Books

A Walk in the Woods Bill Bryson Two unprepared friends take on the Appalachian Trail, in a book as much about American forests as about failing to walk them. A Whole New Mind Daniel Pink As routine work is automated or offshored, Pink argues the premium shifts to design, empathy and meaning, the right-brain skills. A Woman Is No Man Etaf Rum Three generations of Palestinian-American women in Brooklyn, and the silences each one is handed. 1 recommender The Wage Standard: What’s Wrong in the Labor Market and How to Fix It Arindrajit Dube The economist whose work overturned the textbook view that minimum wages cost jobs sets out the case that employers hold real discretion over what they pay. 1 recommender The Wanting Monster Martine Murray A creature appears whenever wanting more takes hold. An Australian writer and illustrator make a counter-myth to acquisition, pitched at children and aimed at adults. 1 recommender The War of Art Steven Pressfield A field guide to beating “Resistance,” the internal force that stops creative work, and showing up to do the work like a professional. 4 recommenders The War on Normal People Andrew Yang Yang's alarm about automation gutting ordinary work, and his signature fix: a universal basic income to give people a floor to stand on. The Warren Buffett Portfolio Robert G. Hagstrom Robert Hagstrom lays out the focus-investing strategy behind Warren Buffett's success, making the case for concentrated, long-term portfolios. 2 recommenders The Warrior: Rafael Nadal and His Kingdom of Clay Christopher Clarey Three decades covering Nadal: what the topspin forehand cost his body, the Mallorcan family that produced him, and the rivalry that defined the best era tennis has had. 1 recommender The Wars of the Roses Dan Jones Thirty years of English dynastic slaughter, told so clearly you can follow who is winning. 1 recommender The Water Dancer Ta-Nehisi Coates Ta-Nehisi Coates’s debut novel follows an enslaved man with a mysterious power and his path into the fight for freedom. 1 recommender The Waters Bonnie Jo Campbell A healer, her granddaughter and a Michigan swamp, with a suspicious town at the edge of it. 1 recommender The Way of Integrity Martha Beck Martha Beck's guide to living in alignment with your own truth, built on the structure of Dante's Inferno, and an Oprah's Book Club selection. 1 recommender The Way of Kings Brandon Sanderson A slave, a scholar and a highprince in a vast, storm-scoured world. The first volume of Sanderson's epic Stormlight Archive. 1 recommender The Way of the Superior Man David Deida A cult classic addressing men on purpose, relationships and sexuality, arguing a man should live his deepest purpose rather than wait for certainty. 1 recommender The Wealth and Poverty of Nations David S. Landes Historian David Landes ranges across centuries to ask why some nations grew rich while others stayed poor, weighing culture, geography, and institutions. 1 recommender The Wedding People Alison Espach She arrives at the hotel with no luggage and no plan to leave, and walks into someone else's wedding. 1 recommender The Well of Ascension Brandon Sanderson The tyrant is dead, and now the rebels have to govern, with three armies besieging the capital and the economy collapsing under them. The White People and Other Weird Stories Arthur Machen Machen's tales of pagan survivals and creeping dread, the weird fiction that Lovecraft revered. 1 recommender The Wilderness Angela Flournoy Friendship given the weight most novels reserve for marriage: five women, tracked across the long middle of adult life. 1 recommender The Will to Win Robert Herjavec Herjavec reframes winning as a trainable discipline of focus, fitness, and honest self-assessment, illustrated with deals, races, and the failures that taught him most. The Willpower Instinct Kelly McGonigal Willpower as a physiological capacity with limits, where self-criticism makes it worse rather than better. 1 recommender The Wisdom of Sundays Oprah Winfrey Highlights from Oprah’s Super Soul conversations, arranged as insights on meaning, presence, and personal growth. The Woman Who Could Not Forget Ying-Ying Chang Iris Chang mother on what documenting a massacre cost her daughter, who took her own life at thirty-six 1 recommender The Women Kristin Hannah Hannah follows an army nurse through two tours of Vietnam and a homecoming that proves harder than the war, into a country insisting women were never there. 1 recommender The Wordy Book Julie Paschkis Julie Paschkis pairs each image with a phrase that declines to settle, in the saturated folk style of her Neruda picture books. 1 recommender The Work of Art Adam Moss The former editor of New York magazine interviews dozens of artists, writers, and musicians about how a finished work actually gets made, mess and all. 1 recommender The Works of John Leguizamo John Leguizamo Four landmark solo-show scripts in which Leguizamo plays dozens of characters to dissect machismo, immigration, and identity with tenderness and savagery. The World According to Garp John Irving A wrestler turned novelist, his famously radical mother, and a life visited by absurd and sudden violence. 1 recommender The World at First Light: A New History of the Renaissance Bernd Roeck A very long Renaissance history that asks why it happened in Europe and not somewhere else. 1 recommender The Worth of Water Gary White, Matt Damon An actor and an engineer discover that the poor will repay loans for clean water, then rebuild their charity around it. The Wounded Generation: Coming Home After World War II David Nasaw Sixteen million Americans came home from the war, and the country decided not to ask how they were. 1 recommender The Wren, the Wren Anne Enright A celebrated poet walks out on his family, and Enright prints his poems beside the wreckage so readers can price one against the other. 1 recommender Waiting for the Barbarians J.M. Coetzee A magistrate on the frontier of an unnamed empire discovers that decency costs more than he is willing to pay. 1 recommender Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography Tom Arnold-Forster He coined stereotype and the Cold War, argued the public could not govern itself, and shaped American liberalism for fifty years. His questions have returned. 1 recommender War and Peace Leo Tolstoy Five families through Napoleon's invasion, plus several hundred pages arguing with historians. 1 recommender