Here are 100 books that Butler to the World fans have personally recommended if you like
Butler to the World.
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I’ve worked for two decades as a researcher and campaigner to expose the tax behaviour of unscrupulous multinational companies and wealthy individuals, and the central lesson is that we only make progress when the narrative shifts: when the public and policymakers start to appreciate just how much damage is done to our societies by the professional enablers of tax abuse. These books are real narrative-shifters, showing the world to us in ways we need to see, and making it a pleasure.
I think Treasure Islands may well be the most influential book in tax justice.
Author Nick Shaxson, previously a journalist for the Financial Times and Reuters, became a key member of the Tax Justice Network and wrote this rollicking blockbuster. In a story that spans the globe, Shaxson captures the lurking malevolence of the men – and it is almost always men – who shaped our world so they could profit from selling opportunities for tax abuse and financial crime.
The dragons of Yuro have been hunted to extinction.
On a small, isolated island, in a reclusive forest, lives bandit leader Marani and her brother Jacks. With their outlaw band they rob from the rich to feed themselves, raiding carriages and dodging the occasional vindictive…
I am passionate about integrating individual, organizational, and community needs to create a better world for the benefit of us all. I am an author and founder of organizations in the career and workforce development fields. My four books (Affiliation in the Workplace, Building Workforce Strength, Business Behaving Well, and How to Build a Nontraditional Career Path) and much of my career explored bringing work to life for those close to us, for ourselves, for our organizations, and for our communities. My social activism has been expressed through community volunteer work and promoting a range of social causes. I hope you enjoy the books I have chosen for you!
Some books reach me on an emotional level, while with others, it is in their intellectual reach and research rigor. This book is of the latter kind.
I was captivated by the breadth of ideas presented and the depth of research involved. It affirmed for me the dangerous trajectory of growing financial inequality that is unfolding and why that is important. This book is a monumental work.
A New York Times #1 Bestseller An Amazon #1 Bestseller A Wall Street Journal #1 Bestseller A USA Today Bestseller A Sunday Times Bestseller A Guardian Best Book of the 21st Century Winner of the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award Winner of the British Academy Medal Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award
What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy. But satisfactory answers have been hard…
I’ve worked for two decades as a researcher and campaigner to expose the tax behaviour of unscrupulous multinational companies and wealthy individuals, and the central lesson is that we only make progress when the narrative shifts: when the public and policymakers start to appreciate just how much damage is done to our societies by the professional enablers of tax abuse. These books are real narrative-shifters, showing the world to us in ways we need to see, and making it a pleasure.
Eva Joly is one of the great heroes of tax justice, one of my heroes, a campaigning judge who faced down death threats in order to break the extraordinary corruption case of France’s biggest oil company.
But here, she joins forces with the novelist Judith Perrignon to tell a story of corruption that is sharp, ironic, and intelligent, as it runs from Lagos to London, by way of Paris and St Petersburg.
The head of the Nigerian fraud squad is evacuated from Lagos by secret-service operatives. Meanwhile a junior prosecutor in Nice probes the mysterious death of the wife of a powerful banker and a crusading journalist in St Petersburg pursues a corrupt oligarch and his criminal business empire. The paths of all three cross in London, where they find themselves embroiled in violent events obviously linked to financial and political interests and hunted by the oligarch's men, the Western secret services and goons sent by Nigerian oil magnates. A satirical, intelligent and fast-paced thriller set in the world of high finance…
At five years old, Kasiel was found with the pointed ends of his ears cut off. Despite that brutal start, he’s lived twelve peaceful years with the man who took him in. Keeping his hair long over his mutilated ears helps him hide the fact that he is Vanrian, a…
I am a professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, and I am interested in global capitalism, financial elites, and all aspects of how people broker capital deals. I am a scholar of anti-heroes who studies all of the ways that people play in the gray. My first book, Dealing in Desire, is an ethnography where I embedded myself in several different hostess bars to study the relationship between sex work and financial deal-making. I grew up in California but have lived most of my adult life in Ho Chi Minh City, Houston, Boston, and Chicago.
I love this book because it is one of those rare books written by a woman who trained to become a wealth manager in order to tell a story about how the ultra-rich keep getting richer despite taxes on income, capital gains, property, and inheritance. In her groundbreaking investigations, she follows the money of the ultra-wealthy through some of the most popular offshore tax havens. She also interviews wealth managers to shed light on how they help their clients dodge taxes and creditors and hide money from their families. I am in awe of the author's achievement.
