related to some book on El Salvador that I’d enjoyed. From a literary standpoint it’s not[…]
Development in Poor Countries · International · Read
Rural Development
This is a brilliant but slim work from Robert Chambers. Occasionally I stumble upon a text nearly as old as I am, sitting on someone’s shelf, out of print for[…]
Medicine and Culture
This is a very helpful book when it comes to thinking about health, and how each society views it. Often in the United States we say “health” and we really[…]
Development in Poor Countries · Read
The End of Poverty
I’ve previously written about The White Man’s Burden, by William Easterly, and I consider this to be its companion volume. Easterly and Sachs are essentially competing economists, with Sachs playing[…]
Development in Poor Countries · Read
White Man’s Burden
While in Nigeria I had the opportunity to read William Easterly’s The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So[…]
The Umbrella of US Power
Written pre-9/11, this is a slim volume from Chomsky that outlines the broad strokes of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the ways in which the United States wantonly[…]
Development in Poor Countries · Read · War / Conflict
War Games
Linda Polman has somehow been writing for years, ever so quietly, about the glaring problems within the humanitarian aid industry. War Games, as the sub-title informs, is the story of[…]