I’ve always inexplicably tried and failed to keep track of what books I read. This page is my last hope, really. Feel free to peruse, or ask for my thoughts if you’re interested. Links will take you to Amazon (via my referral). If I’ve reviewed it, I’ll include that in brackets – and you can always go to my reviews category. If you’re real book savvy, you can guess when I was researching certain topics or taking certain courses.

2016

• Conservation Is Our Government Now: The Politics of Ecology in Papua New Guinea by Paige West
• Reel World: An Anthropology of Creation by Anand Pandian
• Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt by James Ferguson
• Censorium: Cinema and the Open Edge of Mass Publicity by William Mazzarella
• Refugees of the Revolution: Experiences of Palestinian Exile by Diana Allan
• Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa by Charles Piot
• Of Revelation and Revolution, Volume 1: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa by John and Jean Comaroff
• Refracted Visions: Popular Photography and National Modernity in Java by Karen Strassler
• Microfinance and Its Discontents: Women in Debt in Bangladesh by Lamia Karim
• Order and Rebellion in Tribal Africa by Max Gluckman
• Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt
• Survival In Auschwitz by Primo Levi
• Taming Tibet: Landscape Transformation and the Gift of Chinese Development by Emily Yeh
• Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War by Viet Thanh Nguyen
• The Spirit of Development: Protestant NGOs, Morality, and Economics in Zimbabwe by Erica Bornstein
• The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
• Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande by E.E. Evans-Pritchard
• Schism and Continuity in an African Society: A Study of Ndembu Village Life by Victor Turner
• Kupilikula: Governance and the Invisible Realm in Mozambique by Harry West
• Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster by Svetlana Alexievich
• Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar by David Graeber
• Humanitarian Aftershocks in Haiti by Mark Shuller
• Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan by Nick Turse
• Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life by Georgio Agamben
• Human Rights and African Airwaves: Mediating Equality on the Chichewa Radio by Harri Englund
• River of Tears: Country Music, Memory, and Modernity in Brazil by Alex Dent
• China’s Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa by Howard French
• Prisoners of Freedom: Human Rights and the African Poor by Harriy Englund
• Localizing Transitional Justice: Interventions and Priorities after Mass Violence, edited by Rosalind Shaw and Lars Waldorf with Pierra Hazan
• Patrice Lubumba by Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja
• Singing for the Dead: The Politics of Indigenous Revival in Mexico by Paja Faudree
• Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English by J.R. Rickford and R.J. Rickford
• Frantz Fanon: Toward a Revolutionary Humanism by Christopher J. Lee
• Values in Translation: Human Rights and the Culture of the World Bank by Galit Safarty
• Cultivating Development: An Ethnography of Aid Policy and Practice by David Mosse
• Aiding Violence: The Development Enterprise in Rwanda by Peter Uvin
• Precarious Japan by Anne Allison
• Women and Microcredit in Rural Bangladesh by Aminur Rahman
• The Anti-Politics Machine: “Development,” Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho by James Ferguson
• Give a Man a Fish: Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution by James Ferguson
• Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by James C. Scott
• Hood by Alison Kinney
• Origins of Human Communication by Michael Tomasello
• The History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith by Gilbert Rist
• Human Rights and the Uses of History by Samuel Moyn
• Waste by Brian Thill
• A Brief History of Neoliberalism by David Harvey
• Language Shock: Understanding the Culture of Conversation by Michael Agar
• Refrigerator by Jonathan Rees
• Making Sense of the Central African Republic edited by Tatiana Carayannis and Louisa Lombard

2015

• Advocacy in Conflict: Critical Perspectives on Transnational Activism edited by Alex de Waal
• In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio by Phillipe Bourgois
• Culture and Practical Reason by Marshall Sahlins
• The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
• Unstrange Minds: Mapping the World of Autism by Roy Richard Grinker
• The Power Elite by C. Wright Mills
• Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society by Lila Abu-Lughod
• Guerilla Auditors: The Politics of Transparency in Neoliberal Paraguay by Kregg Hetherington
• Conceiving the Future: Pronatalism, Reproduction, and the Family in the United States, 1890-1938 by Laura K Lovett
• The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber
• The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois
• Totem and Taboo by Sigmund Freud
• The Gift by Marcel Mauss
• Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy
• Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
• The Trouble with the Congo: Local Violence and the Failure of International Peacebuilding by Severine Autessere
• In the Name of Humanity: The Government of Threat and Care edited by Ilana Feldman and Miriam Ticktin
• Living with Bad Surroundings: War, History, and Everyday Moments in Northern Uganda by Sverker Finnström
• Tomorrow’s Battlefield: US Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa by Nick Turse
• Kintu by Jennifer Nansubuga Makombi
• Africa Uprising: Popular Protest and Political Change by Adam Branch and Zachariah Mampilly
• Ebola: The Natural and Human History of a Deadly Virus by David Quammen
• Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route by Saidiya Hartman

