Books

The End of Power Moisés Naím Power today is easier to get, harder to use and easier to lose, and Naim traces that shift across armies, parties, churches and firms. 1 recommender The English Patient Michael Ondaatje Four strangers in a bombed Italian villa, one of them burned beyond recognition and unwilling to say who he is. 1 recommender The Entrepreneur Roller Coaster Darren Hardy Written for the emotional reality of founding a company rather than its mechanics, and as preparation not encouragement. 1 recommender The Essays of Warren Buffett Warren Buffett Warren Buffett's shareholder-letter writings, arranged by theme into a readable guide to his thinking on business and investing. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine Ilan Pappé An Israeli historian arguing from Israel's own archives that 1948 followed a plan. The Everyday Hero Manifesto Robin Sharma Part memoir, part method: Sharma's framework for ordinary people to do heroic, generous work with their lives The Evolution of Everything Matt Ridley The case that morality, money and technology were never designed by anyone, and are better for it. 1 recommender The Executioner’s Song Norman Mailer Gary Gilmore demanded his own execution, and Mailer simply gets out of the way. 1 recommender The Eye of the World Robert Jordan An ancient evil stirs and three young villagers are swept into a struggle far larger than their village. The Wheel of Time begins. 1 recommender The Face of War Martha Gellhorn Sixty years of war reporting by a woman who stowed away in a hospital ship to reach D-Day. 1 recommender The Fall Guillermo del Toro, Chuck Hogan Book two: the vampiric infection has spread and civilization is buckling, as a ragged band of survivors takes the fight to the ancient master behind the plague. The Fall of Republics Thomas F. Madden What actually happens when a republic falls, traced from Carthage and Rome through Venice to the framers who studied them. 1 recommender The Feather Detective: Mystery, Mayhem, and the Magnificent Life of Roxie Laybourne Chris Sweeney Roxie Laybourne built forensic ornithology at the Smithsonian out of the fragments left when birds hit aircraft, reshaping aviation safety and solving crimes along the way. 1 recommender The Fellowship of the Ring J.R.R. Tolkien The hobbit Frodo Baggins inherits a ring of terrible power and must keep it from the Dark Lord who made it. 1 recommender The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams Philip Zaleski Four writers met in an Oxford pub for thirty years, and two of them invented modern fantasy. 1 recommender The Fire Is Upon Us Nicholas Buccola Two men argue the American dream at Cambridge in 1965, and neither ever really stops. 1 recommender The First King of England: Aethelstan and the Birth of a Kingdom David Woodman Alfred gets the fame, but it was his grandson who first ruled anything that could be called England. 1 recommender The Fish Can Sing Halldor Laxness An orphan raised in a turf cottage on the edge of Reykjavik meets Iceland's most famous singer. 1 recommender The Food of Southern Thailand Austin Bush Recipes, maps, photographs and history from a region whose cooking gets explained by its underlying logic rather than as a list of finished dishes. 1 recommender The Forever War Dexter Filkins Afghanistan and Iraq in fragments, by a reporter who kept going back until the fragments were the story. 1 recommender The Forgotten Highlander Alistair Urquhart Death Railway, then a torpedoed hellship, then Nagasaki. One man absorbed nearly every horror of the Pacific war 1 recommender The Forgotten Teachers: How Nature Wrote the Story of Life Brian Isett A neuroscientist and an artist trace the route from mitochondria to minds, treating evolution as a sequence of lessons rather than a ladder anyone was climbing. 1 recommender The Four Agreements Don Miguel Ruiz Drawing on Toltec wisdom, Ruiz distills a code for living into four agreements, be impeccable with your word, don't take things personally, don't assume, and always do your best. 2 recommenders The Four Heavens: A New History of the Ancient Maya David Stuart Stuart helped decipher Maya glyphs as a teenager. Here he turns decades of epigraphy into narrative history rather than another specialist monograph. 1 recommender The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive Patrick Lencioni A business fable following two CEOs, and the argument that what separates great leaders from good ones is disciplined obsession, not brilliance. 1 recommender The Four Steps to the Epiphany Steve Blank Startups rarely fail at building the product; they fail because nobody wanted it, and this is the process for finding out first. 1 recommender The Fourth Instinct Arianna Huffington Huffington argues that beyond survival, sex, and power lies a fourth instinct, the pull toward the spiritual, and that ignoring it leaves us hollow. The Friedkin Connection William Friedkin The director of The Exorcist and The French Connection on a career built at maximum risk. 1 recommender The Friends of Eddie Coyle George V. Higgins A small-time Boston gunrunner tries to talk his way out of prison, in a novel told almost entirely in dialogue. 1 recommender The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England Brandon Sanderson A man wakes in medieval England with no memory, armed only with a budget guidebook to dimensional tourism that may be lying to him. The Future of Freedom Fareed Zakaria Zakaria warns that elections alone don't make a country free, and that democracy without the rule of law and liberal institutions can curdle into a new kind of tyranny. The Future of Islam John L. Esposito What polling across Muslim-majority countries actually shows, versus what commentary assumes. The Gardener and the Carpenter Alison Gopnik Stop building the child to a plan. A developmental psychologist's case for tending conditions instead of engineering outcomes. 1 recommender The Gathering Storm Robert Jordan, Brandon Sanderson The first volume Sanderson completed from Robert Jordan's notes after his death, carrying the Wheel of Time toward its Last Battle. The Genesis Machine Amy Webb, Andrew Hessel A futurist's account of synthetic biology, the technology that lets us write life rather than read it. 1 recommender The German Historicist Tradition Frederick C. Beiser The German thinkers who decided history was the key to everything, and why almost nobody reads them now. 1 recommender