R. Jeremiah Maller

In this breathtaking book by Pulitzer Prize winner Katherine Boo, a bewildering age of global change and inequality is made human through the dramatic story of families striving toward a better life in Annawadi, a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport. As India starts to prosper, the residents of Annawadi are electric with hope. Abdul, an enterprising teenager, sees “a fortune beyond counting” in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away.

A research trip to Guatemala illuminates truths both intimate and global for four young travelers. The graduate students arrived in Guatemala energized and ready to take on the world. They planned to follow the path of coffee beans from a peasant coffee-growing community in the western highlands through the chain of buyers, co-ops, exporters, and roasters, all the way to a café in San Francisco. As the students investigate the profit made at every link in the coffee chain, they confront a series of unexpected events that illuminate globalization in surprising ways.