Margins
Tarnished book cover
Tarnished
The True Cost of Gold
2014
First Published
3.86
Average Rating
165
Number of Pages
The True Cost of Gold tells the stories of those who mine the gold, the risks they take and the dangers they from injury and drowning to mercury poisoning and lung damage. Here are portraits of people whose way of life is threatened and who now are fighting back—a miner who calls for fair trade and fair mine certification, “a modern-minded mayor who takes a stand against modern mining,” a Romanian farmer-philosopher.Children as young as four haul buckets of water and smash boulders. Activist farmers stage roadblocks to protest the foreign takeover of a local mine. Indigenous peoples are displaced and environments despoiled. All of this in the service of gold—the lustrous, coveted symbol of wealth that is too often borne of poverty, danger and disease. Eleven journalists traveled to 10 countries, from Peru to the Philippines, to tell these stories. Their work combines first-rate reporting, vivid imagery and video, previously published by the Pulitzer Center, an innovative non-profit that supports international journalism.
Avg Rating
3.86
Number of Ratings
14
5 STARS
36%
4 STARS
29%
3 STARS
29%
2 STARS
0%
1 STARS
7%
goodreads

Authors

Jacob Kushner
Jacob Kushner
Author · 2 books

Jacob Kushner is an author, educator, and international correspondent who writes magazine and other longform stories from Africa, Germany, and the Caribbean. He reports on migration and human rights, foreign aid and investment, terrorism and violent extremism, science and global health, climate change and wildlife, and press freedom. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Economist, National Geographic, The Nation, VQR, The Atavist, WIRED, Foreign Policy, and VICE. He has photographed for National Geographic and field-produced for VICE on HBO, and PBS NewsHour. He is the author of China’s Congo Plan, and Look Away: A True Story of Murders, Bombings, and a Far-Right Campaign to Rid Germany of Immigrants, was published in 2024 by Grand Central (Hachette). Both were favorably reviewed in The New York Review of Books. He has taught International Reporting and Migration at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and he is currently a visiting professor at Columbia Journalism School in New York. A former Fulbright Scholar, Max Planck Journalist in Residence, and Logan Nonfiction Fellow at the Carey Institute for Global Good, Jacob was a finalist for the Livingston Award for International Reporting. He speaks Dominican Spanish, Haitian Creole, conversational German, and basic French.

548 Market St PMB 65688, San Francisco California 94104-5401 USA
© 2026 Paratext Inc. All rights reserved