5 books that can save the world

Lucas Wittmann, the Books Editor at The Daily Beast, argues that the books nominated for this year's Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism "demonstrated the important role that insightful, incisive, and well-researched books still play in helping us understand our complicated, messy world." One of the nominated books and why Wittmann thinks it is worth reading:

Enough: Why the World’s Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty
by Roger Thurow and Scott Kilman

If you thought oil was hard to grasp, try figuring out the amazing economic, political, geographic, and scientific complexities around solving world hunger. Then read Roger Thurow and Scott Kilman’s powerful book to realize that it’s actually quite simple: there’s enough to go around. They take the simple yet astounding story of why America ships beans to Africa instead of having Africans produce their own beans to illustrate the perverse system of dependency that our agricultural policies sustain. Hard to imagine such a hard, challenging subject being made as riveting as it is in this damning account of how misguided so many of our international aid and hunger policies are.

Read Wittmann's take on another nominated book.

--Marshal Zeringue