Books

Unconditional Parenting Alfie Kohn A challenge to the rewards and punishments at the heart of parenting advice: praise, stickers and time-outs teach children to chase approval. 1 recommender Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy Henry Farrell America turned the plumbing of the world economy into a weapon, and most countries only noticed afterwards. 1 recommender Understanding Ethiopia’s Tigray War Martin Plaut The deadliest war of recent years killed hundreds of thousands and barely reached the news. 1 recommender Understanding Power Noam Chomsky Decades of unscripted talks, footnoted so every claim can be checked. The accessible way in. Understanding Salafism Yasir Qadhi A scholar from inside the tradition separates Salafism as a method of reading scripture from the politics attached to its name. Underworld Don DeLillo A baseball from the 1951 pennant game passes through fifty years of American paranoia. 1 recommender Unflinching Jody Mitic A sniper loses both feet to a landmine in Afghanistan, and the harder story starts there 1 recommender Universal Women Mark Garrett Cooper Eleven women directed 170 films at Universal before 1920, then the doors closed. 1 recommender Unlimited Power Tony Robbins Robbins's first book: the belief and physiology of peak performers, reverse-engineered into steps you can copy Unscripted MJ DeMarco DeMarco's blunt manifesto against the school-job-debt-retire script, arguing a purpose-driven business is how you rewrite a life engineered for mediocrity. Unshakeable Tony Robbins A shorter, sharper sequel: how to stay invested and calm through the market crashes that wreck most people Unstoppable Maria Sharapova Sharapova's candid memoir of her rise from a Siberian town to tennis stardom, the loneliness, the Serena rivalry, and the doping ban that upended it. Untamed Glennon Doyle Doyle on leaving a marriage, meeting her wife, and unlearning the training that teaches women to distrust what they want. 1 recommender Unto This Last John Ruskin Four essays that got Ruskin dropped by his magazine for arguing an economy answers to justice, not efficiency 1 recommender Up at the Villa W. Somerset Maugham An English widow in a Florentine villa performs one impulsive act of charity and spends the night disposing of the consequences. Maugham at his most economical. 1 recommender Upstream: Selected Essays Mary Oliver Oliver on attention, solitude, and the three selves competing inside any working artist. Quieter than the poems, and considerably more explicit about how the work gets done. 1 recommender Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier Robert Fishman Garden suburb, rural dispersal, tower and park: three plans to abolish the industrial city, taken seriously as social theory and followed through to what got built. 1 recommender Use What You’ve Got, and Other Business Lessons I Learned from My Mom Barbara Corcoran, Bruce Littlefield Corcoran turns her mother's homespun wisdom into street-smart business lessons, tracing her rise from waitress to real-estate mogul. V13 Emmanuel Carrère Ten months in court with the survivors and the accused of the Bataclan attacks. 1 recommender Valentine Elizabeth Wetmore A girl walks to a farmhouse at dawn, and the women of an oil-boom town must decide what to say. 1 recommender Vanderbilt Anderson Cooper, Katherine Howe Cooper tells his own family's story: how the Vanderbilts built the greatest fortune in America and then, generation by generation, spent it all away. Viacheslav Ivanov: A Symbolist Life Michael Wachtel The forgotten poet at the centre of Russia's Silver Age, and the circle that gathered in his tower. 1 recommender Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World Richard Cockett Freud, Popper, Hayek, Wittgenstein and Mahler came out of one city in about one generation. 1 recommender Villa and Zapata: A History of the Mexican Revolution Frank McLynn Two peasant armies, two very different revolutionaries, and the decade of chaos that made modern Mexico. 1 recommender Vinegar Hill A. Manette Ansay A. Manette Ansay's novel traps a 1970s wife and mother in her in-laws' cold, oppressive Wisconsin house. 1 recommender Waiting for the Barbarians J.M. Coetzee A magistrate on the frontier of an unnamed empire discovers that decency costs more than he is willing to pay. 1 recommender Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography Tom Arnold-Forster He coined stereotype and the Cold War, argued the public could not govern itself, and shaped American liberalism for fifty years. His questions have returned. 1 recommender War and Peace Leo Tolstoy Five families through Napoleon's invasion, plus several hundred pages arguing with historians. 1 recommender War by Other Means: The Pacifists of the Greatest Generation Who Revolutionized Resistance Daniel Akst The American pacifists who refused the Second World War and invented the tactics of the 1960s. 1 recommender War Doctor David Nott A surgeon who spent decades volunteering in the world's most dangerous war zones, operating in bombed hospitals with almost nothing. 1 recommender Warbreaker Brandon Sanderson In a kingdom where colour is power and the dead return as gods, a princess is sent as a bride to the god-king she was raised to fear. Warrior Race Imran Khan Into the mountains and valleys of the Pathans, the frontier people from whom Imran Khan's own family descends. WASPs Vera S. Williams The women who ferried bombers across America in wartime, and waited fifty years to be called veterans. 1 recommender Waste Books Georg Christoph Lichtenberg An eighteenth-century physicist's private notebooks, which turn out to read like the sharpest feed you have ever scrolled. 1 recommender Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey Through Britain Roger Deakin Deakin swam moats, tarns, estuaries and the sea off Scilly, and founded a movement almost by accident. Part travelogue, part argument that water is the last commons. 1 recommender Way of the Warrior Kid Jocko Willink Marc dreads fifth grade until his SEAL uncle arrives for the summer with a plan and no sympathy.