Here are 100 books that Global Health Priority-Setting fans have personally recommended if you like
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I’m a professor in international politics, having written widely on ethical issues in international politics. Much of my previous work has considered the ethical questions that arise when there is a relatively stable, liberal international order, dominated by liberal democracies. But I’m increasingly concerned that, as the global order changes, many of our previous ethical understandings appear anachronistic, with fewer resources to deal with issues, more challenges, and fewer actors willing to act. I’m now trying to better understand what are the implications of rising global authoritarianism and geopolitical shifts mean for states’ global responsibilities and what this means for remaining liberal actors.
We often think about intervention as questions of states intervening against other states, violating their legitimate sovereign claims.
This book complicates this picture. It focuses on less violent and risky types of intervention, by a variety of actors, showing how intervention can vary in how much it opposes institutions and how coercive it is.
One example Rafanelli gives is of Tostan (an international NGO that runs community empowerment programs in Western Africa) that works against practices such as female genital cutting and child marriage.
This significantly complicates the simplistic picture of intervention, often proposed by those wanting to reject measures to tackle human rights abuses. Such forms of intervention might be required to help protect democracy globally.
Global political actors, from states and NGOs to activist groups and individuals, exert influence in societies beyond their own in myriad ways--including via public criticism, consumer boycotts, divestment campaigns, sanctions, and forceful intervention. Often, they do so in the name of justice-promotion. While attempts to promote justice in other societies can do good, they are also often subject to moral criticism and raise several serious moral questions. For example, are there ways to promote one's own ideas about justice in another society while still treating its members tolerantly? Are there ways to do so without disrespecting their legitimate political institutions…
The Victorian mansion, Evenmere, is the mechanism that runs the universe.
The lamps must be lit, or the stars die. The clocks must be wound, or Time ceases. The Balance between Order and Chaos must be preserved, or Existence crumbles.
Appointed the Steward of Evenmere, Carter Anderson must learn the…
I am a philosopher, neuroscientist, geostrategist, and futurologist with a deep interest in the exponential growth of disruptive technologies and how they have the potential to both foster and hinder the progress of human civilisation. My mission is rooted in Transdisciplinary Philosophy and finding transdisciplinary, equitable, and sustainable solutions to identify, predict, and manage frontier risks and geopolitical fractures, both here on earth and in Outer Space. My work at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, St. Antony’s College (Oxford), and the WEF (as a member of various Global Future Agenda Councils) focuses on the interplay between philosophy, neuroscience, strategic culture, applied history, disruptive technologies, grand strategy, IR theory, and security.
In this meticulously researched book, Farrell and Newman explore how the U.S. has reshaped the global economic system, using financial networks, supply chains, and digital infrastructure as instruments of geopolitical influence.
The book does a good job at highlighting the ways in which global systems are manipulated to serve strategic ends, often with profound implications for sovereignty and dignity.
I recommend this book because it provides a compelling look at how economic interdependence—a cornerstone of global cooperation—has become a subtle yet powerful mechanism for exerting influence and control. It echoes my long-held conviction that the complex web of global relationships is a dynamic arena for power struggles, where economic dependencies can be weaponised to serve political interests and strategic dominance.
A Responsible Statecraft best foreign policy book of 2023
A deeply researched investigation that reveals how the United States is like a spider at the heart of an international web of surveillance and control, which it weaves in the form of globe-spanning networks such as fiber optic cables and obscure payment systems
America’s security state first started to weaponize these channels after 9/11, when they seemed like necessities to combat terrorism―but now they’re a matter of course. Multinational companies like AT&T and Citicorp build hubs, which they use to make money, but which the…
I’m a professor in international politics, having written widely on ethical issues in international politics. Much of my previous work has considered the ethical questions that arise when there is a relatively stable, liberal international order, dominated by liberal democracies. But I’m increasingly concerned that, as the global order changes, many of our previous ethical understandings appear anachronistic, with fewer resources to deal with issues, more challenges, and fewer actors willing to act. I’m now trying to better understand what are the implications of rising global authoritarianism and geopolitical shifts mean for states’ global responsibilities and what this means for remaining liberal actors.
