Books like The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

01

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Yuval Noah Harari · History

Sapiens traces the full arc of human history from the emergence of Homo sapiens in Africa roughly 70,000 years ago to the present.

Both dig into power.

02

Guns, Germs, and Steel

Jared Diamond · Science

Guns, Germs, and Steel is Jared Diamond's attempt to answer a question posed to him by a Papua New Guinean politician named Yali: why did Europeans end up with so much cargo — wealth, technology, power — while other peoples had comparatively little?

A kindred history read.

03

Fast Food Nation

Eric Schlosser · Science

Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation is one of the most consequential pieces of American investigative journalism of the early twenty-first century.

A kindred history read.

04

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

Naomi Klein · History

Naomi Klein's central argument is that the climate crisis cannot be solved within the existing economic framework.

Shares capitalism and political economy with The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

05

The Great Transformation

Karl Polanyi · Economics

The Great Transformation is Karl Polanyi's 1944 account of how a self-regulating market economy emerged in nineteenth-century England, what social catastrophe that emergence caused, and why the market society created its own political reaction.

Shares capitalism and political economy with The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

06

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson · Economics

Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson argue that the fundamental difference between rich and poor countries is not geography, culture, or bad luck.

Shares political economy and power with The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

07

A People's History of the United States

Howard Zinn · History

Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, first published in 1980, retells American history from the perspective of those who rarely appear in conventional textbooks: Native Americans, enslaved people, industrial workers, women, immigrants, and dissidents of various kinds.

Both dig into power.

08

Americana

Bhu Srinivasan · History

Americana is Bhu Srinivasan's attempt to tell the history of American capitalism through its defining industries and the entrepreneurs who built them.

Both dig into capitalism.

09

Annals of Imperial Rome

Tacitus · History

Tacitus wrote the Annals in the early second century CE as a history of Rome from the death of Augustus to the death of Nero — the reigns of Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero, covering roughly 14 to 68 CE.

Both dig into power.

10

Empire of Cotton: A Global History

Sven Beckert · History

Sven Beckert's Empire of Cotton argues that cotton was not just the raw material of the Industrial Revolution but the commodity through which modern capitalism was invented.

Both dig into capitalism.

11

History of the Peloponnesian War

Thucydides · History

Thucydides' account of the twenty-seven-year conflict between Athens and Sparta stands as the founding document of political realism and the first work of history that treats evidence and causation as problems to be solved rather than stories to be told.

Both dig into power.

12

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power

Shoshana Zuboff · History

Shoshana Zuboff spent years researching what she calls surveillance capitalism — a new economic logic in which human experience is turned into raw material for prediction products that are sold to businesses wanting to influence behavior.

Both dig into capitalism.