While you may not have read all the books you intended to this year (who ever does?), we’d like to know your standout reads of 2015.
Which books would you recommend to our readers? A novel that shone a light on a part of the world you knew little about? A non-fiction tome that helped you become an expert on a topic? Or perhaps it was a classic you’d always hoped to conquer. We welcome suggestions of fiction or non-fiction, and they don’t have to be 2015 releases.
The following titles caught our eyes on the Global development desk:
New York Review Abroad, Fifty Years of International Reportage edited by Robert B Silvers
A highlight for me this year was the New York Review Abroad, Fifty Years of International Reportage. Edited by Robert B Silvers, the book journeys from Vietnam, Cambodia and China to South Africa, Uganda and Egypt, by way of Haiti and El Salvador, covering under- or misreported stories from the world’s hotspots over the past half a century. Susan Sontag, VS Naipaul, Joan Didion and Nadine Gordimer all contribute but Ryszard Kapuściński’s essay Fire on the Road was the favourite for me. Kapuściński’s reputation took a bit of a hammering a few years ago, but anyone who has read Another Day of Life can be left in no doubt about the brilliance of his writing.
I also read Cynthia Enloe’s The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War – Enloe was one of the speakers at the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom’s 100th anniversary summit in April. Published in 1993, it was remarkable – and depressing – to find just how little has changed. Liz Ford
The Crossing by Samar Yazbek
The Syrian refugee crisis was the defining story of 2015. For exiled Syrian journalist Samar Yazbek, it was deeply personal and years in the making. In this compelling read, Yazbek weaves her experiences of the civil war with snapshots of the life cycle of the crisis – from early street demonstrations against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, to the multi-faceted conflict we face today.
At the heart of the book are Yazbek’s illegal crossings from Turkey into Syria, in which she attempts to uncover the everyday stories of people caught in the crossfire, as well as those fighting. “Later I told [people in Syria] about sneaking through the barbed wire to the other side. How we had crossed from being lost in one wilderness to being lost in another. It had been a moment of oscillation, of teetering on the line between exile and homeland,” she writes.
Yazbek’s beautiful storytelling, translated from Arabic into English by Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp and Nashwa Gowanlock, combined with the personal stories she tells make this a highlight of recent releases on Syria. Carla Kweifio-Okai
Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James A Robinson
It can be all too easy to pigeonhole countries and decide that the poverty of poorer nations is written in the stars – a consequence of geography, climate, values or economics. In a way, this analysis is comforting because it removes angst about whether we, as the global community, could do more to battle inequities.
Such conscience-salving theories are not for US academics Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson. In this book, they set out to discover why some countries are richer and more successful than others, and comprehensively debunk the idea that countries are condemned to poverty by immutable realities of place or practice. Instead they expertly expose the role of political institutions, taking readers on a whistle-stop tour through time and space to elucidate their central premise – that prosperity becomes possible only when political institutions are inclusive and power is centralised. Any other combination will not result in sustainable, long-term growth.
Starting in Nogales, a town on the Mexico-US border, and journeying through ancient Rome, Mayan civilisations and England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688, Acemoglu and Robinson show that sound institutions create a virtuous circle that spawns prosperity: if people feel they are protected by decent institutions, they are willing to work harder, innovate and deliver economic growth. But they will not feel empowered to do so if the institutions that govern them are, in the authors’ words, extractive and bent on plundering their wealth.
Though the tone can at times seem a little didactic, the astute central premise, and abundant well-delineated examples, make for a satisfying read with enough “aha!” and “yes!” moments to keep readers turning the pages. This book offers plenty of food for thought, even three years after its publication, as we watch a slow drift towards a new era of autocracy in some African countries, and take the first steps on a 15-year journey to the better world we promised ourselves amid much hype and excitement at the UN in September. Clár Ní Chonghaile
• Over to you. What was your favourite read on development or world affairs in 2015? You can leave your thoughts in the comment thread below, or email us at development@theguardian.com.
