Books

The Beginning of Infinity David Deutsch Physicist David Deutsch argues that good explanations have unlimited reach and drive endless human progress. 1 recommender The Beginning of Spring Penelope Fitzgerald Moscow, 1913: a printer's English wife leaves him, and nobody quite explains anything. 1 recommender The Belly Art Project Sara Blakely Spanx founder Sara Blakely's photo collection turns pregnant bellies into painted canvases, celebrating motherhood with warmth, humor, and a movement-builder's eye. The Best of all Possible Worlds: A Life of Leibniz in Seven Pivotal Days Michael Kempe Seven particular days, taking in binary arithmetic, the calculus dispute, epidemic-control proposals and mining engineering, instead of one continuous Leibniz life. 1 recommender The Better Angels of Our Nature Steven Pinker Pinker marshals sweeping data to argue that violence has fallen dramatically across human history. 2 recommenders The Big Short Michael Lewis The few investors who saw the mortgage collapse coming, and what it cost them to be right before anyone believed it. The Black Stallion Walter Farley A shipwrecked boy and an untamed Arabian survive a desert island together, then have to survive coming home. 1 recommender The Black Swan Nassim Nicholas Taleb Taleb's influential examination of rare, high-impact events and our blindness to them. 1 recommender The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England Jonathan Healey Seventeenth-century England executed its king, abolished the monarchy, and then quietly invited it all back. 1 recommender The Blind Assassin Margaret Atwood A novel inside a novel inside a scandal: an old woman unspools her sister's death and the story they hid. Booker winner The Blood in Winter: England on the Brink of Civil War, 1642 Jonathan Healey The months in which England stopped arguing and started killing, reconstructed almost day by day. 1 recommender The Bluest Eye Toni Morrison Toni Morrison's first novel follows a young Black girl in 1940s Ohio who longs for blue eyes, believing they would make her loved. 3 recommenders The Bomber Mafia Malcolm Gladwell A circle of airmen believed precision bombing could make war humane. Tokyo, March 1945, answered them. The Book Against Death Elias Canetti Canetti spent fifty years refusing to accept mortality as wisdom, and the fragments assembled after his own death are furious, funny and entirely unreconciled. 1 recommender The Book of a Naturalist W. H. Hudson Raised on the Argentine pampas, Hudson observed with a scientist precision and wrote with a poet attachment. This 1919 collection ranges across birds, snakes and memory. 1 recommender The Book of Beautiful Questions Warren Berger Warren Berger makes the case that better questions lead to better decisions, and offers a toolkit of them for thinking, creating, and leading. 1 recommender The Book of Disquiet Fernando Pessoa A trunk of fragments left by a Lisbon bookkeeper who never existed, assembled after Pessoa died into a book with no plot that is somehow impossible to put down. 1 recommender The Book of Elsewhere Keanu Reeves, China Miéville Keanu Reeves and China Miéville's novel of an 80,000-year-old immortal warrior who longs to die, pulp action lifted into meditative literary fantasy. The Book of Five Rings Miyamoto Musashi The legendary undefeated samurai’s treatise on strategy, combat, and mastery, read for centuries as a guide to excellence in any discipline. 2 recommenders The Book of Imaginary Beings Jorge Luis Borges Borges's bestiary of creatures dreamed up across world literature and myth, catalogued with deadpan erudition. 1 recommender The Book of Ruth Jane Hamilton Jane Hamilton's debut narrates the hard life of a young woman in a small Illinois town, building toward a shattering act of violence. 1 recommender The Book of Three Lloyd Alexander An assistant pig-keeper is swept into a war for Prydain in the opening book of Lloyd Alexander's beloved fantasy series. 1 recommender The Boom in Spanish American Literature: A Personal History The Boom in Spanish American Literature: A Personal History Jose Donoso A novelist's memoir of the moment Latin American fiction took over the world, written from inside it. 1 recommender The Brothers Grimm: A Biography Ann Schmiesing The Grimms collected their fairy tales mostly as a by-product of inventing modern German philology. 1 recommender The Buffalo Hunter Hunter Stephen Graham Jones A pastor's journal, a Blackfeet vampire's confession, and the history of the American West doing the haunting. 1 recommender The Bully Pulpit Doris Kearns Goodwin Roosevelt, Taft, and the muckraking journalists who together drove the Progressive era. 1 recommender The Burhān Mohammed Hijab A step-by-step argument for a necessary being, drawing on Islamic thought. The Cactus Sarah Haywood A rigidly self-sufficient woman at forty-five faces a contested will and an unplanned pregnancy in the same week. 1 recommender The Call of the Tribe Mario Vargas Llosa A novelist's account of the seven liberal thinkers who turned him away from the left. 1 recommender The Cancer Journals Audre Lorde Lorde on her diagnosis, her mastectomy, and her refusal of the prosthesis she was expected to wear, insisting throughout that silence about illness is a political act. The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money Bryan Caplan Employers pay for the credential rather than the algebra. Caplan follows the signalling evidence to conclusions about public funding that few readers accept whole. The Case Against Socialism Rand Paul Paul's one-sided brief marshaling history and economics, from Venezuela to the Nordics, to argue that socialism trends toward scarcity, coercion, and lost freedom. The Case of Ireland: Commerce, Empire and the European Order, 1750-1848 James Stafford Ireland argued its way into the Union on commercial grounds, and this recovers those arguments. 1 recommender The Casual Vacancy J.K. Rowling Rowling's first novel for adults: when a parish councilman dies suddenly, a small English town's genteel surface cracks open to reveal class resentment, addiction, and quiet cruelty. The Checklist Manifesto Atul Gawande Surgeon Atul Gawande shows how a tool as humble as a checklist can prevent catastrophic mistakes in medicine, aviation, and business, where expertise alone isn't enough. 1 recommender The Cherokees in War & at Peace 1670-1840 David Narrett A century and a half of Cherokee diplomacy, warfare and forced removal, told with the Cherokee as political actors negotiating among empires rather than as victims of history. 1 recommender