Books

Wireheads: An Unnatural History of Technology in the Brain Mike Jay Two centuries of trying to reach the brain directly, from electrodes to deep brain stimulation, alongside the science fiction that kept arriving there first. 1 recommender Wise Blood Flannery O'Connor A veteran founds the Church Without Christ and finds he cannot preach his way out of belief. 1 recommender Wise Guy Guy Kawasaki Part memoir, part life lessons, Kawasaki tells the stories behind his unlikely career, from Apple to venture capital, and the ideas about grace and growth he drew from each. With the Old Breed E.B. Sledge A mortarman at Peleliu and Okinawa, writing without a shred of the gloss usually applied to that war 1 recommender Within These Wicked Walls Lauren Blackwood A young exorcist takes the one job nobody else will, cleansing a haunted castle, in an Ethiopian-inspired Jane Eyre. 1 recommender Without Lying Down Cari Beauchamp The highest-paid screenwriter in Hollywood was a woman, and the industry forgot on purpose. 1 recommender Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women Jane Hirshfield Forty-three centuries of sacred poetry by women, from Sumerian temple hymns through Mirabai and Rabia, in the anthology that made much of it visible in English. 1 recommender Women Who Run With the Wolves Clarissa Pinkola Estes A Jungian analyst reads myths and folk tales to recover what she calls the Wild Woman archetype. 1 recommender Women, Race & Class Angela Davis Where the abolitionist and suffrage movements broke along race and class, and who paid for it. Wonderful Tonight Pattie Boyd The model and muse behind "Something" and "Layla" tells her own story of life at the center of rock and roll. 1 recommender Wooden on Leadership John Wooden, Steve Jamison The legendary UCLA coach lays out the Pyramid of Success and the daily habits behind ten championships. 1 recommender Words of Radiance Brandon Sanderson Shallan hunts a lost ancient city and Kaladin weighs what it costs to protect people he has every reason to hate. World Order Henry Kissinger Kissinger examines how different civilizations have conceived of world order, and why a shared international system is so hard to sustain. 1 recommender World Orders Old and New Noam Chomsky The Cold War ends and a new world order is announced, and Chomsky argues almost nothing underneath it has actually changed. World Travel Anthony Bourdain, Laurie Woolever Assembled by his longtime assistant after his death, a guide to the places Bourdain loved, in his own words where he left them. Worth the Risk Allison Schrager An economist on the seven ways people misprice risk, and why refusing to take any is itself a cost nobody counts. 1 recommender Write Useful Books Rob Fitzpatrick Non-fiction treated as a product with users: recruit testers, watch where they stall, rewrite until it works. 1 recommender Writers & Lovers Lily King The unglamorous middle of a writing life: debt, grief, and a novel nobody believes in any more. 1 recommender Written in Water: The Ephemeral Life of the Classic in Art Rochelle Gurstein If nothing is a classic, art cannot challenge anyone, which is the problem Gurstein sets out. 1 recommender Wrong Place, Wrong Time Gillian McAllister A mother sees her son commit murder, then wakes each day further back in time, hunting the moment that caused it. 1 recommender Wyatt Earp Casey Tefertiller The definitive life of a man Hollywood rescued from a reputation he had largely earned. 1 recommender Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859-1877 Richard Franklin Bensel The American central state was not built in Washington. It was built by the Civil War, on both sides. 1 recommender Year of Wonders Geraldine Brooks A Derbyshire village quarantines itself against the plague, and a housemaid becomes its unlikely healer. 1 recommender Year of Yes Shonda Rhimes The Shondaland creator's year of saying yes to everything that scared her, and the funny, candid reckoning with anxiety and overwork that followed. Yearbook Seth Rogen Rogen's first book: true, frequently absurd stories from a life spent getting high, getting famous, and embarrassing himself at both. Yellowface R. F. Kuang A failed novelist steals her dead friend's manuscript and publishes it as her own, then explains why she was right to. 1 recommender Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything Viktor E. Frankl Eleven months out of the camps, Frankl told a Vienna audience why life remains worth living. The lectures were then lost for seventy years and only recently recovered. 1 recommender Yes! Noah J. Goldstein, Steve J. Martin, Robert B. Cialdini Fifty short, evidence-backed tactics for getting people to agree, from the team behind Influence. 1 recommender Yoko: A Biography David Sheff The woman blamed for breaking up the Beatles, taken seriously as an artist in her own right. 1 recommender You Can Negotiate Anything Herb Cohen The terms you live with are usually the ones you never thought to question. A classic on treating that as fixable. 1 recommender You Can’t Win Jack Black A burglar and hobo's frank memoir of the American underworld, a cult classic that shaped William S. Burroughs. 1 recommender You Don’t Have to Be a Shark Robert Herjavec A case that selling is a learnable life skill, not a shark's instinct: persuasion as understanding what people want and helping them get it. You Have a Match Emma Lord A DNA test turns up the older sister nobody mentioned, and the two end up at the same summer camp. 1 recommender You Look Like a Thing and I Love You Janelle Shane AI explained through its funniest failures, because each one shows precisely where the understanding stops. 1 recommender You Should See Me in a Crown Leah Johnson A scholarship depends on winning prom queen, a contest a poor, Black, queer honour student has every reason to dread. 1 recommender You Think It, I’ll Say It Curtis Sittenfeld Ten stories about people confidently misjudging each other, from a writer with a merciless eye for self-deception. 1 recommender