Books

Southern Europe in the Age of Revolutions Maurizio Isabella The 1820s revolutions in Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece, treated as one connected movement. 1 recommender Southern Honor Bertram Wyatt-Brown Why men in the antebellum South were prepared to kill over an insult, taken seriously as a system. 1 recommender Speak to Win Brian Tracy Tracy spent decades on stage before writing this. Public speaking treated as a learnable mechanic rather than a nerve to be conquered. Spectacular Things Beck Dorey-Stein One sister is bound for the national football team; the other has spent her life making that possible. 1 recommender Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History From the Puritans to Donald Trump Molly Worthen American history retold through charisma, from Puritan preachers to Trump, with technology mattering less than expected. 1 recommender Spiritual Enlightenment Jed McKenna A blunt, iconoclastic book stripping spirituality of comfort and dogma, presenting enlightenment as seeing through illusion rather than achieving bliss. 1 recommender Stag Dance Torrey Peters A novel and three stories about desire and transition, including one set in a logging camp. 1 recommender Stalactite & Stalagmite: A Big Tale from a Little Cave Drew Beckmeyer Two rock formations grow toward each other across geological time. It is a love story and an honest account of cave formation, and the romance takes a hundred thousand years. 1 recommender Standard Deviation Katherine Heiny A husband, his exhaustingly charming second wife, his first wife, and a club of origami obsessives. 1 recommender Starling House Alix E. Harrow In a dying Kentucky coal town, a woman takes a cleaning job at the cursed house everyone else avoids. 1 recommender Starry Messenger Neil deGrasse Tyson What the view from space does to earthbound arguments: Tyson turns the cosmic lens on politics, war, race and truth Starship Troopers Robert A. Heinlein Powered armour and interstellar war, wrapped around an argument about who has earned the vote. 1 recommender Starsight Brandon Sanderson Spensa goes undercover among the very aliens who have been bombing her people, and finds the enemy is not what she was told. Start With Why Simon Sinek People don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it: the Golden Circle idea that launched a thousand mission statements Steelheart Brandon Sanderson Ordinary people woke up with superpowers and promptly became tyrants. David saw Steelheart bleed once, and has spent his life planning to make it happen again. Steve Jobs Walter Isaacson Built from over forty interviews with Jobs himself, an unsparing portrait of the genius and the cruelty in equal measure Still Born Guadalupe Nettel Two friends who swore off motherhood, and a novel that refuses to resolve the ambivalence. 1 recommender Still Lives Maria Hummel An artist who paints murdered women vanishes on her opening night, in a mystery with the art world's appetites in its sights. 1 recommender Stillness Is the Key Ryan Holiday The scarce resource is not information but the stillness to think, and it is harder than it sounds. Stinger Robert R. McCammon A dying Texas border town is sealed inside an alien sphere, with a relentless bounty hunter loose in its streets. 1 recommender Stolen Lives Malika Oufkir Malika Oufkir's memoir recounts twenty years her family spent imprisoned in the Moroccan desert after her father's failed coup. 1 recommender Stone Mattress Margaret Atwood Nine tales about people old enough to have outlived their own reputations, and what they decide to do about it. Stones from the River Ursula Hegi Ursula Hegi's novel follows a dwarf named Trudi through a German town across both world wars, watching neighbors turn toward Nazism. 1 recommender Storm of Steel Ernst Junger The First World War told by a German officer who found it terrible and, disconcertingly, exhilarating 1 recommender Storyworthy Matthew Dicks A champion storyteller's method for finding and telling the small, true stories hidden in ordinary life. 1 recommender Straight Talk, No Chaser Steve Harvey Harvey's follow-up field guide for finding, keeping, and reading a man, expanding his blunt, comic, man-explaining-men advice to every relationship stage. Strange Stability: How Cold War Scientists Set Out to Control the Arms Race and Ended up Serving the Military-Industrial Complex Benjamin Wilson Cold War scientists set out to control the arms race and were absorbed by the system they meant to restrain. 1 recommender Strange Weather in Tokyo Hiromi Kawakami A woman in her thirties keeps running into her old schoolteacher at the same bar, and neither hurries. 1 recommender Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel Edwin Frank The NYRB Classics editor reads the century through thirty-odd novels, from Machado de Assis to Perec, arguing the form kept reinventing what it could be. 1 recommender Strata: Stories from Deep Time Laura Poppick Poppick reads Earth history out of rock layers, oxygen and mass extinction, making deep time legible rather than merely enormous, without leaving the field work out. 1 recommender Stravinsky: The Second Exile, France and America 1934-1971 Stephen Walsh Stravinsky from the flight to France through Hollywood, in what may be the best life of him. 1 recommender Stride Toward Freedom Martin Luther King Jr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s account of the Montgomery bus boycott. 1 recommender Strong Ground Brené Brown Brené Brown returns to the research on courage and connection, mapping how we stay grounded and lead with integrity when everything around us feels unstable. 1 recommender Stumbling on Happiness Daniel Gilbert We are reliably wrong about what will make us happy, and the imagination doing the predicting never admits it. 1 recommender Success Is a Journey Brian Tracy The closest Tracy comes to memoir, built around the overland trek across Africa he made in his twenties with almost no money. Such a Fun Age Kiley Reid A babysitter is accused of kidnapping the child she cares for, and the people rushing to help have their own reasons. 1 recommender