🧲 Books like this
Armed Madhouse: From Baghdad to New Orleans--Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild
Greg Palast · back to the book
What’s in it
Tap a tag: ❤ = this matters to me · tap again ✕ = don’t care · again to reset. The list below updates each time.
24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorImperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone
Rajiv Chandrasekaran · 336 pages
An unprecedented account of life in Baghdad’s Green Zone, a walled-off enclave of towering plants, posh villas, and sparkling swimming pools that was the headquarters for the American occupation of Iraq.
Throw Them All Out: How Politicians and Their Friends Get Rich Off of Insider Stock Tips, Land Deals, and Cronyism That Would Send the Rest of Us to Prison
Peter Schweizer · 211 pages
Schweizer, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, discusses the state of government and the depths of its political corruption.
Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire
Matt Taibbi · 288 pages
"Smells Like Dead Elephants brings together notorious journalistic agitator Matt Taibbi's most incisive and hilarious work from his column in Rolling Stone. Written during a period in our history with no shortage of outrage to compel Taibbi's pen, these pieces paint a shocking portrait of our government at work, or rarely working. But Taibbi doesn't just hit inside the Beltway, he gets into the ac
El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency
Ioan Grillo · 321 pages
"The world has watched stunned at the bloodshed in Mexico. Forty thousand murdered since 2006; police chiefs shot within hours of taking office; mass graves comparable to those of civil wars; car bombs shattering storefronts; headless corpses heaped in town squares. And it is all because a few Americans are getting high. Or is it? The United States throws Black Hawk helicopters, DEA assistance, an
The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin
Masha Gessen · 333 pages
This is the chilling account of how a low-level, small-minded KGB operative ascended to the Russian presidency and, in an astonishingly short time, destroyed years of progress and made his country once more a threat to her own people and to the world. Handpicked by the "family" surrounding an ailing and increasingly unpopular Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin seemed like a perfect choice for the oliga
A Russian Diary: A Journalist's Final Account of Life, Corruption & Death in Putin's Russia
Anna Politkovskaya · 323 pages
Anna Politkovskaya, one of Russia's most fearless journalists, was gunned down in a contract killing in Moscow in the fall of 2006. Just before her death, Politkovskaya completed this searing, intimate record of life in Russia from the parliamentary elections of December 2003 to the grim summer of 2005, when the nation was still reeling from the horrors of the Beslan school siege. In A Russian Dia
This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral — plus plenty of valet parking! — in America’s Gilded Capital
Mark Leibovich · 401 pages
"A book about contemporary political culture in Washington, DC"-- Washington funerals can make great networking opportunities. Disgraced Hill aides can overcome ignominy and emerge with a more potent "brand" than many elected members of Congress. There are no Democrats and Republicans anymore in the nation's capital, just millionaires. That is the grubby secret of the place in the twenty-first ce
Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib
Seymour M. Hersh · 432 pages
Since September 11, 2001, Seymour M. Hersh has riveted readers -- and outraged the Bush Administration -- with his stories in The New Yorker, including his breakthrough pieces on the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. Now, in Chain of Command, he brings together this reporting, along with new revelations, to answer the critical question of the last three years: how did America get from the clear morning w
Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army
Jeremy Scahill · 464 pages
On September 16, 2007, machine gun fire erupted in Baghdad's Nisour Square leaving seventeen Iraqi civilians dead, among them women and children. The shooting spree, labeled "Baghdad's Bloody Sunday," was neither the work of Iraqi insurgents nor U.S. soldiers. The shooters were private forces working for the secretive mercenary company, Blackwater Worldwide. This is the explosive story of a compan
In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu's Congo
Michela Wrong · 353 pages
Known as "the Leopard," the president of Zaire for thirty-two years, Mobutu Sese Seko, showed all the cunning of his namesake -- seducing Western powers, buying up the opposition, and dominating his people with a devastating combination of brutality and charm. While the population was pauperized, he plundered the country's copper and diamond resources, downing pink champagne in his jungle palace l
Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis
Jonathan Blitzer · 544 pages
The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq
George Packer · 512 pages
"The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq recounts how the United States set about changing the history of the Middle East and became ensnared in a guerrilla war in Iraq. It brings to life the people and ideas that created the Bush administration's war policy and led America to the Assassins' Gate - the main point of entry into the American zone in Baghdad. The consequences of that policy are shown in
The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals
Jane Mayer · 392 pages
In the days immediately following September 11th, the most powerful people in the country were panic-stricken. Radical decisions about how to combat terrorists and strengthen national security were made in a state of chaos and fear, but the key players, Vice President Cheney and his powerful, secretive adviser David Addington, used the crisis to further a long-held agenda to enhance presidential p
Putin's Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia?
