Book Recommendations

Here are some books and movies I recommend, with an eye towards “economic” themes.

Non-Fiction

• How Asia Works, by Joe Studwell
• The Gunpowder Age, by Tonio Andrade
• Foreign Devils on the Silk Road, by Peter Hopkirk
• Forgotten Ally, by Rana Mitter
• Asia’s Next Giant, by Alice Amsden
• Coercion, Capital, and European States, by Charles Tilly

Fiction/Literary Non-Fiction

• CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, by George Saunders
• War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy
• Down and Out in Paris and London, by George Orwell
• The Road to Wigan Pier, by George Orwell
• Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell
• Red Plenty: Inside the Fifties’ Soviet Dream, by Francis Spufford
• Red Sorghum, by Mo Yan
• A Room of One’s Own, by Virginia Woolf
• A Grain of Wheat, by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
• The Quiet American, by Graham Greene
• The Epic of Gilgamesh, by Unknown

Movies

• The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert McNamara, by Errol Morris
• The Only Son, by Yasujiro Ozu
• Good Morning, by Yasujiro Ozu
• High and Low, by Akira Kurosawa
• To Live, by Zhang Yimou
• Memories of Murder, by Bong Joon-ho
• Take Out, by Sean Baker and Shih-Ching Tsou
• Sorry to Bother You, by Boots Riley
• Faces Places, by Agnes Varda
• Chungking Express, by Wong Kar-Wai