Midnight in Mexico: A Reporter's Journey Through a Country's Descent into Darkness

Beauty and the Inferno.

Roberto Saviano · 280 pages

Roberto Saviano is best known for his work on the Italian mafia, but Beauty and the Inferno also tackles universal themes with great insight and humanity, with urgency, and often with anger. This important collection includes essays on the legacy of the earthquake at L'Aquila, a town at risk of becoming overrun by mafia; on boxing as an escape route; on the life of the legendary South African jazz

Gangster Warlords: Drug Dollars, Killing Fields, and the New Politics of Latin America

Ioan Grillo · 377 pages

"In a ranch south of Texas, the man known as The Executioner dumps five hundred body parts in metal barrels. In Brazil's biggest city, a mysterious prisoner orders hit-men to gun down forty-one police officers and prison guards in two days. In southern Mexico, a meth maker is venerated as a saint while enforcing Old Testament justice on his enemies. A new kind of criminal kingpin has arisen: part

Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers

Anabel Hernandez · 377 pages

The definitive history of the drug cartels, Narcoland takes readers to the front lines of the "war on drugs," which has so far cost more than 60,000 lives in just six years. Hernández explains in riveting detail how Mexico became a base for the mega-cartels of Latin America and one of the most violent places on the planet. At every turn, Hernández names names - not just the narcos, but also the po

Mafia State: How one reporter became an enemy of the brutal new Russia

Luke Harding

Amexica: War Along the Borderline

Ed Vulliamy · 440 pages

Code Name: Pale Horse: How I Went Undercover to Expose America's Nazis

Scott Payne · 256 pages

News of a Kidnapping

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama's Washington

Sharyl Attkisson · 432 pages

A CBS reporter reveals how she has been electronically surveilled while digging deep into the Obama Administration and its scandals, and offers an incisive critique of her industry and the shrinking role of investigative journalism in today's media.

Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic

Sam Quinones · 377 pages

Sam Quinones chronicles how, over the past 15 years, enterprising sugar cane farmers in a small county on the west coast of Mexico created a unique distribution system that brought black tar heroin-- the cheapest, most addictive form of the opiate, 2 to 3 times purer than its white powder cousin-- to the veins of people across the United States.

Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion

Elizabeth L. Cline · 258 pages

Evaluates the costs of low-priced clothing while tracing the author's own transformation to a conscientious shopper, a journey during which she visited a garment factory, learned to resole shoes, and shopped for local, sustainable clothing.

Marching Powder: A True Story of Friendship, Cocaine, and South America's Strangest Jail

Rusty Young, Thomas McFadden · 400 pages

"Inspired by the description of San Pedro prison in La Paz, Bolivia, in the Lonely Planet Guidebook - and in particular by the 'English-speaking' tours it advertised -- Rusty Young decided to visit the notorious jail. The tour was given by inmate Thomas McFadden, a British citizen arrested for drug smuggling. They struck up a friendship, and Young ended up spending for months in San Pedro, listeni

Stringer: A Reporter's Journey in the Congo

Anjan Sundaram · 265 pages

A journalist who has reported from Africa and the Middle East presents a memoir about his life-threatening, disorienting year of self-discovery in one of the world's most conflicted nations in 2005-2006.

From Beirut to Jerusalem

Thomas L. Friedman · 560 pages

Examines Israeli-Palestinian relations, the PLO, Israeli politics, Lebanese factions, news reporting from the Middle East, and other issues of the Middle East.

Every Man in This Village is a Liar: An Education in War

Megan K. Stack · 257 pages

A shattering account of war and disillusionment from a young woman reporting from the front lines of the war on terror SHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD.

I Was Told to Come Alone: My Journey Behind the Lines of Jihad

Souad Mekhennet · 361 pages

"The journalist who broke the "Jihadi John" story draws on her personal experience to bridge the gap between the Muslim world and the West and explain the rise of Islamic radicalism Souad Mekhennet has lived her entire life between worlds. The daughter of a Turkish mother and a Moroccan father, she was born and educated in Germany and has worked for several American newspapers. Since the 9/11 atta

Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

Suketu Mehta · 542 pages

A native of Bombay, Suketu Mehta gives us an insider's view of this stunning metropolis. He approaches the city from unexpected angles, taking us into the criminal underworld of rival Muslim and Hindu gangs; following the life of a bar dancer raised amid poverty and abuse; opening the door into the inner sanctums of Bollywood; and delving into the stories of the countless villagers who come in sea

In the Hot Zone: One Man, One Year, Twenty Wars

Kevin Sites · 368 pages

Kevin Sites is a man on a mission. Venturing alone into the dark heart of war, armed with just a video camera, a digital camera, a laptop, and a satellite modem, the award-winning journalist covered virtually every major global hot spot as the first Internet correspondent for Yahoo! News. Beginning his journey with the anarchic chaos of Somalia in September 2005 and ending with the Israeli-Hezboll

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

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

McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld

Misha Glenny · 387 pages

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the deregulation of international financial markets in 1989, governments and entrepreneurs alike became intoxicated by dreams of newly opened markets. But no one could have foreseen that the greatest success story to arise from these events would be the worldwide rise of organized crime. Today, it is estimated that illegal tra

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner · 320 pages

*A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything* Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? Why do drug dealers still live with their moms? How much do parents really matter? How did the legalization of abortion affect the rate of violent crime? These may not sound like typical questions for an economist to ask. But

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

Hello Everybody!

Joris Luyendijk · 243 pages

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America

Barbara Ehrenreich · 240 pages

The author's experience holding low-wage jobs in three parts of the U.S. in the late 1990s.