Recommendations from our site
“The book is ostensibly organized by the materials, but it’s actually about the human beings who mine them, use them, exploit them, and exploit other human beings to try and get more of them. It’s not a polemical book. It’s a book of power that makes you think about the materials we take for granted.” Read more...
The 2024 British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding
Charles Tripp, Political Scientist
“What I like about this book—and he makes this point very clearly—is that this is stuff that you can see. Ed Conway is a journalist for Sky News and of course TV journalists are always looking for things that can be filmed…He’s trying to paint a picture, and you want to see what he’s seeing, which is the extraordinary effort that goes into mining the six vital materials that he focuses on: salt, sand, iron, copper, oil, and lithium.” Read more...
The Best Business Books of 2023: the Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award
Andrew Hill, Journalist
“There’s also a very readable, eye-opening book by British journalist Ed Conway called Material World, which looks at the mining and consumption of six commodities: sand, salt, iron, copper, oil and lithium. It opens with him watching gold being mined and, having witnessed what’s involved, feeling a bit guilty about his wedding ring.” Read more...
Notable Nonfiction of Early Summer 2023
Sophie Roell, Journalist