"A timely account of how the 1% holds on to their wealth...Ought to keep wealth managers awake at night." -Wall Street Journal
"Harrington advises governments seeking to address inequality to focus not only on the rich but also on the professionals who help them game the system." -Richard Cooper, Foreign Affairs
"An insight unlike any other into how wealth management works." -Felix Martin, New Statesman
"One of those rare books where you just have to stand back in awe and wonder at the author's achievement...Harrington offers profound insights into the world of the professional people who dedicate their lives to…
In my graduate studies, I had a fantastic professor who was able to make the politics of international criminal justice one of my favorite subjects. The intersection of law, politics, peace, and conflict pulled me in. But the fact that it also touches on human rights, state sovereignty, and the prevention of mass atrocities got me hooked. I ended up doing extensive research on the International Criminal Court and how it interacts with UN peace operations, and I have subsequently been teaching peace and justice at Leiden University. I publish regularly on these topics as well and am the associate editor of International Peacekeeping, one of the leading journals on international conflict management.
Many authors who write about international criminal justice forget that those who are the subject of criminal investigations have their own interests and goals in how they respond. The states in which these investigations take place try to use the courts and tribunals for their own purposes, like neutralizing opposition or presenting themselves as good international citizens.
In this book, Clark reports on his decade-long investigation into the effect of the ICC on politics in African states, especially the DRC and Uganda. I love how he draws on a variety of sources and hundreds of interviews to produce a detailed and nuanced story.
There are a number of controversies surrounding the International Criminal Court (ICC) in Africa. Critics have charged it with neo-colonial meddling in African affairs, accusing it of undermining national sovereignty and domestic attempts to resolve armed conflict. Here, based on 650 interviews over 11 years, Phil Clark critically assesses the politics of the ICC in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, focusing particularly on the Court's multi-level impact on national politics and the lives of everyday citizens. He explores the ICC's effects on peace negotiations, national elections, domestic judicial reform, amnesty processes, combatant demobilisation and community-level accountability and reconciliation.…
I learned early that information doesn’t change people’s minds and that we can’t lecture our way into people’s hearts. Real change comes through building empathy, and we do that through compelling, personal storytelling. I’ve been working on disrupting bias and building empathy my whole life. It’s why I write, and why I teach, and why I travel to speak with different groups. It’s my theory of change in the world—the first step towards moving us to a more caring, kinder global society.
I have never read a book like Babel, that is so deeply entrenched in histories of colonialism, and also sheds so much light on the inequities of our world today.
We see how well-meaning people get sucked into power, and it causes each reader to reflect on how the decisions we make daily can put us on different trajectories.
Babel is such a forceful vision, with beautiful writing and inspiring imagination.
Resonant Blue and Other Stories
by
Mary Vensel White,
The first collection of award-winning short fiction from the author of Bellflower and Things to See in Arizona, whose writing reflects “how we can endure and overcome our personal histories, better understand our ancestral ones, and accept the unknown future ahead.”
I’m a British science editor and author of a string of books on the scientific, medical, and social implications of advances in genetics research. I trained as a geneticist but found more personal satisfaction wielding a pen rather than a pipette. I’m especially drawn to science stories that have medical implications for the public and a strong narrative thread. Prior to writing Editing Humanity, I covered the race for the BRCA1 breast cancer gene (Breakthrough), the Human Genome Project (Cracking the Genome), and the rise of personal genomics (The $1,000 Genome). I’m currently writing a biography of sickle cell disease, arguably the most famous genetic mutation in human history.
The CRISPR story took a shocking turn in 2018 when a Chinese scientist attempted the unthinkable – overseeing the birth of twin girls with edited DNA.
I devoted multiple chapters to this saga in my book (resulting in the book’s ban in China); meanwhile, Stanford law professor Hank Greely produced an excellent account of the entire story in CRISPR People. Greely eloquently guides the reader beyond the headlines, offering valuable context and shrewd legal analysis, before asking whether this scandal could happen again.
What does the birth of babies whose embryos had gone through genome editing mean--for science and for all of us?