Karen Dawisha · 445 pages
The raging question in the world today is who is the real Vladimir Putin and what are his intentions. Karen Dawisha's brilliant work provides an answer, describing how Putin got to power, the cabal he brought with him, the billions they have looted, and his plan to restore the Greater Russia.
Hack Attack: How the Truth Caught Up with the World's Most Powerful Man
Nick Davies · 430 pages
"The definitive book on how the News of the World phone-hacking scandal reached the highest echelons of power in the government, security, and the media in the UK, from the journalist who broke the story"--
One Nation Under Blackmail, Vol. 1: The Sordid Union Between Intelligence and Crime that Gave Rise to Jeffrey Epstein
Whitney Alyse Webb · 544 pages
Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq
Thomas E. Ricks · 487 pages
The definitive military chronicle of the Iraq war and a searing judgment on the strategic blindness with which America has conducted it, drawing on the accounts of senior military officers giving voice to their anger for the first time.Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post senior Pentagon correspondant Thomas E. Ricks's Fiasco is masterful and explosive reckoning with the planning and execution o
The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire
Tim Schwab · 496 pages
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
Naomi Klein · 619 pages
**The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism** is a 2007 book by the Canadian author and social activist Naomi Klein. In the book, Klein argues that neoliberal free market policies (as advocated by the economist Milton Friedman) have risen to prominence in some developed countries because of a deliberate strategy of "shock therapy". This centers on the exploitation of national crises (dis
Zeitoun
Dave Eggers · 352 pages
From Goodreads: The true story of one family, caught between America’s two biggest policy disasters: the war on terror and the response to Hurricane Katrina. Abdulrahman and Kathy Zeitoun run a house-painting business in New Orleans. In August of 2005, as Hurricane Katrina approaches, Kathy evacuates with their four young children, leaving Zeitoun to watch over the business. In the days followi
The Fear: Robert Mugabe and the Martyrdom of Zimbabwe
Peter Godwin
Journalist Peter Godwin has covered wars. As a soldier, he's fought them. But nothing prepared him for the surreal mix of desperation and hope he encountered when he returned to Zimbabwe, his broken homeland. Godwin arrived as Robert Mugabe, the country's dictator for 30 years, has finally lost an election. Mugabe's tenure has left Zimbabwe with the world's highest rate of inflation and the shorte
Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China
Philip P. Pan · 398 pages
A vivid chronicle of the world's most successful authoritarian state. Pan, who reported from China for seven years, eluded the police and succeeded in going where few Western journalists have dared. From the rusting factories in the industrial northeast to a tabloid newsroom in the booming south, from a small-town courtroom to the plush offices of the nation's wealthiest tycoons, he takes us insid
Stupid White Men
Michael Moore · 320 pages
"Remember when everything was looking up? When the government was running at a surplus, pollution was disappearing, peace was breaking out in the Middle East and Northern Ireland, and the Bridge to the Twenty-First Century was strung with high-speed Internet cable and paved with 401(k) gold?". "Well, so much for the future. Michael Moore, the award-winning provocateur behind Roger & Me and the be