I gained a lot of respect for him this year because I read his The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World (2006). It's a people's history of the Non-Aligned Movement. A lot of his later texts are poorly-cited pamphlets but this earlier work is very serious, incredibly thoughtful and artful constructed. It's easy to imagine a version of this book being that is a bunch of sprawling facts as it involves like 80 different counties but he organizes the book by concept (like developmental economics or the cultural question) and centers each chapter around a city that acts as a metonym for the idea, then expands the chapter to other areas that had significant movements with respect to the idea.

I realized as much as he's a guy who likes to go off on a microphone he's actually quite a serious dude too.