Books by Siddharth Kara
“Siddharth Kara goes, literally, deep into the holes being dug, mainly in the Democratic Republic of Congo, by artisan miners who are pulling rocks from the ground in the most extraordinary circumstances. Kara interviews the workers and the traders who are buying it and, he alleges, putting it into the formal supply chain. There’s a shocking moment where he just throws in that none of them has ever held a mobile phone. And yet, they’re at the very end of the chain that leads to our iPhones and our electric cars. It is a shocking account, and he sets it in the context of the terrible history of what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo – previously Zaire, and before that the Belgian Congo – as a place that has been exploited, from the word go, for these minerals, which could have made its people wealthy and prosperous and well looked after.” Read more...
The Best Business Books of 2023: the Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award
Andrew Hill, Journalist
Interviews where books by Siddharth Kara were recommended
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1
Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization
by Ed Conway -
2
Right Kind of Wrong: Why Learning to Fail Can Teach Us to Thrive
by Amy Edmondson -
3
How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything In Between
by Bent Flyvbjerg & Dan Gardner -
4
Elon Musk
by Walter Isaacson -
5
Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives
by Siddharth Kara -
6
The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma
by Michael Bhaskar & Mustafa Suleyman
The Best Business Books of 2023: the Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award, recommended by Andrew Hill
The Best Business Books of 2023: the Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award, recommended by Andrew Hill
If you like nonfiction books that will get you up to speed with what’s going on in the world, the Financial Times annual book prize is a great place to start. If you run a business, one or two useful books also feature. Andrew Hill, the newspaper’s senior business writer, talks us through the books that made the 2023 shortlist, from cobalt extraction in the Congo to how to manage the AI genie that’s out of the bottle and coming towards us at speed.
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1
Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green
by Henry Sanderson -
2
The Powerhouse: Inside the Invention of a Battery to Save the World
by Steve LeVine -
3
The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations
by Daniel Yergin -
4
Charged: A History of Batteries and Lessons for a Clean Energy Future
by James Morton Turner -
5
Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives
by Siddharth Kara
The best books on Batteries, recommended by Lukasz Bednarski
The best books on Batteries, recommended by Lukasz Bednarski
As the world turns to electric vehicles and renewable energy to help stave off a climate crisis, there will be huge changes for individuals, industries and even the world geopolitical order. Lukasz Bednarski, a battery analyst, former rare metals trader, and author of Lithium, The Global Race for Battery Dominance, talks us through some of the books that shed light on what’s going on, from the cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo to the high-tech labs where the latest battery technology is being developed.
