Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and its Triumphs

Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras and the Crack Cocaine Explosion

Gary Webb · 574 pages

Gary Webb draws from thousands of pages of once-secret files from the CIA, DEA, and FBI, the L.A. Sheriff's Department, and recently declassified papers from the Iran-Contra investigation. Together with Nicaraguan journalist Georg Hodel, Webb interviewed former members of the Contra drug ring, as well as former federal prosecutors, CIA and DEA agents, and former Central American police officials.

Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father's Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success

Russ Buettner, Susanne Craig · 528 pages

"Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success" by Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig is an investigative account of Donald Trump’s finances, drawing on decades of tax records, business documents, and insider testimony. The book argues that Trump’s public image as a self-made billionaire is largely a myth, built on vast financial support from his fa

And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic

Randy Shilts · 651 pages

The blueprint of 20th century investigative journalism. Tracing the course of HIV/AIDS through society; from its earliest as then unknown incarnation, to the height of this 1980s hysteria – the death of Rock Hudson: Shilts's book should be in every High School's final academic examinations coursework reading list, as a compulsory item. An unregrettable read.

The Looming Tower

Lawrence Wright · 550 pages

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 Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire

Tim Schwab · 496 pages

Them: Adventures with Extremists

Jon Ronson · 336 pages

In the tradition of Bill Bryson, a fascinating and frequently hilarious look at extremists around the globe, and the conspiracy theory that unites them. Journalist Jon Ronson, the mild-mannered but ironic observer, learns some alarming things about the looking-glass world of them and us. Are the extremists onto something? Or has Ronson become one of Them?

The Looting Machine: Warlords, Oligarchs, Corporations, Smugglers, and the Theft of Africa's Wealth

Tom Burgis · 336 pages

The trade in oil, gas, gems, metals and rare earth minerals wreaks havoc in Africa. During the years when Brazil, India, China and the other "emerging markets" have transformed their economies, Africa's resource states remained tethered to the bottom of the industrial supply chain. While Africa accounts for about 30 per cent of the world's reserves of hydrocarbons and minerals and 14 per cent of t

Escape from North Korea: The Untold Story of Asia's Underground Railroad

Melanie Kirkpatrick · 362 pages

It is a crime to leave North Korea. Yet increasing numbers of North Koreans dare to flee. They go first to neighboring China, which rejects them as criminals, then on to Southeast Asia or Mongolia, and finally to South Korea, the United States, and other free countries. They travel along a secret route known as the new underground railroad. With a journalist's grasp of events and a novelist's ear

The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government's Secret Drone Warfare Program

Jeremy Scahill, The Staff of The Intercept · 256 pages

The "author and his colleagues at the investigative website, The Intercept, expose stunning new details about America's secret assassination policy."--NoveList.

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 Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America's War in Afghanistan

Michael Hastings

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.

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

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

The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power

Jeff Sharlet · 454 pages

A journalist's penetrating look at the untold story of Christian fundamentalism's most elite organization, a self-described invisible network dedicated to a religion of power for the powerfulThey are the Family—fundamentalism's avant-garde, waging spiritual war in the halls of American power and around the globe. They consider themselves the new chosen—congressmen, generals, and foreign dictators

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

One Nation Under Blackmail, Vol. 1: The Sordid Union Between Intelligence and Crime that Gave Rise to Jeffrey Epstein

Whitney Alyse Webb · 544 pages

Gaddafi's Harem: The Story of a Young Woman and the Abuses of Power in Libya

Annick Cojean · 299 pages

Soraya was just fifteen, a schoolgirl in the coastal town of Sirte, when she was given the honor of presenting a bouquet of flowers to Colonel Gaddafi, “the Guide,” on a visit he was making to her school the following week. This one meeting—a presentation of flowers, a pat on the head from Gaddafi—changed Soraya’s life forever. Soon afterwards, she was summoned to Bab al-Azizia, Gaddafi’s palatial

Objective Troy: A Terrorist, a President, and the Rise of the Drone

Scott Shane · 400 pages

A dramatic account of the cat-and-mouse game between the Obama administration and most-wanted terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki traces the President's shifting campaigns and the evolution of the robotic technology that ended Awlaki's life.

In the Time of Madness: Indonesia on the Edge of Chaos

Richard Lloyd Parry · 336 pages

The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man

Luke Harding · 346 pages

"IT BEGAN WITH A TANTALIZING, ANONYMOUS EMAIL: "I AM A SENIOR MEMBER OF THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY." What followed was the most spectacular intelligence breach ever, brought about by one extraordinary man. Edward Snowden was a 29-year-old computer genius working for the National Security Agency when he shocked the world by exposing the near-universal mass surveillance programs of the United States

Holy War Inc. Inside the Secret World of Osama Bin Laden

Peter L. Bergen · 304 pages

"On September 11, 2001, the world in which we live was changed forever. The twin towers of the World Trade Center came crashing down, one side of the Pentagon burst into flames, and more than six thousand men, women, and children lost their lives in the most deadly terrorist attack on American soil. As shocking as it was, it had been long in the making: the assault was the most sophisticated and

The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court

Jeffrey Toobin · 384 pages

Bestselling author Jeffrey Toobin takes you into the chambers of the most important--and secret--legal body in our country, the Supreme Court, and reveals the complex dynamic among the nine people who decide the law of the land.Just in time for the 2008 presidential election--where the future of the Court will be at stake--Toobin reveals an institution at a moment of transition, when decades of co