Authors Like Nicholas D. Kristof

The same method Kristof uses, taken as far as it can go: named people followed for years, and the argument about poverty built from what happens to them rather than stated over their heads. Where Kristof moves between countries in a single chapter, Boo stays in one place and lets it become a whole world. She also keeps herself out of the story almost entirely, which he rarely does.

If Tightrope is the Kristof book you loved, this is the next one. Desmond pairs close portraits of individual tenants with hard data, the same two-handed approach Kristof and WuDunn use, but with a social scientist's rigour about cause. Poverty, by America pushes further than they do on the reader's own part in the problem.

The closest companion to the addiction chapters of Tightrope. Macy works the way Kristof does at his best — a small town, named families, and the corporate and political decisions traced back from their kitchens — but she stays with one crisis for three books. Paper Girl makes the same journey home that Tightrope does.

Kristof writes about atrocities while they are happening; Hochschild writes about how earlier ones were exposed, and by whom. The moral argument is the same — look at what everyone else would rather not see — and so is the interest in the few people who refused to look away. Read King Leopold's Ghost for the history behind half of Kristof's datelines.

Kristof usually centres the people living with a problem; Kidder centres the person who has decided to spend a life on it. That makes him the natural next read after A Path Appears, which is about what works. His books are slower and more novelistic than Kristof's, and more interested in what that kind of devotion costs.

The American argument of Tightrope, made two decades earlier and by a different route: Ehrenreich does the work herself instead of interviewing the people who do it. She is angrier and funnier than Kristof, and far less interested in hope, which makes her a useful corrective when his optimism feels too easy.

Covers nearly the same ground as Tightrope — addiction, family breakdown, the collapse of working-class jobs — but from inside one family, and from the other side of the political argument. Kristof puts much of the blame on policy; Vance puts much of it on culture. Read them against each other rather than one instead of the other.

Kristof's Darfur columns asked why nobody was stopping a genocide; Power's book is the long answer, case by case from Armenia to Rwanda. Her memoir then shows what happened when she was inside the government being asked that question. Together they cover both halves of the same failure.

Not a similar author so much as the other half of the writing. If you have read Half the Sky, A Path Appears or Tightrope, you have read WuDunn; her background in finance shows in the books' attention to what programmes cost and which ones work. Worth naming rather than leaving invisible behind his column.

The sharpest critique on this list of the kind of giving that A Path Appears often celebrates. Giridharadas shares Kristof's concern with inequality but distrusts the solutions-by-donation answer. Read A Path Appears first and this second, for the argument and its strongest counterargument.