When McKinsey Comes to Town

As an expose of McKinsey, this book focuses on the most questionable and problematic aspects of the company’s work. Selection bias aside, the authors (Walt Bogdanich & Michel Forsythe) document a company seeking profits by any means: improving tobacco sales while knowledge the harmful effects, improving opioid sales amidst a peak of overdose deaths, human […]

Tags: #Capitalism #Consulting #McKinsey #Walt Bogdanich #When McKinsey Comes to Town

Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat

In search of a book about Egyptian political leaders, I came across very little. An earlier post covered a book by the spouse of Gamal Abdel Nasser. Amazon put me on to the book “Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat: The Presidents Who Shaped Modern Egypt” (2014) by Charles River Editors. Disappointing. Partly brief biography […]

Imagining Afghanistan

Quite a number of books have followed in the tradition of Edward Said, critiquing and contesting the manufacturing of narratives. Nivi Manchanda’s “Imagining Afghanistan” The History and Politics of Imperial Knowledge” (2020) provides a deep dive into those narratives of Afghanistan. Chapters of the book explore the use of “tribe” and “tribalism”, the colonial construction […]

Tags: #Afghanistan #Colonial #Colonialism #History #Manufactured consent

God’s Unruly Friends

I discovered “God’s Unruly Friends: Dervish Groups in the Islamic Middle Period 1200-1550” (2006) by Ahmet Karamustafa largely by accident (it was a footnote in another book I had read). The title got me, but it sat on the shelf for a while until I got to it. The book itself is quite short, the […]

Tags: #Dervish #Deviant #History #Middle East #Social Norms

Nasser: My Husband

The American University of Cairo published “Nasser: My Husband” (2013) by Tahia Gamal Abdul Nassar. The book was translated from an earlier Arabic version. For anyone interested in the personal life of Nasser, this provides some insight. It comparatively provides little on his political and military experiences – if one is after that information, better […]

Tags: #Egypt #Gamal Abdel Nasser #Nasser

The Silk Roads

In a random bookshop in Kathmandu I came across “The Silk Roads: A New History of the World” (2015) by Peter Frankopan. Having taught Global Political Economy in the past and gone through a number of textbooks (which are largely centered on the Euro-West and its perspectives on global matters) I was hoping this book […]

Tags: #History #Politics #Power #Silk Roads #Trade