Siddharth Kara Books In Order

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Siddharth Kara is an activist, screenwriter, author, and an expert on modern slavery. He also serves as an adjunct lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, and a senior fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health. He is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and a best-selling author.

Kara has written various reports and books on the topic of modern slavery. His first book was titled Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery. It co-won the 2010 Frederick Douglass Award for best non-fiction book on slavery at Yale University. The book was made into the feature film “Trafficked”.

Kara would release another book, Bonded Labor: Tackling the System of Slavery in South Asia, and the third book Modern Slavery: A Global Perspective was published in October 2017 at the United Nations.

He first encountered human trafficking while in the nineties at a Bosnian refugee camp. Since then, the author has been to over fifty countries in his quest to research modern slavery. Along the way, he has seen humans sold into slavery and confronted some of those responsible.

The author advises the US government, the International Labor Organization, the United Nations, and other governments when it comes to anti-trafficking policy and law. He has also been featured in the media on the subject of human rights, appearing on the BBC, CNBC, the Guardian, CNN, National Geographic, and other documentaries.

Kara has been a Merill Lynch investment banker, following that up by running his own finance and m&a consulting firm. He graduated with his law degree, an MBA from Columbia University, and Kara also attended Duke University, receiving his BA in English and philosophy. While there, he co-founded the Duke Refugee Action Project. This was what let to the Hart Leadership Program at the Sanford School of Public Policy.

Kara was born in Knoxville, Tennessee. His parents were Indian. He grew up in Memphis and split his time between Mumbai, India. He spent many summers in India and then would go back to Memphis University School.

Kara also attended Duke University, receiving his BA in English and philosophy. While there, he co-founded the Duke Refugee Action Project. This was what let to the Hart Leadership Program at the Sanford School of Public Policy.

He is married to Aditi Shankardass, a neuroscientist. He spends his time between the city of London and the city of Los Angeles.

Modern Slavery: A Global Perspective is a book by Siddharth Kara that covers the cost of slavery around the world. The author has been able to document the realities of modern slavery and been able to show the systems that dehumanize and degrade and are able to take dignity from people just for profit.

It also connects the enslaved’s suffering to the daily lives of Western consumers. This is an informative and factual work that shows just how much Kara has learned and seen over the years to show how large in scope slavery actually is and to follow a more solid path towards abolishing it.

Whether it’s labor trafficking agriculturally to being in Nigeria sex trafficking to taking on debt bondage in the construction sector of Southeast Asia, Kara shows the reader the many different shapes and forms that slavery can take and what it can do to ground things into the reality of what it is to serve in the modern day.

This book encompasses over fifteen years of intensive field research conducted in over 50 countries all over the world. They include interviews with the slavers and the enslaved. The author has shown how slavery is manifested in the modern world, how it has not gone away or disappeared into the past, and how it has become a part of global supply chains.

Cobalt Red is a 2023 novel from Siddharth Kara. He has appeared to talk about the cobalt mining and its human rights abuses on Fresh Air, CNN, ABC News, Fox News, and The Joe Rogan Experience. The book was a finalist in nonfiction for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize. The book was also named one of the 100 Notable Books for 2023 by the New York Times, shortlisted for the 2023 Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award. It was also one of the best books of 2023 for the New Yorker, one of Goodreads’ best books of 2023, and one of the top 16 books of 2023 by Wired.

This nonfiction work is an investigation into the human rights abuses that lay behind the cobalt mining operation in the Congo, along with the moral implications that come along with it that might end up affecting all of us.

This is a story that exposes the tremendous toll that is taken on the people along with the environment of the Democratic Republic of the Congo through cobalt mining. This is as relayed through the real testimonies of the Congolese people.

Siddharth Kara has been a researcher and an activist for some time now, and has made his way deep into the cobalt territory to try and take down the various testimonies of the people who have lived, worked, and died in order to obtain cobalt.

This is where Kara finds out the truth behind those terrible mining practices, as he looks into mining areas controlled by militia, looked into the supply chain of cobalt mined by children in toxic conditions to be sold to tech giants, and been able to gather up testimonies from people who are able to go through much suffering and even end up losing their lives to cobalt mining.

These components make up litihium-ion rechargeable batteries and more. Almost 75% of the global cobalt supply is mined in the Congo. In this book, the author and activist puts forth an argument that all of us should care about what happens in the Congo, because we are not separate but involved in it since we directly benefit from the efforts. Read this fascinating book to get all of the facts and an exhaustive look at the true cost of cobalt mining.