Books

Energy: A Beginner’s Guide Vaclav Smil Smil explains energy as one subject running from physics to food to industry, and is unsentimental about how slowly it changes. 1 recommender Engineering in Plain Sight Grady Hillhouse A practising civil engineer explains the cables, pipes, substations and towers you pass every day, turning an ordinary street into something a reader can actually read. 1 recommender Enlightenment in a Smart City: Edinburgh’s Civic Development, 1660-1750 Murray Pittock Edinburgh's Enlightenment explained through its drains, its street plans, and the building regulations behind them. 1 recommender Enlightenment Now Steven Pinker Pinker marshals data across dozens of measures to argue that life has been getting better, and why that matters. 1 recommender Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism Scott Horton The case that the war on terrorism created more terrorism than it ever prevented. Entrepreneur Revolution Daniel Priestley The industrial age is over and the mindset we were schooled into no longer fits the entrepreneurial one that replaced it. 1 recommender Enver Hoxha: Twentieth-Century Tyrant Robert C. Austin A small Balkan state broke with Yugoslavia, then Moscow, then Beijing, and covered itself in bunkers. Austin explains the sequence without claiming Hoxha becomes legible. 1 recommender Erik Satie Three Piece Suite Ian Penman Penman circles Satie in fragments: the velvet suits, the Rosicrucian phase, the furniture music, and a reputation that keeps getting rebuilt by other people. 1 recommender Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows Balli Kaur Jaswal A writing class for Punjabi widows in Southall turns into something far franker, funnier and more dangerous than its teacher expected. 1 recommender Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor Roger Lewis Burton and Taylor across six hundred pages of drinking, jewels and films, written by a man who is plainly enjoying himself far too much to stop. 1 recommender Essential Labor Angela Garbes The case that caregiving is the work holding everything up, and the reason it stays unpaid. 1 recommender Estonia Neil Taylor The clearest history in English of a country that has been independent for barely half its modern life. 1 recommender Eurotrash, A Novel Christian Kracht A road trip round Switzerland with a semi-crazy mother, a plastic bag of cash and a family fortune with Nazi money in it. Short, funny, unforgiving about respectability. 1 recommender Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution Cat Bohannon Two hundred million years of evolution retold from the female body outward rather than the male. 1 recommender Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel’s Messiah Charles King Messiah was written for a Dublin charity in three weeks, by a composer close to ruin. 1 recommender Everything Inside Edwidge Danticat Eight stories of Haitians and Haitian Americans, and the ways migration keeps working on a life long after arrival. 1 recommender Everything Is F*cked Mark Manson Manson's follow-up trades personal problems for a bigger question: how to sustain hope in a broken world, via pop philosophy and profane humor. Everything Is Mama Jimmy Fallon Fallon's follow-up flips the gag: babies who answer every question with Mama, a rhyming read-aloud gift giving mothers their due. Everything You Need to Know About Everything You Need to Know About Daniel Tatarsky A browsable miscellany of facts across every subject. 1 recommender Evvie Drake Starts Over Linda Holmes She was leaving him the day he died, and has told nobody. Grief complicated by relief. 1 recommender Excellent Advice for Living Kevin Kelly Wired's founding editor distills a lifetime into hundreds of short, sharp aphorisms on how to live, work, and treat other people well. 2 recommenders Exiled in Modernity: Delacroix, Civilization, and Barbarism David O'Brien Delacroix worried constantly about whether civilisation was truly advancing, and he put the question into his paintings. 1 recommender Exit Stalin: The Soviet Union as a Civilization 1953-1991 Mark B. Smith Smith treats the post-Stalin Soviet Union as a working civilisation with its own logic, covering housing, law, consumption and belief rather than counting down to collapse. 1 recommender Expert Secrets Russell Brunson How to turn what you know into a movement and a business, by finding your voice and leading a following of true fans. 2 recommenders Explaining Successes in Africa: Things Don’t Always Fall Apart Erin Accampo Hern The African states that worked, examined for once instead of the far more familiar failures. 1 recommender Extreme Ownership Jocko Willink The leader owns everything in their world. No exceptions, no blaming the plan, no blaming the people below. Fable Adrienne Young Abandoned on an island at fourteen, a trader's daughter dredges gems to survive and buys her way back into his world. 1 recommender Factfulness Hans Rosling Rosling shows how a fact-based worldview corrects our instinct to see the world as more frightening than it is. 1 recommender Failed States Noam Chomsky The failed-state criteria turned back on the country that applies them to everyone else. Fair Play Eve Rodsky A card-based system for splitting domestic work, built on the idea that one partner's time is treated as infinite. 1 recommender Fairy Tale as Myth/Myth as Fairy Tale Jack Zipes Zipes traces how fairy tales were shaped, sanitised and weaponised as they passed through the centuries. 1 recommender Faith, Hope and Carnage Nick Cave Forty hours of conversation recorded after the death of Cave fifteen-year-old son, covering grief, songwriting, doubt and why he has no patience left for cynicism. 1 recommender Fall on Your Knees Ann-Marie MacDonald Ann-Marie MacDonald's novel spans generations of a troubled family on Cape Breton, unspooling long-hidden secrets. 1 recommender Famesick: A Memoir Lena Dunham Dunham on early fame, illness and the disorientation of having been very publicly young, written after a decade away from the spotlight she entered at twenty-four. 1 recommender Familiaris David Wroblewski David Wroblewski's novel tells the origin story of the Sawtelle family and their remarkable dogs in early twentieth-century Wisconsin. 1 recommender Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field Nancy Forbes, Basil Mahon Nancy Forbes and Basil Mahon tell how Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell, a generation apart, uncovered the electromagnetic field that underpins modern life. 1 recommender