Books

Between Meals A. J. Liebling Liebling on eating in 1920s Paris as a young man on an allowance, and on the appetite required to do it properly. 1 recommender Between the World and Me Ta-Nehisi Coates Written as a letter to his teenage son, Coates's National Book Award winner reckons with what it means to inhabit a Black body in America, and the history written on it. 1 recommender Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions Batja Mesquita Emotions as something built between people rather than felt inside one, and why that makes them culturally specific. 1 recommender Beware of Pity Stefan Zweig A young officer's pity for a disabled girl leads him into promises he cannot keep. 1 recommender Bewilderment Richard Powers Richard Powers's novel follows an astrobiologist raising his grieving, troubled young son as he searches the stars and struggles to save the boy. 1 recommender Beyond Belief Nir Eyal The author of Indistractable turns to the beliefs we hold about ourselves, arguing that the stories we tell quietly set the ceiling on what we attempt. 1 recommender Beyond Fear Dorothy Rowe A psychologist's account of how fear shapes our lives and the defences we build against it. Beyond Fundamentalism Reza Aslan Extremism recast as a global habit of mind rather than an Islamic problem: what happens when politics gets rewritten as a cosmic war. Beyond Psychology Otto Rank Freud most gifted heir walks away from the discipline entirely, arguing that people need myth and art rather than any explanation. 1 recommender Beyond the Pleasure Principle Sigmund Freud The late essay where Freud concedes something in us pulls the other way from pleasure. 1 recommender Beyond Wealth Alexander Green An investment writer steps away from markets to ask what money is actually for, in short reflective essays. 1 recommender Bienville’s Dilemma: A Historical Geography of New Orleans Richard Campanella New Orleans is built somewhere no one should build a city, and this explains why they did. 1 recommender Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature Dan Sinykin American publishing was bought up by conglomerates, and it changed what novels got written. 1 recommender Big Mistakes: The Best Investors and Their Worst Investments Michael Batnick The worst trades of the greatest investors, and why losing is the fee rather than the verdict. Big Wolf & Little Wolf: The Little Leaf That Wouldn’t Fall Nadine Brun-Cosme A leaf refuses to fall, and two wolves wait. Brun-Cosme and Tallec say something patient and unsentimental about worry, and about the shape that care takes. 1 recommender Bill Moyers: A World of Ideas Bill Moyers Moyers sat down with Asimov, Chomsky, Achebe and Tuchman in 1988, at a length and seriousness American broadcast television has not attempted since. 1 recommender Binti Nnedi Okorafor Nnedi Okorafor's Hugo and Nebula winning novella about a Himba girl who leaves Earth for an intergalactic university, from Tor.com. 1 recommender Birds and Poets John Burroughs The most widely read naturalist of his era moves between close observation of birds and essays on Whitman and Emerson, at an unhurried pace that still holds. 1 recommender Birdsong Sebastian Faulks The Somme from above and the tunnellers below it, listening in the dark for the enemy digging back. 1 recommender Bittersweet Susan Cain Susan Cain's book makes the case that sorrow and longing, not just positivity, are a source of creativity and connection. 1 recommender Black Ambrosia Elizabeth Engstrom A teenage drifter crossing the emptied Midwest, narrating what she needs and how she takes it. 1 recommender Black and Blue Anna Quindlen Anna Quindlen's novel follows a battered wife who flees with her son and tries to build a hidden new life under a false name. 1 recommender Black Buck Mateo Askaripour A satire of startup salesmanship, delivered as a how-to manual that gets more savage as it goes. 1 recommender Black Candle Women Diane Marie Brown Four generations, one house, and a family curse that a teenage crush finally forces into the open. 1 recommender Black Lamb and Grey Falcon Rebecca West Eleven hundred pages through the Balkans as fascism rose, part travelogue and part argument about why Europe was about to tear itself apart again. 1 recommender Black Reconstruction in America W. E. B. Du Bois W. E. B. Du Bois overturned the accepted history of Reconstruction by putting Black Americans at the center of it. 1 recommender Blessed Unrest Paul Hawken Hundreds of thousands of small groups are working to heal the planet. Hawken asks what they add up to. 1 recommender Blink Malcolm Gladwell Snap judgements are often better than considered ones, and sometimes catastrophically worse. What separates the two? Blitzscaling Reid Hoffman How a handful of companies grew from startup to giant at breakneck speed, and the counterintuitive rules that let them Blonde Joyce Carol Oates Norma Jeane Baker imagined from the inside, at length, as a novel rather than a life. 1 recommender Blood Harmony: The Everly Brothers Story Barry Mazor Their close harmony shaped the Beatles, the Beach Boys and Simon and Garfunkel, and their partnership collapsed into a decade of not speaking to each other. 1 recommender Blood Meridian Cormac McCarthy A scalp-hunting gang crosses the 1850s borderlands, and the desert regards the violence with exactly the same attention it gives a rock. 2 recommenders Bloomberg by Bloomberg Michael Bloomberg Fired from Salomon at 39, Bloomberg tells how he bet the payout on a single machine and built a media empire from it Blue Moon Alicia Keys Poems and reflections framed as the shared journal of Mama Mae and LeeLee, blending verse with illustration. Blue Sisters Coco Mellors Three sisters return to an empty New York apartment a year after the fourth one died. 1 recommender Blueprint Nicholas A. Christakis Christakis argues evolution wired us for cooperation and friendship, not just tribalism and conflict. 1 recommender