Columbia Global Reports

How to bring hostages home? There’s no simple answer. "I never took it personally when the Islamic Republic of Iran abducted me in 2014 and used me as a hostage for 544 days. True, the impact on my loved ones — and my own lasting scars — is deeply personal. But the officials in Tehran… more

When Europeans began arriving in the New World at the end of the 15th century, they used the region to source silver, gold, coffee, and wool. Today, China is the foremost trading partner with several Latin American countries, and buys oil from Venezuela, Mexico, and Ecuador; iron ore from Brazil; beef from Argentina; and copper… more

"The role of citizenship and statehood in the average person’s life is often taken for granted," Publishers Weekly notes in its rave review of Atossa Araxia Abrahamian's forthcoming book The Cosmopolites. "Abrahamian draws from economic and political theory for a fascinating, eminently readable exploration of contemporary citizenship and concepts of statehood." The subject of The Cosmopolites is how the increasingly… more

When Clay Shirky was planning his move to China to teach at the campus of NYU Shanghai, he found out about a new little publishing imprint called Columbia Global Reports, and immediately wrote to its director Nicholas Lemann, proposing to spend a year chronicling China's attempt to become a real innovator in digital technology. One… more

The advance reviews are in for Columbia Global Reports' inaugural book, Bethany McLean's Shaky Ground: The Strange Saga of the U.S. Mortgage Giants. We are overjoyed to read Kirkus Reviews' enthusiastic appraisal of the work: The housing sector is a house of cards. So economics writer Bethany McLean—who, having covered Enron and the financial meltdown of 2008,… more