TBB offers a series of book reviews on some of the many texts we use during the course of our curriculum. Books have been chosen for TBB Book Reviews because they offer unique insight into international development issues and inspire us each to be proactive agents of change. If you are interested in exploring some of the ideas TBB students engage during our gap year programs, pick up a few books and follow along!
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The End of Poverty by Jeffery Sachs Jeffrey Sachs is a world renowned economist who served as the architect of the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals. In this bestseller, Sachs paints a picture of how the complexities of poverty have trapped 1.2 billion people around the world in what he calls “extreme poverty.” Read Review |
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The White Man’s Burden by William Easterly William Easterly is a former World Banker staffer and is currently a professor at NYU. Building on his extensive research and personal experience in the field of international development, The White Man’s Burden delivers a strong critique of the efforts of the “developed” world to assist the “developing” world with foreign aid. Read Review |
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Development as Freedom by Amartya Sen The definition of “development” is elusive, to say the least. Yet, experts in the field use the term constantly without explaining what they mean. Amartya Sen committed an entire book to defining the term in Development as Freedom. Rather than focusing on the widely accepted quantifiable statistics like income and infant mortality to determine a community’s state of development, Sen writes that these only reflect advances if they result in increases in the freedom of individuals. Read Review |
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Dead Aid by Dambisa Moyo The debate about the goals, nature, and effectiveness of aid to the developing world has raged for decades. In recent years, these debates have focused upon aid to Africa as donors struggle to determine why their efforts haven't made greater gains on the continent. Dambisa Moyo has injected a new idea that has turned the debate upside-down. In Dead Aid, she asserts that aid has not only been ineffective, but has ultimately slowed development through the creation of crippling dependencies and the empowerment of corrupt regimes. Read Review |
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Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins John Perkins was part of a small and secretive sect among international corporate executives known as “Economic Hit Men” or EHMs. After nearly 30 years as an EHM, this book exposes the little known history of how a few pivotal figures changed the course of world history. Read Review |
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Collapse by Jared Diamond Jared Diamond’s Collapse utilizes anthropological and archaeological research to analyze why many ancient and not so ancient civilizations (the Maya, the Anasazi, the Khmer of Angkor Wat, and the Vikings on Greenland, to name a few) did not survive. His research reveals a pattern of man-made environmental destruction leading to each society’s collapse. Diamond takes this analysis beyond just a cautionary message to determine the assumptions that undergirded unsustainable behaviors, policies, and cultures. Read Review |
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Hot Flat and Crowded by Thomas Friedman While global climate change tends to take the front seat in arguments in favor of energy policy and research, Thomas Friedman’s Hot, Flat, and Crowded takes a different approach: sustainable energy policy and technology is the future of the global economy. Further, he argues, the country that leads the way in both will lead the globe economically and politically in the decades to come. Read Review |
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Savages by Joe Kane Savages is a first-person account of the conflict of the past few decades between Texaco (now owned by Chevron) and the Huaorani communities affected by their oil extraction endeavors in the Amazon. Kane’s book chronicles the divisions within the local community, the cultural divide, and the national and global economic and political forces at play in determining the future health and sovereignty of the society that has called the forest home for hundreds - if not thousands - of years. Read Review |
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Cradle to Cradle by William McDonough and Michael Braungart For decades, the modern environmental movement has been built upon the assumption that salvation will come through doing “less bad.” Policy at all levels focuses primarily upon limiting pollution, reducing waste, and reducing resource use (though this last one is pretty rare). William McDonough and Michael Braungart’s Cradle to Cradle presents a radical shift in thinking: don’t regulate toward “less bad,” design toward “more good.” Read Review |
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Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and Oliver Relin Greg Mortenson stumbled through the Himalayas, exhausted, dehydrated, and in serious danger of dying from exposure. Having failed to reach the peak of K2, he arrived in a rural mountain village in Pakistan, where the community nursed him back to health. Weeks later, as he prepared to return to the US, he watched the children of the village sit on the bare earth, scratching numbers and words into the dirt as their teacher led classes. He decided to repay this village that saved his life by building them a school. Read Review |
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Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire There are only a few areas of development that are considered absolutes and included in every nation’s plan for growth and prosperity. Education is certainly one of them. Yet, the concept of what it means to “educate” someone is rarely examined. Perhaps, like the term “development”, education simply is too broad, too sticky, too loaded a topic for anything less than a deep philosophical tome. Paulo Freire’s seminal work Pedagogy of the Oppressed attempts to drive to the heart of the issue. Read Review |
