Books

A Guide to the Good Life William Irvine Stoicism presented as equipment for living rather than history, with its techniques set out to be used. 1 recommender A History of Boston Daniel Dain Seven hundred pages on the city that keeps exporting radical ideas, from Puritan settlement through abolition and busing to biotech. Long, and consistently readable. 1 recommender A History of Modern Palestine Ilan Pappé A survey from the Ottoman period onward, keeping ordinary people in view rather than leaderships. A History of the Muslim World: From its Origins to the Dawn of Modernity Michael Cook Twelve centuries to 1800, treating the Muslim world as many connected homes rather than one civilisation moving through a single continuous story. 1 recommender A Lesson Before Dying Ernest J. Gaines Ernest Gaines's novel set in 1940s Louisiana follows a teacher asked to help a wrongly condemned young man face death with dignity. 1 recommender A Life for Liberty: The Making of an American Originalist Randy Barnett The memoir of the law professor who built the constitutional case that nearly killed Obamacare. 1 recommender A Map of the World Jane Hamilton Jane Hamilton's novel follows a farm family destroyed by a drowning accident and a false accusation. 1 recommender A Marriage at Sea Sophie Elmhirst They sold everything to sail away, then a whale sank the boat. Months adrift, with only each other to survive. 1 recommender A Matter of Degrees Gino Segre Physicist Gino Segre explores how temperature, from the human body to the cosmos, shapes life, matter, and the fate of the planet. 1 recommender A Memory of Light Robert Jordan, Brandon Sanderson The Last Battle, and the end of a series twenty-three years in the telling. Sanderson finishes what Robert Jordan began. A Million Little Pieces James Frey James Frey's raw addiction narrative, published as memoir and later revealed to be partly fabricated, follows a young man through rehab. 1 recommender A Million Miles in a Thousand Years Donald Miller If your life were a film, would anyone sit through it? Story principles, turned on the life he was actually living. 1 recommender A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life of the World’s Smartest Birds of Prey Jonathan Meiburg Darwin was puzzled by it, and so is everyone else: a South American falcon with the curiosity and problem-solving of a crow, followed through evolution and the Falklands. 1 recommender A Nation of Sheep Andrew Napolitano Liberty traded for the appearance of safety, argued while the trade was still being made. A New Earth Eckhart Tolle Eckhart Tolle argues that recognizing the ego is the first step toward a more awakened, present way of living. 1 recommender A People’s History of the United States Howard Zinn Howard Zinn retells American history from the vantage of workers, women, and the marginalized rather than its usual victors. 1 recommender A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There Aldo Leopold Published months after Leopold died in 1949, and still the founding argument that soil, water and animals belong to a moral community rather than a balance sheet. 1 recommender A Short History of Nearly Everything Bill Bryson A determined amateur works out how science actually established what it knows, and finds the researchers stranger than the findings. A Small Personal Voice Doris Lessing Lessing on the novelist obligation: neither propaganda nor retreat, but a small personal voice saying honestly what it knows. Long out of print, still unanswered. 1 recommender A Star Danced Gertrude Lawrence The stage star's own account of a career that ran from London music halls to Broadway. 1 recommender A Storm of Swords George R. R. Martin The volume where Martin cashes in every promise he made about consequence, at a wedding readers have never quite recovered from. A Tale of Two Cities Charles Dickens Charles Dickens's novel of the French Revolution braids love and sacrifice through the terror of London and Paris. 1 recommender A Thief of Time Tony Hillerman Leaphorn hunts a missing archaeologist through Anasazi ruins and a whitewater canyon. 1 recommender A Thousand Splendid Suns Khaled Hosseini Two women a generation apart, forced into one household, across thirty years of Afghan history. 1 recommender A Treatise on Liberal Critiques of Ridda Mohammed Hijab An examination of apostasy in Islamic law and its liberal critics. A Very Expensive Poison Luke Harding Luke Harding’s investigation of the polonium poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in London and the trail leading back to the Kremlin. 1 recommender A Virtuous Woman Kaye Gibbons Kaye Gibbons tells the story of an unlikely Southern marriage in alternating voices, looking back after the wife's death. 1 recommender 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 A Year with Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno’s Diary Brian Eno Eno kept a diary for 1995, then wrote appendices that outgrew it, covering generative music, Oblique Strategies, and the daily texture of actually working. 1 recommender Aalto in Detail: A Catalogue of Components Celine Dietziker Alvar Aalto designed the door handles too, and this catalogues every component he touched. 1 recommender Aaron’s Rod D. H. Lawrence 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 Ezra Klein Why a rich country cannot build housing, transit or clean energy, and the case that the scarcity is self-inflicted. 2 recommenders Accidental Presidents Jared Cohen The eight vice presidents who inherited the office on a president's death, and what each did with it. 1 recommender According to Queeney Beryl Bainbridge Samuel Johnson's last years, seen sideways by a child who found him ridiculous. 1 recommender