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 the program, pick up a few books and follow along!
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.”
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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. Combining personal stories and clearly stated research, Easterly argues the $2.3 trillion loaned as development assistance since the end of WWII has not only failed to improve the lives of the worlds’ poorest, but has often resulted in greater poverty and oppression.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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