Books

The Man Who Came Uptown George Pelecanos A prison librarian, a man just released, and the favour he owes to the wrong person. 1 recommender The Man Without a Face Masha Gessen Masha Gessen’s account of Vladimir Putin’s rise from KGB officer to unchallenged ruler of Russia. 1 recommender The MANIAC Benjamin Labatut Von Neumann rendered as fiction, then handed over to AlphaGo and what came after. 1 recommender The Many Lives of Mama Love Lara Love Hardin Lara Love Hardin's memoir traces her fall from suburban mother to jail for heroin-fueled theft, and her rise as a ghostwriter. 1 recommender The Marriage Portrait Maggie O'Farrell A Medici girl married at fifteen becomes certain her husband intends to kill her, in a novel drawn from a real death. 1 recommender The Mattering Instinct Rebecca Newberger Goldstein Goldstein argues the drive to matter is basic equipment rather than vanity, then follows what that implies for ethics, ambition, and how we justify ourselves. 1 recommender The Means of Escape Penelope Fitzgerald Her only story collection, assembled as she was dying, ranging from Tasmania to the supernatural. 1 recommender The Measure of a Man Sidney Poitier Sidney Poitier's memoir reflects on his journey from poverty in the Bahamas to Hollywood, and on the values that guided him. 1 recommender The Measure of Economies: Measuring Productivity in an Age of Technological Change Marshall B. Reinsdorf Productivity statistics were built for a different economy, and this is the technical case for fixing them. 1 recommender The Measure of Progress: Counting What Really Matters Diane Coyle Our economic statistics were designed for a world of factories, and they no longer see what matters. 1 recommender The Mighty Red Louise Erdrich A wedding in North Dakota farm country, and young lives shaped by land that may not survive them. 1 recommender The Millionaire Fastlane MJ DeMarco A blunt, contrarian rejection of get rich slow in favour of building businesses that create value and scale fast. 1 recommender The Mind of South Africa Allister Sparks Written in 1990 as apartheid ended and before anyone knew what followed, explaining how the system was built and believed in rather than only what it did. 1 recommender The Ministry for the Future Kim Stanley Robinson A UN body is created to represent people not yet born, and spends decades trying to force the world to act on climate. 1 recommender The Missing Morningstar and Other Stories Stacie Shannon Denetsosie A Navajo writer's debut collection, moving between the gritty, the tender and the strange. 1 recommender The Moment of Lift Melinda French Gates Gates makes the data-and-story case that empowering women, on contraception, education, and unpaid work, is the fastest way to lift a whole society. The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari Robin Sharma A burned-out lawyer sells everything for a Himalayan pilgrimage and returns with a fable about how to actually live The Most Fun We Ever Had Claire Lombardo Four adult sisters flounder in the shadow of parents whose marriage was so happy it became impossible to live up to. 1 recommender The Most Important Thing Howard Marks Oaktree's Howard Marks distills his investor memos into lessons on risk, cycles, and second-level thinking, the habits that separate good investors from the crowd. 1 recommender The Muqaddimah Ibn Khaldun The fourteenth-century work that founded social science, on the group solidarity that wins power and then decays into comfort. 1 recommender The Museum of Other People: From Colonial Acquisitions to Cosmopolitan Exhibitions Adam Kuper Ethnographic museums were built to display other people, and are now unsure what they are for. 1 recommender The Myth of Normal Gabor Maté, Daniel Maté Maté's synthesis: what we call normal in a stressful, disconnected culture is quietly making us sick, and healing begins by naming that. The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies Bryan Caplan Voters are not merely ignorant but wrong in predictable directions, and since one vote decides nothing, there is no personal cost to believing what feels good.