Hungry Planet: What the World Eats by by Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio

Hungry Planet presents a photographic study of families from around the world, revealing what people eat during the course of one week. Each family's profile includes a detailed description of their weekly food purchases; photographs of the family at home, at market, and in their community. The centerpiece of each chapter is a portrait of the entire family surrounded by a week's worth of groceries accompanied by interviews and detailed grocery lists. Buy from Amazon

The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time
by Jeffrey Sachs

Jeffrey D. Sachs, director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University sheds light on the most vital issues facing our planet: the causes of poverty, the role of rich-country policies, and the very real possibilities for a poverty-free future. The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time is a blueprint for world-wide economic success-a goal, he argues, we can reach in a mere twenty years. Buy from Amazon

Repositioning Nutrition as Central to Development: A Strategy for Large Scale Action (Directions in Development)
by World Bank

Persistent malnutrition is contributing not only to widespread failure to meet the first MDG—to halve poverty and hunger—but to meet other goals in maternal and child health, HIV/AIDS, education, and gender equity. The choice is now between continuing to fail, or to finally make nutrition central to development. Buy from Amazon

Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World
by Tracy Kidder

This powerful and inspiring new book shows how one person can make a difference, as Kidder tells the true story of a gifted man who is in love with the world and has set out to do all he can to cure it. Buy from Amazon

Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time
by Greg Mortenson, David Oliver Relin

Anyone who despairs of the individual’s power to change lives has to read the story of Greg Mortenson, a homeless mountaineer who, following a 1993 climb of Pakistan’s treacherous K2, was inspired by a chance encounter with impoverished mountain villagers and promised to build them a school. Over the next decade he built fifty-five schools—especially for girls—that offer a balanced education in one of the most isolated and dangerous regions on earth. Buy from Amazon