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Johann Hari's Top Book Recommendations

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

1

In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts

Close Encounters with Addiction

Based on Gabor Maté’s two decades of experience as a medical doctor and his groundbreaking work with the severely addicted on Vancouver’s skid row, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts radically reenvisions this much misunderstood field by taking a holistic approach. Dr. Maté presents addiction not as a discrete phenomenon confined to an unfortunate or weak-willed few, but as a continuum that runs throughout (and perhaps underpins) our society; not a medical "condition" distinct from the lives it affects, rather the result of a complex interplay among personal history, emotional, and... more
Recommended by Johann Hari, and 1 others.

Johann HariIf you wanted to design a system that would make addiction worse, you’d design the system we have now. (Source)

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2
'The Globalization of Addiction' presents a radical rethink about the nature of addiction. Scientific medicine has failed when it comes to addiction. There are no reliable methods to cure it, prevent it, or take the pain out of it. There is no durable consensus on what addiction is, what causes it, or what should be done about it. Meanwhile, it continues to increase around the world. This book argues that the cause of this failure to control addiction is that the conventional wisdom of the 19th and 20th centuries focused too single-mindedly on the afflicted individual addict. Although... more
Recommended by Johann Hari, and 1 others.

Johann HariWhat Bruce shows is that both the right-wing and left-wing theories of addiction are wrong. (Source)

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3
p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px Calibri} span.s1 {font-kerning: none} Ciudad Juarez lies just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas. A once-thriving border town, it now resembles a failed state. Infamously known as the place where women disappear, its murder rate exceeds that of Baghdad.

In Murder City, Charles Bowden-one of the few journalists who spent extended periods of time in Juarez-has written an extraordinary account of what happens when a city disintegrates. Interweaving stories of its inhabitants-a beauty queen who was raped, a...
more
Recommended by Johann Hari, and 1 others.

Johann HariIt’s a study of Ciudad Juarez, a city in northern Mexico, on the border with the United States. At the time Charles Bowden was there, it was the deadliest city in the world. (Source)

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4
Recommended by Johann Hari, and 1 others.

Johann HariWho wants the drug war? Who wins from it? Who benefits from it? It’s armed criminal gangs. For everyone else, it’s a disaster. (Source)

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