I want to read (nonfiction) books about how the rest of the world lives

April 7, 2013 8:36 AM

More specifically I want to read books on the topic of "What you take for granted, someone else is praying for".

I feel that I am not seeing much further than my comfortable Western perspective of life. I keep up on current events and read articles about human rights issues, life quality, etc...but I feel like that just gives me a small glimpse of what life is like for most of the world.

I know that it is not the most noble pursuit to want to learn about people who have it worse off than you, to feel better, so to say, but sometimes one needs a bit of a wake up call on their narrow perspective, a bit of a shake up of values, of what one considers "normal" or "average" and takes for granted.

I would also be interested in books that detail what life was like during different times of history, i.e. the Middle Ages.

Thank you!

posted by Kateruba to Society & Culture (26 answers total)

(Auto)Biographies are great for this. There are some good biographies of Gandhi and Woody Guthrie that will give you what you want.

Frederick Douglas's autobiography is also a good one.
posted by colin_l at 8:46 AM on April 7, 2013 [1 favorite]

More photos than text, but Material World is something you might enjoy.
posted by box at 8:49 AM on April 7, 2013 [2 favorites]

Mountains Beyond Mountains shook me up in the way that you are talking about.

Half the Sky is on my list - I haven't read it yet, but it may fit your bill.
posted by bunderful at 8:52 AM on April 7, 2013 [2 favorites]

Seconding Mountains Beyond Mountains. For the Middle Ages (European), you could do much worse and can hardly do better than Barbara Tuchmans' A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century.
posted by rtha at 8:58 AM on April 7, 2013 [3 favorites]

Poor Economics might fit the bill but it's more about decisionmaking than it is about slice of life, though there are many illustrative anecdotes.
posted by crush-onastick at 9:05 AM on April 7, 2013

A book that I recommend to my high schoolers for just this purpose is A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. I also really liked Mountains Beyond Mountains, and a similar book to that that I also enjoyed was Three Cups of Tea (which paints a great portrait of life in Pakistan and Afghanistan but unfortunately now is kind of suspect - see Jon Krakauer's e-book denouncing it. So make of that what you will - I still enjoyed it.
posted by luciernaga at 9:07 AM on April 7, 2013

Topically, Barbara Demick's "Nothing to Envy" is about the experiences of several people interviewed after escaping North Korea into a Chinese border town. There may be poorer people on the planet, by some metrics, but few that lead lives so relentlessly grim.
posted by zadcat at 9:16 AM on April 7, 2013

Would first-world strife fit the bill? I quite liked Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx.

(Now-dated previous question looking for books of that stripe)
posted by kmennie at 9:20 AM on April 7, 2013

If ficetion counts, how about A Fine Balance by Rohan Mistry? It's a pretty devastating history of several individuals in 20th century India.
posted by genmonster at 9:29 AM on April 7, 2013 [1 favorite]

I came in to add Mountains Beyond Mountains. Also, Escape from Camp 14, which is about the North Korean guglags (work/concentration camps).
posted by michellenoel at 9:30 AM on April 7, 2013

It sort of treads the line between fiction & nonfiction (though it is a true story), but I loved What is the What by Dave Eggers. It's the story of Valentino Achak Deng, one of the "lost boys" of South Sudan.

Also, if you're open to fiction, I second the recommendation of A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry.
posted by barnoley at 10:04 AM on April 7, 2013 [1 favorite]

It's Western but a lot of people don't know much about the life of the poor over here anyway.

David Simon (of The Wire) fame wrote two books about Baltimore that'd be pretty eye-opening. Homicide inspired the series Homicide and The Corner inspired The Wire. Off The Books is about how the urban poor survive. Code of the Street and American Project cover similar ground.
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 10:15 AM on April 7, 2013 [1 favorite]

I also came in here to recommend A Fine Balance. Devastating is the word I would use to describe it too. I read it for a post-colonial literature class in undergrad which was all about slums. We also read the non-fiction Planet of Slums, which I think would be just what you're looking for.

