Johann Hari Books In Order

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Johann Hari is an award-winning British playwright and journalist who is the author of several New York Times bestselling titles. The man was born in Glasgow, Scotland but lived for much of his life in London, which is where his family moved to when he was one year old.

He was born to a Swiss immigrant father who drove a bus for a living while his mother worked as a nurse and later on in shelters catering to domestic violence survivors. Later on, he went to college at King’s College, Cambridge, where he studied Political and Social Science and graduated with a Double First.

He would then become a reporter and journalist working for all manner of magazines and newspapers. He has written articles and columns for the likes of the Huffington Post, The Independent, The Nation, El Mundo, The Melbourne Age, and the Los Angles Times among many other international magazines and newspapers.

Amnesty International has twice named him National Newspaper Journalist of the Year for his war reporting. He has also been an environmentalist Commentator of the Year and Cultural Commentator of the Year.
Hari’s works have been translated into more than three dozen languages and have been praised by some notable people from Naomi Klein to Oprah, from Elton John to Noam Chomsky.

Hari garnered rave reviews from the likes of the “Sydney Morning Herald” and the “Washington Post” for his latest work “Stolen Focus,” which came out in 2022. The work was a bestseller on three different continents.
His debut novel “Chasing the Scream” was just as huge as it was adapted into a documentary series and Oscar-nominated film. “Lost Connections,” his second novel was shortlisted by the British Medical Association for an award and was described as one of the most important texts in recent years.

The award-winning author has also had his works and war reporting column on the likes of His TED Talks have been viewed nearly 100 million times and he has appeared on popular shows such as BBC’s Question Time, All Things Considered by NPR, The Joe Rogan Podcast, Realtime with Bill Maher on HBO, and The Joe Rogan Podcast.

He is also an executive producer of an eight-part TV series that starred Samuel L Jackson and an Oscar-nominated film. Johann Hari currently spends half his time traveling while researching his work and the restart home in London.

After achieving a lot of success with his first two works, it was with his third that Johann Hari really came into his own. With each year that passed, he felt that things that required deep focus such as having long conversations, or reading a book were becoming increasingly difficult.

Since this seemed to be happening to most people around him, he decided to research the phenomenon. Making use of his training in the social sciences, he unearthed evidence that showed a worrying increase in attention problems.
In his quest to understand the phenomenon, he went on a journey across the world from Melbourne to Miami, Montreal to Moscow, interviewing the leading experts across the globe on focus and attention.
It was from the results of his research that he would then pen his blockbuster work “Stolen Focus,” which thrust him back into the spotlight.

“Lost Connections” by Johann Hari is a startling challenge to what we have always thought about anxiety and depression.

The author suffered from depression in his childhood and was on antidepressants in his teenage years. Like most people, he was told that it was all about a chemical imbalance in the brain.
When he graduated with a degree in the social sciences, he started investigating anxiety and depression and learned that most people had lied to him. He found social scientists working on finding the real cause of the conditions which he found were mostly to do with modern lifestyles rather than what is in the brain.

His quest took him from an uprising in Berlin to an Indiana Amish community and to the homeless living in Las Vegas storm tunnels which are shown in dramatic and vivid detail.
He found solutions very different from the conventional ones that have for the most part been ineffective. Just as his work Chasing Scream transformed how we look at addiction, Lost Connections with its animation and TED Talk have resulted in some very much-needed debates about anxiety and depression.

Johann Hari’s novel “Stolen Focus” gives the heartbreaking fact that American office workers can only focus on one task for three minutes while teenagers can only manage 65 seconds.
The author discovered that constantly switching from tab to tab and device to device was a depressing and diminishing way to live. He tried all manner of self-help solutions including discarding his phone for three months but nothing was effective.

He would then seek out leading experts on human attention to find some surprising insights. While we often think that we cannot focus due to a failure to exert willpower over our various devices, he found that this was not the case.
For the most part, people’s focus has been stolen by external forces that make people uniquely vulnerable to corporations that use out attention to make huge profits.

According to Hari’s research, the crisis has a dozen deep causes from rising pollution to the decline of mind wandering which rob us of much of our attention.

In this work, he explores how dissidents in Silicon Valley learned how to steal our attention. He provides some interesting insights that will transform the debate of focus and attention.

“Chasing the Scream” by Johann Hari is set a century following the banning of drugs in the US. On the eve of the centenary, the author set out on a pic journey to document the war on drugs.

In his quest, he discovered that addiction is nothing like what we think it is, drugs are nothing like what we think they are and there are some very different motives to the war on drugs that is commonly seen on TV.
In this work, the author puts forth his discoveries by telling the stories of people across the globe that have had their lives completely changed by the war on drugs. They range from a Mexican hitman who needs to get out to a crack dealer in Brooklyn on a quest to reunite with his mother.

At the opening of the story, Hari just discovered that the man that launched the war on drugs had been responsible for stalking and killing Billie Holiday. It ends with the story of a bold doctor that did his best to ensure the government decriminalized every drug from crack to cannabis.

The work challenges what we have thought about the war against drugs as it explores one of the most consequential and controversial questions of our time.