This book really brought home to me the transnational side of rising global authoritarianism.
We know a lot about democratic decline within countries and the changing global order. This book differs as it powerfully documents the transnational links between dictators across the world, working together like never before.
This is even if they are not particularly close or share ideology. Dictators are simply collaborating to enrich themselves by propagating authoritarianism globally and undermining democracy.
It’s also very engagingly written with some powerful vignettes.
The celebrated historian and journalist uncovers the networks trying to destroy the democratic world
All of us have in our minds a cartoon image of what an autocratic state looks like, with a bad man at the top. But in the 21st century, that cartoon bears little resemblance to reality. Nowadays, autocracies are run not by one bad guy, but by sophisticated networks composed of kleptocratic financial structures, security services and professional propagandists. The members of these networks are connected not only within a given country, but among many countries. The corrupt, state-controlled companies in one dictatorship do business with…
The Guardian of the Palace is the first novel in a modern fantasy series set in a New York City where magic is real—but hidden, suppressed, and dangerous when exposed.
When an ancient magic begins to leak into the world, a small group of unlikely allies is forced to act…
I’m a professor in international politics, having written widely on ethical issues in international politics. Much of my previous work has considered the ethical questions that arise when there is a relatively stable, liberal international order, dominated by liberal democracies. But I’m increasingly concerned that, as the global order changes, many of our previous ethical understandings appear anachronistic, with fewer resources to deal with issues, more challenges, and fewer actors willing to act. I’m now trying to better understand what are the implications of rising global authoritarianism and geopolitical shifts mean for states’ global responsibilities and what this means for remaining liberal actors.
As the world is becoming more autocratic, we often think in terms of "autocracies" and "democracies."
This book helps us to move away from this state-centric approach. It really brought home to me that we should focus on authoritarian practices, where even generally liberal actors can engage in authoritarian practices sometimes.
This helps us to much better understand how the world is changing as it is becoming more autocratic.
This book challenges the assumption that authoritarianism is necessarily a phenomenon located at the level of the state, and that states as a whole are therefore either democratic or authoritarian. Its central aim is to shed light on manifestations of authoritarianism that are not confined to the 'territorial trap' of the modern state, and are not captured by the concept of an authoritarian regime. Redefining authoritarianism from a practice perspective allows us to understand how authoritarian practices unfold and evolve within democracies and in transnational settings, in what circumstances they thrive, and how they are best countered. Authoritarian Practices in…
I’m the global health reporter for The New York Times, the latest iteration in 30 years as a foreign correspondent. I’ve covered wars and humanitarian disasters, but it’s health stories that have always drawn me most. Health stories are intimate and personal, but they’re also about politics and economics, and social norms – about power. I’ve written about the Zika virus crisis in Brazil, child malnutrition in India, teen suicide in the Arctic – but no story has drawn me in and kept me riveted like Africa’s AIDS pandemic has over the past 25 years. I intend to keep reporting on it until the day a cure is found.
Craig Timberg was a reporting colleague when I was a correspondent in South Africa, and became a friend, one with whom I often passionately disagreed.
That’s why I suggest this book: it offers a very different perspective than mine. Craig and his co-author Halperin, an epidemiologist whose work had a big influence on Craig’s thinking, draw a clear through-line for how Western powers created the sparks of the African epidemic then vigorously fanned them.
A significant chunk of the book focuses on solutions (Halperin is a vociferous champion of male circumcision as an intervention to drive down the spread of the virus). It’s a brisk read that makes complex epidemiological dynamics accessible.
In this groundbreaking narrative, longtime Washington Post reporter Craig Timberg and award-winning AIDS researcher Daniel Halperin tell the surprising story of how Western colonial powers unwittingly sparked the AIDS epidemic and then fanned its rise. Drawing on remarkable new science, Tinderbox overturns the conventional wisdom on the origins of this deadly pandemic and the best ways to fight it today.
