Books

Mountains Beyond Mountains Tracy Kidder A doctor who believed the poor deserve the best medical care, and spent his life showing it could be delivered. 1 recommender Mozart the Performer: Variations on the Showman’s Art Dorian Bandy Mozart was a showman before he was a composer, and the performing shaped everything he wrote. 1 recommender Mr. Lear: A Life of Art and Nonsense Jenny Uglow Before the nonsense verse, Lear painted parrots at twenty and hid his epilepsy for life. Uglow gives the ornithologist and the limerick-writer equal standing. 1 recommender Mr. Putin Fiona Hill, Clifford G. Gaddy Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy’s analytical portrait of Vladimir Putin through the identities that shape how he rules. 1 recommender Mrs. Dalloway Virginia Woolf One June day in London, a party being planned and a war still going off in someone's head. 1 recommender Mrs. Nixon Ann Beattie A novelist circles Pat Nixon, admits she cannot reach her, and writes that as the book. 1 recommender Mural Mahmoud Darwish The long poem Darwish wrote after a near-fatal heart operation, translated by Rema Hammami and John Berger. 1 recommender Murder of a Medici Princess Caroline P Murphy 1 recommender Music for Chameleons Truman Capote Late Capote: stories, a novella and a day spent with Marilyn Monroe. 1 recommender Music of Exile: The Untold Story of the Composers who Fled Hitler Michael Haas Some reached Hollywood, some reached nowhere, and some never recovered the reputation the interruption cost them. What became of the composers Hitler drove out. 1 recommender Mustang Sally Edward Allen A tenured English professor blunders through campus orthodoxy and a Nevada brothel, in that order. 1 recommender Mutants Armand Marie Leroi What developmental abnormalities reveal about how bodies are built, written about the people rather than the conditions. 1 recommender My Antonia Willa Cather A Bohemian immigrant girl on the Nebraska prairie, remembered by the boy who never quite had her. 2 recommenders My Booky Wook Russell Brand Addiction, expulsion and early stand-up, written in the ornate register that became his trademark. My Dearest Enemy, My Dangerous Friend Dorothy Rowe Why our brothers and sisters can be our closest allies and our fiercest rivals, sometimes both at once. My Face for the World to See Alfred Hayes He pulls a stranger from the surf, and the rescue quietly dismantles the life he had. 2 recommenders My Father Was a Freedom Fighter Ramzy Baroud One family from a village lost in 1948 into a Gaza refugee camp, following his father through it. My Friend the Mercenary James Brabazon 1 recommender My Friends Fredrik Backman A young woman searching for the story behind a painting uncovers the summer, twenty-five years earlier, that bound four teenagers together. My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry Fredrik Backman A precocious seven-year-old delivers her late grandmother's letters of apology around her apartment building, and discovers who her neighbors really are. My Great Predecessors, Part I Garry Kasparov The first volume of Kasparov's acclaimed history of the world chess champions, analyzing the games and careers of the early greats from Steinitz onward. My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness Adina Hoffman A biography of the poet Taha Muhammad Ali, and of the Palestinians who remained inside Israel after 1948. 1 recommender My Heart Is My Own John Guy Guy re-examined the physical Casket Letters rather than the transcripts, and argues Mary was framed. 1 recommender My Journeys in Economic Theory Edmund Phelps A Nobel laureate's memoir, as interested in Rawls and Italian opera as in the Phillips curve. 1 recommender My Life Leon Trotsky Written in exile in 1930, covering a childhood in Ukraine, the revolution, and the loss of the struggle with Stalin. 1 recommender My Life on the Road Gloria Steinem The feminist icon's memoir of a life spent traveling and organizing, and the road-learned lessons about listening, movement-building, and her mother that shaped her. 1 recommender My Nine Lives: A Memoir of Many Careers in Music Leon Fleisher A concert pianist lost the use of his right hand at thirty-six and built four decades of career around it. 1 recommender My Other Heart Emma Nanami Strenner A child vanishes on the way home to Vietnam, and two girls spend years working out who they actually are. 1 recommender My Own Country Abraham Verghese A young physician's account of treating early AIDS patients in a small eastern Tennessee town in the 1980s. My Remarkable Journey Larry King King's candid memoir, from a poor Brooklyn boyhood as Larry Zeiger to America's most famous microphone, told in his conversational broadcast voice. My Struggle Karl Ove Knausgaard Book 1 of Karl Ove Knausgård's six-book autobiographical novel series, translated by Don Bartlett and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2013. 2 recommenders My Very Own Special Particular Private and Personal Cat Sandol Stoddard A child lays claim to a cat through an escalating series of adjectives, and the cat declines to acknowledge any of them. 1 recommender My View of the World Erwin Schrodinger Two long essays written thirty-five years apart, in which a Nobel physicist asks why there appears to be only one world when billions of observers are looking. 1 recommender Mysticism and Dissent: Socioreligious Dissent in Qajar Iran Mangol Bayat Shaykhism, Babism and the emergence of the Bahai faith, traced through the heterodox currents running under nineteenth-century Iran and the dissent that followed. 1 recommender Myth America Kevin M. Kruse, Julian E. Zelizer Historians debunk enduring myths about the American past. 1 recommender N by E Rockwell Kent A painter sails a small boat to Greenland in 1929, wrecks it, and stays. Illustrated throughout with his own woodcuts, written as starkly as he drew. 1 recommender