Jennifer M Harris's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Jennifer M Harris recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Jennifer M Harris's favorite book recommendations of all time.

1
From the acclaimed, best-selling author Adam Hochschild, a sweeping history of the Spanish Civil War, told through a dozen characters, including Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell: a  tale of idealism, heartbreaking suffering, and a noble cause that failed

For three crucial years in the 1930s, the Spanish Civil War dominated headlines in America and around the world, as volunteers flooded to Spain to help its democratic government fight off a fascist uprising led by Francisco Franco and aided by Hitler and Mussolini. Today we're accustomed to remembering the war through...
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Recommended by Jennifer M Harris, and 1 others.

Jennifer M HarrisHe tells a somewhat untold story of the involvement of US corporations. (Source)

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2
A new framework for understanding how globalization works

For all the attention globalization has received in recent years, little consensus has emerged concerning how best to understand it. For some, it is the happy product of free and rational choices; for others, it is the unfortunate outcome of impersonal forces beyond our control.  It is in turn celebrated for the opportunities it affords and criticized for the inequalities in wealth and power it generates.

David Singh Grewal’s remarkable and ambitious book draws on several centuries of political and social...
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Recommended by Jennifer M Harris, and 1 others.

Jennifer M HarrisI’m very long on Grewal, a young scholar whose best work is yet to come. (Source)

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3

Economic Statecraft

A nuclear world desperately in need of alternatives to military force demands better understanding of all techniques of statecraft. In this book David Baldwin draws on social power analyses to develop an analytic framework for evaluating such techniques, and uses it to challenge the conventional view that economic tools of foreign policy do not work.

Integrating insights from economics, political science, psychology, philosophy, history, law, and sociology, this comprehensive work discusses not only the utility of economic statecraft but also its morality, legality, and role in the...
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Recommended by Jennifer M Harris, and 1 others.

Jennifer M HarrisI cried happy tears when I discovered this book. (Source)

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4
Inside the engine-room of China's economic growth--the China Development Bank. Anyone wanting a primer on the secret of China's economic success need look no further than China Development Bank (CDB)--which has displaced the World Bank as the world's biggest development bank, lending billions to countries around the globe to further Chinese policy goals. In "China's World Bank," Bloomberg authors Michael Forsythe and Henry Sanderson outline how the bank is at the center of China's domestic economic growth and how it is helping to expand China's influence in strategically important overseas... more
Recommended by Jennifer M Harris, and 1 others.

Jennifer M HarrisCDB has a lending portfolio that outstrips the World Bank’s by several orders of magnitude. (Source)

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5

Super Sad True Love Story

The author of two critically acclaimed novels, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook and Absurdistan, Gary Shteyngart has risen to the top of the fiction world. Now, in his hilarious and heartfelt new novel, he envisions a deliciously dark tale of America’s dysfunctional coming years—and the timeless and tender feelings that just might bring us back from the brink.

In a very near future—oh, let’s say next Tuesday—a functionally illiterate America is about to collapse. But don’t that tell that to poor Lenny Abramov, the thirty-nine-year-old son of an angry Russian immigrant...
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Whitney CummingsSuper sad but very funny. Well, not super. It’s like a dystopian satire on the future. (Source)

Nicholas CarrI think that novelists, and other artists, are only beginning to grapple with the implications of the Internet, smartphones and all of that. Literature provides a different and very valuable way of perceiving those implications, so I decided to end with a novel. This book is both funny and extremely horrifying. It’s set in a future that is very close in some ways to the present. Shteyngart takes... (Source)

Jennifer M HarrisWhat I like about it is the way Shteyngart takes a pretty wonky concept in geoeconomics and makes it real. (Source)

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