Recent genetic studies have traced the birth of HIV to the forbidding equatorial forests of Cameroon, where chimpanzees carried the virus for millennia without causing a major outbreak in humans. During the Scramble for Africa, colonial companies blazed new routes…
I’ve been gay for half my life; the other half I was confused, questioning, and considered a pathologic deviant by the American Psychiatric Association. I am no longer confused, or considered pathologic or deviant. I’m a father, psychiatrist, and author who grew up in Nebraska. I was a good boy, followed all the rules, and lived the life that was expected of me. I fit in but I never felt like I belonged. I took back control of my life and threw off expectations of what I should be. I want others to believe that they can have a richer life by living the life they were meant to live.
Sometimes I regret not having experienced the sex and drugs enjoyed by my contemporaries who came out much younger in life. The Christodora brought me back to reality. The reality of those years was much darker than my fantasies.
Murphy sketches out the diverse group of intertwined characters that inhabit the Christodora, a gentrified building in Manhattan’s East Village. I wanted to be the artistic Mateo who pushes through life’s difficulties to live an actualized life. But I can’t escape that I could have been one of the AIDS victims for whom the activism Murphy describes was so critical. Or I might have been Hector, an AIDS activist who descends into substance abuse after losing his lover.
Christodora recounts the heartbreak of AIDS but ultimately is a story of the healing of broken lives.
“A sprawling account of New York lives under the long shadow of AIDS, it deals beautifully with the drugs that save us and the drugs that don’t.”—The Guardian (Best Books of the Year)
In this vivid and compelling novel, Tim Murphy follows a diverse set of characters whose fates intertwine in an iconic building in Manhattan’s East Village, the Christodora. The Christodora is home to Milly and Jared, a privileged young couple with artistic ambitions. Their neighbor, Hector, a Puerto Rican gay man who was once a celebrated AIDS activist but is now a lonely addict, becomes connected to Milly…
Aury and Scott travel to the Finger Lakes in New York’s wine country to get to the bottom of the mysterious happenings at the Songscape Winery. Disturbed furniture and curious noises are one thing, but when a customer winds up dead, it’s time to dig into the details and see…
My passion for this topic dates back to my childhood and being impressed by the scary diseases and unhygienic toilets that were part of my family lore. I grew up to be a historian of medicine, which allowed me to indulge my interest in deadly diseases—at a safe historical distance! That curiosity led me to write the Gospel of Germs, a history of popular understandings of the germ theory of disease. Post-COVID, I am thinking about how to get ready for the next big pandemic that climate change and globalization will likely throw at us: will it be bird flu, dengue, mpox, or some new COVID variant?
Of the many riveting books written about the other “big one” of the 20th century—the AIDs pandemic, still ongoing—I especially love France’s account because it combines the power of a personal memoir with a “you are there” description of the plague’s unfolding in the United States.
I also like how France shows the positives in an otherwise tragic story. When faced with a deadly new disease, grassroots activists waged brilliant fights to get attention to its dangers and, in the process, changed American science for the good.
Winner of The Green Carnation Prize for LGBTQ literature
Winner of the Lambda Literary Award for LGBT non-fiction
Shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize 2017
'This superbly written chronicle will stand as a towering work in its field' Sunday Times
'Inspiring, uplifting and necessary reading' - Steve Silberman author of Neurotribes, Financial Times
How to Survive a Plague by David France is the riveting, powerful and profoundly moving story of the AIDS epidemic and the grass-roots movement of activists, many of them facing their own life-or-death struggles, who grabbed the reins of scientific research to help develop the drugs that…
From the start, tented under bedcovers with a flashlight and diary, writing has been sheer joy and discovery. When I became aware that I was bisexual in my twenties, I wrote a memoir to make sense of my body, especially in light of my Christian upbringing, which became Swinging on the Garden Gate. When a fire burned all my belongings, including decades of writing, I found comfort in keeping a journal and was amazed that the practice still gave me hope. How? Why? My curiosity led to three books on writing as a transformational practice and countless workshops. The mystery of how creating something creates the creator fuels everything I do.
Some of the worst memoir-writing advice I’ve ever heard is, “Don’t write in the midst of emotional turmoil.” If Mark Doty had listened, readers would have never received the gift of Heaven’s Coast. No doubt this memoir began as a journaled record of Doty losing his beloved partner to AIDS.
