Books

Achieving Our Country Richard Rorty A 1998 warning that a disillusioned electorate would eventually reach for a strongman. 1 recommender Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man Steve Harvey Harvey's blockbuster insider's guide to how men really think about love, teaching women the rules men play by, from the ninety-day rule on. Act Like a Success, Think Like a Success Steve Harvey Harvey trades dating for ambition, arguing everyone has one defining gift, and drawing on his rise from homeless comedian to mogul to help you find yours. Advanced Selling Strategies Brian Tracy Not a beginner's book. The full professional system, built on military strategy, for people who already sell well and want to sell far better. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain Huck and the runaway Jim raft down the Mississippi in Twain's vernacular masterpiece on conscience, freedom, and the racism of the antebellum South. Aflame: Learning from Silence Pico Iyer A non-Christian has been going on retreat to a Benedictine hermitage above Big Sur for thirty years. This is what he found there about attention and loss. 1 recommender Africa in My Blood: An Autobiography in Letters Jane Goodall Letters from 1934 to 1966: the childhood ambition, the secretarial job that funded the passage, and the first Gombe seasons before anyone believed chimpanzees used tools. 1 recommender Africa: The Definitive Visual History of a Continent DK A visual history of Africa arranged by region rather than by the borders Europeans drew. 1 recommender After 1177 B.C.: The Survival of Civilizations Eric H. Cline The sequel question: after the Bronze Age collapse, why did some civilisations come back? 1 recommender After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan’s Memory Palace Robert Polito Bob Dylan's late career, read as closely as scripture by a critic who has plainly read everything. 1 recommender After the Nazis: The Story of Culture in West Germany Michael H. Kater Literature, film, music and art rebuilding after 1945 while carrying compromised figures and unexamined pasts, from Gruppe 47 through the New German Cinema. 1 recommender Against Interpretation Susan Sontag The argument that hunting for a work's hidden meaning is a way of avoiding the work itself. 1 recommender Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity Paul Kingsnorth An anti-technology argument from a former environmental activist who became a Christian and left the grid. 1 recommender Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics Between the World Wars Tara Zahra The backlash against globalisation is not new, and the 1920s version ended extremely badly. 1 recommender Age of Revolutions Fareed Zakaria Zakaria traces four centuries of upheaval, from the Dutch and industrial revolutions to today, to argue that eras of rapid progress reliably provoke fierce backlash. Alcatraz vs. the Evil Librarians Brandon Sanderson On his thirteenth birthday Alcatraz gets a bag of sand and learns the world is secretly run by a cult of librarians. His talent is breaking things. Alfred Schnittke Alexander Ivashkin The Soviet composer who spliced Baroque pastiche, serialism and film music into single works and called it polystylism, studied by the cellist who premiered him. 1 recommender Alias Grace Margaret Atwood A real 1843 double murder, reimagined: was the servant Grace Marks a monster, a victim, or something no one can name All About Love Bell Hooks Bell Hooks argues that love is an action rather than a feeling, and that we are taught almost nothing about how to do it. 2 recommenders All Adults Here Emma Straub One accident dislodges a memory, and a family starts reassessing what it thought it had agreed. 1 recommender All That Life Can Afford Emily Everett An American in London tutors a wealthy family's children while quietly editing her own background to fit in. 1 recommender All the Colors of the Dark Chris Whitaker Missouri, 1975: girls are vanishing, and one rescue starts an obsession that runs for decades. 1 recommender All the King’s Men Robert Penn Warren Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer-winning novel of populist demagogue Willie Stark and the corrupting machinery of political power. 2 recommenders All the Way to the River Elizabeth Gilbert Elizabeth Gilbert's memoir recounts her consuming love for her best friend Rayya Elias and Rayya's death from cancer. 1 recommender Allah Loves Omar Suleiman Reflections on the qualities and actions Islamic tradition describes as beloved to God. Alles Umsonst Walter Kempowski January 1945, and a Prussian estate fills with refugees while everyone keeps behaving as though the world still works. Published in English as All for Nothing. 1 recommender Allies at War: The Politics of Defeating Hitler Tim Bouverie The Second World War told as a coalition problem, in which the men who had to defeat Hitler spent much of it managing each other instead. 1 recommender Alphabet in Motion: How Letters Get Their Shape Kelli Anderson Two volumes of paper engineering, with pulleys and pop-ups that demonstrate how each letter reached its present shape rather than merely describing the process. 1 recommender Amazing Grace Adams Fran Littlewood She abandons the car in traffic and walks across London to a party she was not invited to. 1 recommender America (The Book) Jon Stewart The Daily Show’s mock civics textbook, skewering American democracy, media, and government with straight-faced satire. 1 recommender America’s Most Hated Woman Ann Rowe Seaman The atheist campaigner who took prayer out of US schools, and the men who murdered her. 1 recommender American Classicist: The Life and Loves of Edith Hamilton Victoria Houseman The woman who taught America to love Greece did her best work after turning sixty. 1 recommender American Dirt Jeanine Cummins A bookseller and her son flee Mexico for the US border after a cartel attack, in a novel that drew wide debate on release. 1 recommender American Grown Michelle Obama The White House garden as a way into a bigger argument about food, health and how communities feed themselves Amorous or Loving?: The Highly Peculiar Tale of English and Its Vocabulary Rupert Gavin Conquest, trade and printing left the language with two or three words for everything. Gavin reads that surplus as evidence about economics rather than as trivia. 1 recommender An American Hedge Fund Timothy Sykes Sykes recounts turning bar-mitzvah money into millions trading penny stocks from his dorm, a brash origin story and case study in high-risk speculation.