In November 2018, the world was shocked to learn that two babies had been born in China with DNA edited while they were embryos--as dramatic a development in genetics as the cloning of Dolly the sheep was in 1996. In this book, Hank Greely, a leading authority on law and genetics, tells the fascinating story of this human experiment and its consequences. Greely explains what Chinese scientist He Jiankui did, how he did it, and how the public and other…
Since a young age, I’ve been focused on how we can build a more just economy that restores and repairs versus extracts from our communities. My expertise is in the micro-economies of alternative, emerging economic solutions—in other words, how businesses and organizations can transform how they work to become pieces of an economy that works for all.
I have a long-loved copy with pages highlighted, corners bent, and margins full of my excited scribbles. The first time I read it, I felt like I had found a true friend in its pages. It reflected back my own developing understanding of the economy and offered language for things I had only sensed.
More than anything, it made me feel less alone and reminded me that others were asking similar questions about how our world could work differently. Gibson-Graham helps the reader understand that the economy is not some far-off concept, but rather all of us, and the choices we make together. Therefore, the book inspires us to see the ways we can change the economy from the ground up.
In the wake of economic crisis on a global scale, more and more people are reconsidering their role in the economy and wondering what they can do to make it work better for humanity and the planet. In this innovative book, J. K. Gibson-Graham, Jenny Cameron, and Stephen Healy contribute complex understandings of economics in practical terms: what can we do right now, in our own communities, to make a difference?
Full of exercises, thinking tools, and inspiring examples from around the world, Take Back the Economy shows how people can implement small-scale changes in their own lives to create…
I’ve always thought of myself as someone who “cares about animals,” but I came to see that I was thinking mainly about mammals and birds and overlooking the vast majority of animal life: fishes and invertebrates. I’m a philosophy professor at the London School of Economics, and for almost 10 years now, I’ve also been part of an emerging international community of “animal sentience” researchers—researchers dedicated to investigating the feelings of animals scientifically. In 2021, a team led by me advised the UK government to protect octopuses, crabs, and lobsters—and the government changed the law in response. But there is a lot more we need to change.
How much do we need to change our ways of life to treat other animals with respect and compassion?
I’m convinced there is a lot we need to change, and I really admire Martha Nussbaum’s grand vision for a future in which all sentient animals have basic “entitlements” written into the Constitution. Is it utopian? A little bit, yes—we are so far away from Nussbaum’s ideal future. But it’s good to have something to aim for.
A revolutionary new theory and call to action on animal rights, ethics, and law from the renowned philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum.
Animals are in trouble all over the world. Whether through the cruelties of the factory meat industry, poaching and game hunting, habitat destruction, or neglect of the companion animals that people purport to love, animals suffer injustice and horrors at our hands every day.
The world needs an ethical awakening, a consciousness-raising movement of international proportions. In Justice for Animals, one of the world's most influential philosophers and humanists Martha C. Nussbaum provides a revolutionary approach to animal rights,…
After her mother is killed in a rare Northern Michigan tornado, Sadie Wixom is left with only her father and grandfather to guide her through young adulthood. Miles away in western Saskatchewan, Stefan Montegrand and his Indigenous family are displaced from their land by multinational energy companies. They are taken…
Choosing philosophy at 18 raised a few eyebrows: friends and family thought I was a bit mad and a little lost. Later, when I decided to write philosophical stories and essays, I heard the same refrain: “Most people are afraid of philosophy.” But those voices never swayed me. Deep down, I knew that thinking is a powerful tool for healing, a way to mend what’s broken within us and in the world. Ideas, I believe, can spark change and make the world a better place.
In a world obsessed with schedules and statistics, I found myself drawn to this whimsical tale about a man who rolls a dice to make life's big decisions. It mirrored my own youthful spirit–a time when I lived very spontaneously, even writing novels as experiments in happenstance. It was a time of unexpected adventures, an antidote to dull routines.
Nowadays, over-planning and seriousness sometimes creep in. But thankfully, I have my children to remind me of the simple, healing joy of play–life doesn’t always have to be so meticulously planned.
The cult classic that can still change your life...Let the dice decide! This is the philosophy that changes the life of bored psychiatrist Luke Rhinehart-and in some ways changes the world as well. Because once you hand over your life to the dice, anything can happen. Entertaining, humorous, scary, shocking, subversive, The Dice Man is one of the cult bestsellers of our time.
