Must Read Books

I have recently had some time to really dedicate myself to reading more books.

Books are amazing and when they make you think critically about issues affecting our world, they can help transform opinions, mind frames, and international systems.

Here are a few that I have found both interesting and enjoyable to read - please add your own (related to the field)!!

1. What is the What - Dave Eggers

In a heartrending and astonishing novel, Eggers illuminates the history of the civil war in Sudan through the eyes of Valentino Achak Deng, a refugee now living in the United States. We follow his life as he's driven from his home as a boy and walks, with thousands of orphans, to Ethiopia, where he finds safety — for a time. Valentino's travels, truly Biblical in scope, bring him in contact with government soldiers, janjaweed-like militias, liberation rebels, hyenas and lions, disease and starvation — and a string of unexpected romances. Ultimately, Valentino finds safety in Kenya and, just after the millennium, is finally resettled in the United States, from where this novel is narrated. In this book, written with expansive humanity and surprising humor, we come to understand the nature of the conflicts in Sudan, the refugee experience in America, the dreams of the Dinka people, and the challenge one indomitable man faces in a world collapsing around him.

2. A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier - Ishmael Beah

In A LONG WAY GONE: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, Beah, now twenty-six years old, tells a powerfully gripping story: At the age of twelve, he fled attacking rebels and wandered a land rendered unrecognizable by violence. By thirteen, he’d been picked up by the government army, and Beah, at heart a gentle boy, found that he was capable of truly terrible acts. At sixteen, he was removed from fighting by UNICEF, and through the help of the staff at his rehabilitation center, he learned how to forgive himself, to regain his humanity, and, finally, to heal.

3. Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures: A True Story from Hell on Earth - Kenneth Cain, Heidi Postlewait, and Andrew Thomson 

At the beginning of the 1990s, the authors, who did not know each other, came together in, of all places, Phnom Penh, Cambodia. There was the Harvard Law graduate who didn't want to be just another corporate lawyer; the New York social worker who saw her chance to make a difference slipping away; the missionary doctor looking for the best way to use his skills to help the people who need him most. They all came to Cambodia as part of the UN peacekeeping mission, and there they became friends, colleagues, and much more. The book is about people who went somewhere for all the right reasons and wound up facing challenges they never knew existed. The story is vividly told, almost tactile in its details. Many of the book's images--of poverty, desolation, abuse--are difficult to forget. For the authors, it was an experience that enriched them beyond measure. This is a unique and rewarding book, a mix of memoir, history, travel, and personal analysis.

4. Three Cups of Tea - Greg Mortenson and David Relin

The inspiring account of one man's campaign to build schools in the most dangerous, remote, and anti-American reaches of Asia. After he was taken in and nursed back to health by the people of an impoverished Pakistani village, Mortenson promised to return one day and build them a school. From that rash, earnest promise grew one of the most incredible humanitarian campaigns of our time—Greg Mortenson's one-man mission to counteract extremism by building schools, especially for girls, throughout the breeding ground of the Taliban.

5. We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families - Philip Gourevitch

Philip Gourevitch, a reporter for the New Yorker, traveled to Rwanda shortly after the killings stopped and collected first-hand accounts of those who actually lived through the genocide—on both sides of the machete. The book goes beyond good reporting to provide a moving, informative primer of a situation created by years of colonial promotion of racial divisions between Hutus and Tutsis, a population accustomed to being told what to do, and a political power structure intent on exclusive control. The Huto Power government managed to persuade common citizens to kill over 800,000 of their Tutsi friends and neighbors.

6. Long Walk to Freedom  - Nelson Mandela

Autobiography of the former South African president  - the book profiles his early life, coming of age, education and 27 years in prison. The last chapters of the book describe his political ascension, and his belief that the struggle continues against apartheid in South Africa.

7. The Zanzibar Chest: A Memoir of Love and War - Aidan Hartley

A white Kenyan, born of a line of colonial adventurers, Hartley is less concerned with the wars he reported, in Ethiopia, Somalia, Burundi and Rwanda, than with his place in them. In journalism, he saw an opportunity to re-engage with the continent of his birth, yet his experience of Africa's postcolonial dismantling seems only to confirm he doesn't belong. In his quest for belonging, Hartley intertwines his own war stories with the tale of Peter Davey, a romantic young British officer and friend of his father, who was murdered in Aden in 1947 and whose diaries he finds in his dead father's Zanzibar chest. There are similarities between Davey and Hartley, two white men in savage lands. But Hartley strives for a more poetic connection. He believes Davey's death represented his father's loss of innocence, just as he himself was transformed by Africa's wars. By uncovering the details of Davey's life, he hopes to connect with his father, and so with his forefathers.

8. Slumdog Millionaire (Also known as Q & A) - Vikas Swarup 

Vikas Swarup's spectacular debut novel opens in a jail cell in Mumbai, India, where Ram Mohammad Thomas is being held after correctly answering all twelve questions on India's biggest quiz show, Who Will Win a Billion? It is hard to believe that a poor orphan who has never read a newspaper or gone to school could win such a contest. But through a series of exhilarating tales Ram explains to his lawyer how episodes in his life gave him the answer to each question.

Ram takes us on an amazing review of his own history -- from the day he was found as a baby in the clothes donation box of a Delhi church to his employment by a faded Bollywood star to his adventure with a security-crazed Australian army colonel to his career as an overly creative tour guide at the Taj Mahal.

*This book is completely different from the movie and if you thought the movie was amazing, this book will absolutely become one of your favourites!