His record of love, loss, and grief packs a punch because it’s so raw. It has lasting power because Doty took time to revise, adding eloquence, perspective, and insight. This is also a great model for integrating reflection into a story.
HEAVEN'S COAST is an anatomy of loss: tender, heartbreaking, consoling and, ultimately, incredibly moving. Beginning with the first onset of AIDS and its lengthening shadow over a blissful relationship, the book follows the shifting patterns between two loves as the illness takes hold - the change in them and the change in the way they perceive the world, through the lens of grief. Doty examines the nature of AIDS as opposed to other illnesses, the responses of society, the frustration of medical care and the exhausting - and occasionally uplifting - burden of caring for the dying at home.
I’ve been researching treatment harms for 3 decades and founded RxISK.org in 2012, now an important site for people to report these harms. They’ve been reporting in their thousands often in personal accounts that feature health service gaslighting. During these years, our treatments have become a leading cause of mortality and morbidity, the time it takes to recognize harms has been getting longer, and our medication burdens heavier. We have a health crisis that parallels the climate crisis. Both Green parties and Greta Thunberg’s generation are turning a blind eye to the health chemicals central to this. We need to understand what is going wrong and turn it around.
AIDS was the pandemic before Covid. Unlike Covid, it mobilized people to take the science and efforts to find a cure into their own hands – especially people on the fringes of society. Nothing like this had ever happened before. It appeared to mark a watershed where medicine would become a servant of the people rather than people being enslaved to its commercial priorities. Sadly this is not how things worked out. The discovery of Triple Therapy was a high point of modern medicine but we have gone downhill since then with few if any drugs saving lives the way Triple Therapy did. Impure Science shows you vividly what we are up against.
In the short, turbulent history of AIDS research and treatment, the boundaries between scientist insiders and lay outsiders have been crisscrossed to a degree never before seen in medical history. Steven Epstein's astute and readable investigation focuses on the critical question of "how certainty is constructed or deconstructed," leading us through the views of medical researchers, activists, policy makers, and others to discover how knowledge about AIDS emerges out of what he calls "credibility struggles." Epstein shows the extent to which AIDS research has been a social and political phenomenon and how the AIDS movement has transformed biomedical research practices…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
Second novels rarely get the love that they deserve. People come to them with all kinds of presumptions and expectations, mostly based on whatever they liked (or didn’t like!) about your first novel, and all writers live in fear of the dreaded “sophomore slump.” I spent a decade trying to write my second novel and was plagued by these very fears. To ward off the bad vibes, I want to celebrate some of my favorite second novels by some of my favorite writers. Some were bona fide hits from the get-go, while others were sadly overlooked or wrongly panned, but they’re all brilliant, beautiful, and full of heart.
A few years ago, I had the chance to write about Allan Gurganus for Harper’s magazine. That gave me a reason to read his entire oeuvre. There’s a lot of great stuff in there, but Plays Well With Others is my favorite. Published in 1997, it was the eagerly awaited follow-up to Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, Gurganus’s smash hit debut, which had come out in 1989. That book sold several million copies and was adapted into a TV miniseries as well as a Broadway show.
Unfortunately, Plays Well could not escape the long shadow cast by Widow. But I am here to tell you that this story of a queer friend-group weathering the worst of the AIDS crisis in 1980s New York City is a sui generis work of genius: a sexually graphic, laugh-out-loud funny, emotionally devastating tour-de-force, as beautiful and bonkers as it is…
In his widely read, prizewinning Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, Allan Gurganus gave fresh meaning to an overexplored American moment: 1860-65. He now turns that comic intensity and historical vision to another war zone: entry-level artistic Manhattan 1980-95. In his first novel since Widow, Gurganus offers us an indelible, addictive praise-song to New York's wild recent days, their invigorating peaks and lethal crashes.
It's 1980, and Hartley Mims jr., a somewhat overbred Southerner, arrives in town to found his artistic career and find a Circle of brilliant friends. He soon discovers both Robert Christian Gustafson, archangelic boy composer of…