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Oracle Bones by Peter Hessler Peter Hessler’s National Book Award winning Oracle Bones takes us beyond surface level into the reality of day-to-day Chinese life. Hessler takes us deeper by interweaving thousands of years of Chinese history into his illustrations of the people of modern China. By providing intimate portraits of the elite, the urban middle class, and the folks of small rural communities, and making the historical connections among these communities, he goes beyond just cross sections of society and creates an accessible, inter-woven narrative of the yesterday, today, and tomorrow of China. Read Review |
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First They Killed my Father by Loung Ung In Cambodia, between 1975 and 1979, the Khmer Rouge attempted to create a completely agrarian society. In order to do so, they evacuated the cities and sent their inhabitants to the countryside to work in labor camps. So began the genocide that killed two million people, targeting the educated people, previous government officials and anyone who questioned their new society. Read Review |
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The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan Michael Pollan researched The Omnivore’s Dilemma in an effort to better understand the relationship between humans and food. Throughout the book, Pollan intertwines scientific descriptions of the various ways we obtain food as humans (industrial production, sustainable farming, and hunting/gathering) with an exploration of the philosophies that undergird the human relationship with food. Read Review |
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In Spite of the Gods by Edward Luce Michael Pollan researched Edward Luce’s In Spite of the Gods offers an inside look at post-independence India that strives to unravel the apparent deep contradictions in this nation of more than 1 billion. Through storytelling, personal experiences, and deep investigative reporting, Luce provides an exceptionally broad analysis of Indian society. From rural untouchables to urban billionaires to political elites, contemporary India comes alive to the reader through a highly accessible writing style that shows the relationship between palace intrigue and the poorest rural Indians. Read Review |
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Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder Paul Farmer rose from a childhood in poverty in the US to earn his MD from Harvard Medical School - with which he continued to live in poverty. Kidder’s compelling story of Farmer’s life and work chronicles his efforts to address public health needs in developing communities around the world including Haiti, Peru, and inner city Boston. Read Review |
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Three Letter Plague by Jonny Steinberg It’s often said that HIV/AIDS is a social disease. Jonny Steinberg illustrates this point brilliantly. A White South African journalist, he set out in 2005 to understand the factors that prevent South Africans from pursuing testing and treatment for a disease that infects 20% of the country and has killed nearly 500,000 of their countrymen. Read Review |
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There Are No Children Here by Alex Kotlowitz Inner city Chicago faces the same problems urban communities throughout the US do: gang violence, drug trafficking, high unemployment, failing schools, and death and incarceration rates for young African American and Latino males that are astounding. There Are No Children Here illustrates these realities by chronicling the experiences of two young boys who confront these challenges each day. Read Review |
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Capitalism’s Achilles Heel by Raymond Baker International banking and financial systems, despite their recent time in the spotlight, will never be sexy topics. Money laundering and off shore banking are tied in our collective consciousness to corrupt government officials and drug trafficking. But, they are rarely associated with international development. In Capitalism’s Achilles Heel, Raymond Baker sheds light on one of the most significant, and possibly most neglected, aspects of international development. Read Review |
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Half the Sky by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn Women are oppressed. Let there be no doubt - that is an exceptionally charged statement. The emotional charge of it is most directly rooted in the horrific realities faced by many millions of women and girls around the globe every day. Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s Half the Sky is an effort to illustrate some of those circumstances and explore the socio-political, economic, and cultural reasons for them. Read Review |
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How to Change the World by David Bornstein Social entrepreneurship is a simple idea that might just change the world: create, market, and sell a product with the express intent of improving the world. In How to Change the World, David Bornstein explores the power of this concept through a series of vignettes highlighting the various permutations this concept has taken in the hands of agents of change around the globe. Read Review |
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Delivering Development by Edward Carr Development often fails. This is not a new premise. Many have written about it. But Edward Carr offers a fascinating perspective on why he believes this is true in Delivering Development. He begins by providing an alternative context for thinking about and defining development. Without going too deeply into his framing of his argument, perhaps one of the most unique points he makes is the human tendency toward shortsightedness. Read Review |
