Books

War by Other Means: The Pacifists of the Greatest Generation Who Revolutionized Resistance Daniel Akst The American pacifists who refused the Second World War and invented the tactics of the 1960s. 1 recommender War Doctor David Nott A surgeon who spent decades volunteering in the world's most dangerous war zones, operating in bombed hospitals with almost nothing. 1 recommender Warbreaker Brandon Sanderson In a kingdom where colour is power and the dead return as gods, a princess is sent as a bride to the god-king she was raised to fear. Warrior Race Imran Khan Into the mountains and valleys of the Pathans, the frontier people from whom Imran Khan's own family descends. WASPs Vera S. Williams The women who ferried bombers across America in wartime, and waited fifty years to be called veterans. 1 recommender Waste Books Georg Christoph Lichtenberg An eighteenth-century physicist's private notebooks, which turn out to read like the sharpest feed you have ever scrolled. 1 recommender Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey Through Britain Roger Deakin Deakin swam moats, tarns, estuaries and the sea off Scilly, and founded a movement almost by accident. Part travelogue, part argument that water is the last commons. 1 recommender Way of the Warrior Kid Jocko Willink Marc dreads fifth grade until his SEAL uncle arrives for the summer with a plan and no sympathy. Way of the Warrior Kid 3 Jocko Willink A new kid, a harder year, and a lesson about the gap between wanting something and doing the work. Way of the Warrior Kid 4 Jocko Willink The workout, the reading list and the rules, pulled out of the stories and handed over directly. Way of the Warrior Kid 5 Jocko Willink Uncle Jake answers the letters kids actually send: about bullies, fear, and wanting to quit. We Are Displaced Malala Yousafzai Refugee girls telling their own displacement, turning a statistic back into specific interrupted lives. We Are Family LeBron James A middle-grade novel about a team falling apart, unpatronising about what young readers can handle. We Are Not Here to Be Bystanders Linda Sarsour Brooklyn to the Women's March, most interesting on the unglamorous mechanics of organising. We Must Not Think of Ourselves Lauren Grodstein Recruited in the Warsaw Ghetto to record testimony, while still living the life he is recording. 1 recommender We the People Jill Lepore The Constitution treated not as settled scripture but as a two-century argument Americans are still having. 1 recommender We Were Never Here Andrea Bartz For the second year running, a friend's holiday ends with a body and an explanation, and the other one starts to wonder. 1 recommender We Were the Mulvaneys Joyce Carol Oates Joyce Carol Oates chronicles the slow unraveling of a golden American family after an assault on its daughter. 1 recommender We Will Be Jaguars Nemonte Nenquimo, Mitch Anderson The Waorani leader who won a landmark case against oil drilling, on growing up in the Amazon and organising against it. 1 recommender Weep, Shudder, Die: On Opera and Poetry Dana Gioia Gioia on opera and poetry, including the claim that Sweeney Todd is a great American opera. 1 recommender Wellness Nathan Hill Nathan Hill's novel follows a Chicago couple from their romantic youth into the disappointments and self-deceptions of middle age. 1 recommender West of Eden Jean Stein Five Los Angeles dynasties, told in overlapping voices by the people who watched them come apart. 1 recommender Western Muslims and the Future of Islam Tariq Ramadan Western Muslims as citizens rather than a diaspora, argued through the classical legal categories. What Are Children For?: On Ambivalence and Choice Anastasia Berg Whether to have children, treated as a genuine question rather than a settled preference. 1 recommender What Do We Know Mary Oliver Ponds, owls and the discipline of noticing, in the Oliver collection most openly concerned with what the noticing was for. 1 recommender What Everyone Needs to Know about Islam John L. Esposito Plain answers to the questions people actually ask, without apology or lecture. What Got You Here Won’t Get You There Marshall Goldsmith At the top, what stops people is rarely a missing skill. It is a habit that was survivable lower down. 1 recommender What Happened to You? Bruce D. Perry, Oprah Winfrey A conversation between Oprah and neuroscientist Bruce Perry that reframes trauma by asking not what is wrong with you, but what happened to you. What I Know for Sure Oprah Winfrey Two decades of Oprah’s “What I Know for Sure” reflections on clarity, gratitude, awe, and resilience, gathered into short essays. What It Takes Stephen A. Schwarzman The Blackstone co-founder on building one of the world's largest investment firms. 1 recommender What It Takes to Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World Prentis Hemphill A somatics teacher who worked with Black Lives Matter argues that political change and personal healing are one process, and is specific about what fear does to a body. 1 recommender What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day Pearl Cleage Pearl Cleage's novel follows an HIV-positive woman who returns to her small Michigan hometown and slowly rebuilds a life. 1 recommender What the Dog Saw Malcolm Gladwell Hair dye, ketchup, and the man who could calm any dog: the New Yorker pieces Gladwell wanted kept. What We Can Know Ian McEwan From a drowned future, scholars piece together our present, and find how little of a life survives the reconstruction. 1 recommender What We Owe the Future William MacAskill The case for longtermism: because vast numbers of people may yet live, positively influencing the long-run future is a key moral priority now. 1 recommender What’s Your Problem? Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg A method for reframing problems, on the premise that most teams solve the wrong one well. 1 recommender