• Beneath the Lion’s Gaze by Maaza Mengiste
• Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria by Brian Larkin
• Virtual War and Magical Death: Technologies and Imaginaries for Terror and Killing edited by Neil Whitehead and Sverker Finnström
• Aboke Girls: Children Abducted in Northern Uganda by Els de Temmerman
• Political Ethnography: What Immersion Contributes to the Study of Power edited by Edward Schatz
• Fiscal Disobedience: An Anthropology of Economic Regulation in Central Africa by Janet Roitman
• Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand
• Culture in Chaos: An Anthropology of the Social Condition in War by Stephen C. Lubkemann
• The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail by Óscar Martínez
• Africa: Unity, Sovereignty & Sorrow by Pierre Englebert
• All Things Must Fight to Live: Stories of War and Deliverance in Congo by Bryan Mealer
• Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton
• American Copia by Javier O. Huerta
• Open City by Teju Cole
• Dangerous Liaisons: Anthropologists and the National Security State edited by Laura A. McNamara and Robert A. Rubinstein
• Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India by Akhil Gupta
• Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil by James Holston
• War Machines: Young Men and Violence in Sierra Leone and Liberia by Danny Hoffman
• In My Mother’s House: Civil War in Sri Lanka by Sharika Thiranagama
• Intimate Enemies: Violence and Reconciliation in Peru by Kimberly Theidon
• Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India by Ranajit Guha
• Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism by Mahmood Mamdani
• Bandits by Eric Hobsbawm
• Making War in Côte d’Ivoire by Mike McGovern

• Nostalgia for the Future: West Africa after the Cold War by Charles Piot
• Social Torture: The Case of Northern Uganda 1986-2006 by Chris Dolan
• Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight by Timothy Pachirat
• Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador by Elisabeth Wood
• Barbed Wire: An Ecology of Modernity by Reviel Netz
• The Thin Blue Line: How Humanitarianism Went to War by Conor Foley
• The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America by Erik Larson
• The Roots of Ethnicity: The Origins of the Acholi of Uganda (Second Edition) by Ronald R. Atkinson
• An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro
• Petals of Blood by Ngũgĩ wa Thiongo
• The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
• Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution by David Harvey
• Living with Bad Surroundings: War, History, and Everyday Moments in Northern Uganda by Sverker Finnström
• Displacing Human Rights: War and Intervention in Northern Uganda by Adam Branch
• Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins
• Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins
• The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
• Unmasking the State: Making Guinea Modern by Mike McGovern
• The Lord’s Resistance Army: Myth and Reality edited by Tim Allen and Koen Vlassenroot
• Remaking Rwanda: State Building and Human Rights After Mass Violence edited by Scott Straus and Lars Waldorf
• Radio Congo by Ben Rawlence
• Ghetto at the Center of the World: Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong by Gordon Matthews
• The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda by Scott Straus
• Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet by Mark Lynas

• The Caine Prize for African Writing 2012
• Playing in the Light by Zoë Wicomb
• The Crosses of Auschwitz: Nationalism and Religion in Post-Communist Poland by Genevieve Zubrzycki
• Art and Revolution: The Life and Death of Thami Mnyele, South African Artist by Diana Wylie
• Sizwe’s Test: A Young Man’s Journey Through Africa’s AIDS Epidemic by Jonny Steinberg
• The Frightened Land: Land, Landscape and Politics in South Africa in the Twentieth Century by Jennifer Beningfield
• World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks
• Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities by Martha Nussbaum
• Darfur: A New History of a Long War by Julie Flint and Alex de Waal
• Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
• I’m Not Leaving by Carl Wilkens
• The Justice Cascade: How Human Rights Prosecutions Are Changing World Politics by Kathryn Sikkink

• Fighting for Darfur: Public Action and the Struggle to Stop Genocide by Rebecca Hamilton
• Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa by Jason K. Stearns
• The Last Campaign: Robert F. Kennedy and 82 Days That Inspired America by Thurston Clark
• Trial Justice: The International Criminal Court and the Lord’s Resistance Army by Tim Allen
• Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages by Guy Deutscher