Mona Chalabi

This book explores how deeply relevant inequality is - how it moulds our minds and bends our moralities. It's the most vivid and readable exploration of the wealth gap I’ve ever read. Anyone who cares about a better future should read this

An astonishing book. Chalabi’s taboo-busting transparency about peoples’ financial lives is revolutionary enough. But it’s the pellucid clarity of her data visualizations that will really change how you see things. I was riveted from start to finish

How What We Have Shapes Who We Are

A revelatory exploration of the ways in which wealth – and the lack of it – shapes our lives, told through the stories of ten people, from award-winning data journalist and artist Mona Chalabi. 
 
Anna has a comfortable life in a beautiful house thanks to her husband – until he suddenly asks for a divorce. Kristina faces a choice between raising her child and finishing her degree; growing other people’s babies afforded her a way out. Tiffany, meanwhile, earns so little that the farm which is her greatest source of reassurance is also her greatest source of stress. Then there’s Jacob: he earns vast sums in finance, and yet he’s less concerned with what he has than with what he has to lose. 
 
Ten people, ten different incomes, all of them somehow afraid. For five years, data journalist Mona Chalabi followed their lives, documenting how wealth shaped their feelings, choices, identities and insecurities. Exposing our various delusions and our universal trappedness, her arresting account of what she discovered asks how much is actually enough to be – and feel – safe? And can we ever know how much we need, or what we owe one another, until we are more honest about what we have? 
 
Interwoven with the data visualisations for which Chalabi is renowned, as well as her own dramatic journey through sudden wealth and back again, Ten Lives reveals, with disarming candour, what we try so hard to hide from one another. And it shows what we stand to gain from confronting the shame we share with its liberating antidote: the truth.

Ten Lives

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Praise for Ten Lives

This book explores how deeply relevant inequality is - how it moulds our minds and bends our moralities. It's the most vivid and readable exploration of the wealth gap I’ve ever read. Anyone who cares about a better ...

An astonishing book. Chalabi’s taboo-busting transparency about peoples’ financial lives is revolutionary enough. But it’s the pellucid clarity of her data visualizations that will really change how you see things. ...

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