🧲 Books like this
The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran
Hooman Majd · 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 authorPutin Country: A Journey into the Real Russia
Anne Garrels · 240 pages
A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa
Howard W. French · 280 pages
Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles
Richard Dowden · 576 pages
Dowden spins tales of cults and commerce in Senegal and traditional spirituality in Sierra Leone; analyzes the impact of oil and the Internet on Nigeria and aid on Sudan; and examines what has gone so badly wrong in Rwanda and the Congo.
And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East
Richard Engel · 241 pages
"Based on two decades of reporting, NBC's chief foreign correspondent's riveting story of the Middle East revolutions, the Arab Spring, war, and terrorism seen up-close--sometimes dangerously so. When he was just twenty-three, a recent graduate of Stanford University, Richard Engel set off to Cairo with $2,000 and dreams of being a reporter. Shortly thereafter he was working freelance for Arab new
China Wakes: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power
Nicholas D. Kristof, Sheryl WuDunn · 510 pages
"When China wakes, it will shake the world," Napoleon Bonaparte once remarked. That moment is now at hand. And in this book Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the Pulitzer Prize winning Beijing correspondents of The New York Times, bring to life the people, the politics, and the paradoxes of China as never before. China Wakes combines groundbreaking reportage with the authors' personal account
Disordered World: An Exploration of Our Volatile Post-9/11 World
Amin Maalouf · 272 pages
Born into the Christian minority in Lebanon and since settled in France, Amin Maalouf claims a unique position in global conversation. His first book, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, was a critical and commercial success and remains in print after twenty years. In Disordered World, Maalouf combines his command of history with a critical perspective on contemporary culture, East and West-joining th
Intent to Destroy: Russia’s Two-Hundred-Year Quest to Dominate Ukraine
Eugene Finkel · 336 pages
Rock the Casbah: Rage and Rebellion Across the Islamic World
Robin Wright · 307 pages
Written by a veteran reporter, this is an up close portrait of the fierce struggle between moderates and extremists taking place within the Islamic world today. Why don't Muslims challenge the violent extremists among them? Well, they do. Here she cites the clerics, comedians, and rappers who challenge al Qaeda violence; the women who are launching liberation movements; and the former jihadists wh
North Korea Undercover: Inside the World's Most Secret State
John Sweeney · 338 pages
"North Korea is like no other tyranny on earth. Its citizens are told their home is the greatest nation in the world, and big brother is always watching: it is Orwell's 1984 made reality. Award-winning BBC journalist John Sweeney is one of the few foreign journalists to have witnessed the devastating reality of life in the controversial and isolated nation of North Korea, having entered the countr
The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care
T.R. Reid · 304 pages
Bestselling author T. R. Reid guides a whirlwind tour ofsuccessful health care systems worldwide, revealing possible pathstoward U.S. reformIn The Healing of America, New York Timesbestselling author T. R. Reid shows how all the otherindustrialized democracies have achieved something the UnitedStates can’t seem to do: provide health care for everybody at areasonable cost.In his global quest to fin
Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran
Elaine Sciolino · 416 pages
"Like the mirror mosaics found in Iran's royal palaces and religious shrines, there is more to the whole of the country than the fragments revealed to outsiders. Persian Mirrors captures this elusive Iran. Sciolino paints in astonishing detail and rich color the surprising inner life of this country, where a great battle is raging, not for control over territory but for the soul of the nation."--B
Walking With The Comrades
Arundhati Roy · 182 pages
In early 2010, Roy traveled into the forests of Central India, homeland to millions of indigenous people, dreamland to some of the world's biggest mining corporations. The result is this... report from the heart of an unfolding revolution.
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
Salvador
Joan Didion · 108 pages
"Previously published in ... The New York review of books in October 1982." Discusses the situation of anarchy and terrorism in El Salvador as of 1982.
Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China
Evan Osnos · 416 pages
The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah Wishes You a Happy Birthday
Neil MacFarquhar · 393 pages
Since his boyhood in Qadhafi's Libya, Neil MacFarquhar has developed a counterintuitive sense that the Middle East, despite all the bloodshed in its recent history, is a place of warmth, humanity, and generous eccentricity. In this book, he introduces a cross-section of unsung, dynamic men and women pioneering political and social change. There is the Kuwaiti sex therapist in a leather suit with m
The Yellow Wind: With a New Afterword by the Author
David Grossman · 228 pages
An account of the author's three month journey on the West Bank of the Jordan River and his awareness of the moral dilemmas inherent in the Palestinian predicament.
Between the World and Me
Ta-Nehisi Coates · 155 pages
An Amazon Best Book of July 2015: Readers of his work in The Atlantic and elsewhere know Ta-Nehisi Coates for his thoughtful and influential writing on race in America. Written as a series of letters to his teenaged son, his new memoir, Between the World and Me, walks us through the course of his life, from the tough neighborhoods of Baltimore in his youth, to Howard University—which Coates dubs “
The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan
Kim Barker · 311 pages
In The Taliban Shuffle, Barker offers an insider’s account of the “forgotten war” in Afghanistan and Pakistan, chronicling the years after America’s initial routing of the Taliban, when we failed to finish the job. When Barker arrives in Kabul, foreign aid is at a record low, electricity is a pipe dream, and of the few remaining foreign troops, some aren’t allowed out after dark. Meanwhile, in
My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel
Ari Shavit · 445 pages
Not since Thomas L. Friedman’s groundbreaking From Beirut to Jerusalem has a book captured the essence and the beating heart of the Middle East as keenly and dynamically as My Promised Land. Facing unprecedented internal and external pressures, Israel today is at a moment of existential crisis. Ari Shavit draws on interviews, historical documents, private diaries, and letters, as well as his own f
The Ends of the Earth: A Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy
Robert D. Kaplan · 476 pages
In The Ends of the Earth, Robert D. Kaplan travels from the devastated countries of West Africa and the fundamentalist enclaves of Egypt and Iran to the culturally explosive lands of Central Asia, India, Pakistan, and Southeast Asia with hardly more than a notebook and a backpack. Kaplan's intention was to investigate firsthand the effect of population explosion and environmental degradation in
The Future Is Peace: A Shared Journey Across the Holy Land
Aziz Abu Sarah, Maoz Inon · 240 pages
Worth Dying For: The Power and Politics of Flags
Tim Marshall · 266 pages
From the renewed sense of nationalism in China to troubled identities in Europe and the USA, to the terrifying rise of Islamic State, the world is a confusing place right now and we need to understand the symbols, old and new, that people are rallying around. For thousands of years, flags have represented our hopes and dreams. We wave them. Burn them. March under their colors. And still, in the tw