She is the author or co-author of four books, including The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty[1] and Fools Rush In: Jerry Levin, Steve Case, and the Unmaking of Time Warner.
[2] She is also the editor of the critical English translation of How It Happened: Documenting the Tragedy of Hungarian Jewry, an influential account of the Holocaust in Hungary written by Ernő Munkácsi in 1947.
[11] As a Fellow at the Cullman Center, Munk began working on "a book of narrative nonfiction set against the backdrop of the Holocaust in Hungary.
Even before it was published, the book was the subject of Joe Nocera's New York Times column in which he noted that Munk's reporting on the controversial and ill-fated Millennium Villages Project "caused her to become disillusioned, and humbled, by the difficulties that any Western aid effort is likely to encounter.
"[22] Foreign Policy magazine recognized The Idealist with a 2013 Albie Award, remarking: "Writing accessibly about development economics is a high-wire act, but Munk accomplishes it brilliantly.
"[23] In the Wall Street Journal, James Traub cited Munk's "impressive persistence, unflagging empathy and journalistic derring-do.
"[24] The economist William Easterly, reviewing the book for Barron's, called it "one of the most readable and evocative accounts of foreign aid ever written"[25] while Howard W. French described it as "a devastating portrait of hubris and its consequences.
[27] On his WNYC radio show, Brian Lehrer suggested that Munk overreached when she concluded that foreign aid has often caused more harm than good.
Written by Munk's ancestor Ernő Munkácsi and originally published in 1947, How It Happened is an early first-hand account of Nazi Germany's occupation of Hungary, describing the Jewish community’s struggle for survival in 1944, when, in a matter of weeks, 437,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz.
In her review for History_(journal), Caroline Mezger argued that, beyond its value as a primary source, How It Happened "represents a critical, multilayered historiographical attempt to grapple with some of the Holocaust’s key questions of culpability, responsibility and agency.