Books
Browse the books our people wrote and recommend.
Aalto in Detail: A Catalogue of Components
Alvar Aalto designed the door handles too, and this catalogues every component he touched.
1 recommender
Aaron’s Rod
A miner walks out on his family at Christmas carrying a flute, and Lawrence follows him through London and Italy without a plot.
1 recommender
Abundance
Why a rich country cannot build housing, transit or clean energy, and the case that the scarcity is self-inflicted.
2 recommenders
Accidental Presidents
The eight vice presidents who inherited the office on a president's death, and what each did with it.
1 recommender
According to Queeney
Samuel Johnson's last years, seen sideways by a child who found him ridiculous.
1 recommender
Achieving Our Country
A 1998 warning that a disillusioned electorate would eventually reach for a strongman.
1 recommender
Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man
Harvey's blockbuster insider's guide to how men really think about love, teaching women the rules men play by, from the ninety-day rule on.
Act Like a Success, Think Like a Success
Harvey trades dating for ambition, arguing everyone has one defining gift, and drawing on his rise from homeless comedian to mogul to help you find yours.
Advanced Selling Strategies
Not a beginner's book. The full professional system, built on military strategy, for people who already sell well and want to sell far better.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Huck and the runaway Jim raft down the Mississippi in Twain's vernacular masterpiece on conscience, freedom, and the racism of the antebellum South.
Aflame: Learning from Silence
A non-Christian has been going on retreat to a Benedictine hermitage above Big Sur for thirty years. This is what he found there about attention and loss.
1 recommender
Africa in My Blood: An Autobiography in Letters
Letters from 1934 to 1966: the childhood ambition, the secretarial job that funded the passage, and the first Gombe seasons before anyone believed chimpanzees used tools.
1 recommender
Africa: The Definitive Visual History of a Continent
A visual history of Africa arranged by region rather than by the borders Europeans drew.
1 recommender
After 1177 B.C.: The Survival of Civilizations
The sequel question: after the Bronze Age collapse, why did some civilisations come back?
1 recommender
After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan’s Memory Palace
Bob Dylan's late career, read as closely as scripture by a critic who has plainly read everything.
1 recommender
After the Nazis: The Story of Culture in West Germany
Literature, film, music and art rebuilding after 1945 while carrying compromised figures and unexamined pasts, from Gruppe 47 through the New German Cinema.
1 recommender
Against Interpretation
The argument that hunting for a work's hidden meaning is a way of avoiding the work itself.
1 recommender
Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity
An anti-technology argument from a former environmental activist who became a Christian and left the grid.
1 recommender
Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics Between the World Wars
The backlash against globalisation is not new, and the 1920s version ended extremely badly.
1 recommender
Age of Revolutions
Zakaria traces four centuries of upheaval, from the Dutch and industrial revolutions to today, to argue that eras of rapid progress reliably provoke fierce backlash.
Alcatraz vs. the Evil Librarians
On his thirteenth birthday Alcatraz gets a bag of sand and learns the world is secretly run by a cult of librarians. His talent is breaking things.
Alfred Schnittke
The Soviet composer who spliced Baroque pastiche, serialism and film music into single works and called it polystylism, studied by the cellist who premiered him.
1 recommender
Alias Grace
A real 1843 double murder, reimagined: was the servant Grace Marks a monster, a victim, or something no one can name
All About Love
Bell Hooks argues that love is an action rather than a feeling, and that we are taught almost nothing about how to do it.
2 recommenders
All Adults Here
One accident dislodges a memory, and a family starts reassessing what it thought it had agreed.
1 recommender
All That Life Can Afford
An American in London tutors a wealthy family's children while quietly editing her own background to fit in.
1 recommender
All the Colors of the Dark
Missouri, 1975: girls are vanishing, and one rescue starts an obsession that runs for decades.
1 recommender
All the King’s Men
Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer-winning novel of populist demagogue Willie Stark and the corrupting machinery of political power.
2 recommenders
All the Way to the River
Elizabeth Gilbert's memoir recounts her consuming love for her best friend Rayya Elias and Rayya's death from cancer.
1 recommender
Allah Loves
Reflections on the qualities and actions Islamic tradition describes as beloved to God.
Alles Umsonst
January 1945, and a Prussian estate fills with refugees while everyone keeps behaving as though the world still works. Published in English as All for Nothing.
1 recommender
Allies at War: The Politics of Defeating Hitler
The Second World War told as a coalition problem, in which the men who had to defeat Hitler spent much of it managing each other instead.
1 recommender
Alphabet in Motion: How Letters Get Their Shape
Two volumes of paper engineering, with pulleys and pop-ups that demonstrate how each letter reached its present shape rather than merely describing the process.
1 recommender
Amazing Grace Adams
She abandons the car in traffic and walks across London to a party she was not invited to.
1 recommender
America (The Book)
The Daily Show’s mock civics textbook, skewering American democracy, media, and government with straight-faced satire.
1 recommender
America’s Most Hated Woman
The atheist campaigner who took prayer out of US schools, and the men who murdered her.
1 recommender
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