It's more a photo-essay than a narrative, but Hungry Planet: What the World Eats is a fascinating look at the weekly food intake of families from around the world.
posted by apricot at 10:23 AM on April 7, 2013

I would highly recommend the recent book Behind the Beautiful Forevers, about the Mumbai slums, by Katherine Boo. She's an exceptional writer, and it's so character-driven that it's hard to remember this is nofiction.
posted by megancita at 10:52 AM on April 7, 2013 [7 favorites]

First They Killed My Father is a poignant memoir of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia from a young girl's perspective.
Night Draws Near tells how the lives of civilians in Iraq were disrupted by the American invasion.
Also nth'ing Nothing to Envy, Too Far Gone, and Mountains Beyond Mountains.
posted by phoenix_rising at 11:29 AM on April 7, 2013 [2 favorites]

culture shock has tons of countries in their series
posted by brujita at 11:38 AM on April 7, 2013 [1 favorite]

If "the rest of the world" means not-North America, then this book might not do it for you, but it's all about "What you take for granted, someone else is praying for" - but here in the U.S.: The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander.
posted by rtha at 11:43 AM on April 7, 2013

House of Stone: The True Story of a Family Divided in War-Torn Zimbabwe, by Christina Lamb
Finding George Orwell in Burma, by Emma Larkin
Say You're One of Them, by Uwem Akpan (stories set in several African countries, fiction but full of the sort of truth you're after)
Wild Swans, by Jung Chang
Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China, by Leslie T. Chang

I was intrigued by the contrast between The House on Dream Street: Memoir of an American Woman in Vietnam (by Dana Sachs), which showed a culture where much of what we consider private life is lived on the sidewalks and streets, and various books about Saudi Arabia, where there are no sidewalks and much of what we consider public, civic life just doesn't exist, or takes place only in private homes and courtyards.
posted by Corvid at 12:36 PM on April 7, 2013 [1 favorite]

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
posted by pompomtom at 5:11 PM on April 7, 2013

Memories of Silk and Straw is an excellent interview-style (think Studs Terkel) look at life in Japan at the beginning of the 20th century.
posted by pullayup at 8:43 PM on April 7, 2013

Response by poster: thank you everyone for your thoughtful recommendations - they should keep me occupied for quite a while!
posted by Kateruba at 9:25 AM on April 8, 2013

Two history recommendations:
Daily Life in Art by Béatrice Fontanel
At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson
posted by neutralmojo at 10:50 AM on April 8, 2013

If you want a perspective of living in poverty in asia, I would recommend reading
How to get filthy rich in rising asia. Just recently finished the book and is a very "non fiction" fiction
posted by radsqd at 1:10 PM on April 8, 2013

here is a line directly quoted from the book

One example: "And where moneymaking is concerned, nothing compresses the time frame needed to leap from my-s***-just-sits-there-until-it-rains poverty to which-of-my-toilets-shall-I-use affluence like an apprenticeship with someone who already has the angles all figured out
posted by radsqd at 1:10 PM on April 8, 2013

Re: Three Cups of Tea - Krakauer and his ilk have called Mortenson into serious question, but as someone who has worked in both Pakistan and Afghanistan, I can confirm for you that the parts where he paints the local village scenario for you are pretty spot on. The poverty and particularly limited opportunities (to put it nicely) for women are massively pressing there.

What is the What is the book that really shook up my values (to the point that I left my cushy Western life behind). I later found out that its own author (Eggers) was a bit disingenuous - when I met him in person, but it doesn't stop the story from being very real and vivid.

We Wish to Inform You... is one of the go-to's on what happened in the Rwandan genocide.

Not so much focused on the bottom billion in particular, but two books from Zimbabwe that I've really enjoyed were When a Crocodile Eats the Sun and Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight.

Long Walk to Freedom chronicles Mandela's struggle. Cry, The Beloved Country however is the real book to read on the racial struggles in SA.

Enjoy your reading...there's a wide world of suffering out there that most Westerners never have to even think about should they not actively choose to investigate it.
posted by allkindsoftime at 3:17 AM on April 11, 2013 [1 favorite]

If you want to REALLY dive into some specifics, I recommend Portfolios of the Poor. It's a very in-depth look at what the financial lives of the global poor are like. Eye opening, with lots of illustrative graphs. If you want to be appreciative for things like paychecks, checking accounts, and positive interest rates, read this book.
posted by justalisteningman at 5:56 PM on April 12, 2013