Books

Twilight of the Elites Chris Hayes Hayes argues that a decade of elite failure, from Iraq to the financial crisis, has broken public trust, and that meritocracy itself keeps producing the rot. Typhoid Mary Anthony Bourdain Bourdain the cook turns historian, following Mary Mallon, the Irish cook who spread typhoid across New York and was hunted for it. Uncivil Agreement Lilliana Mason Why American voters who agree on policy still distrust each other, and how party loyalty turned into a social identity. 1 recommender Uncle Rabbit & the Wax Doll Jonathan Amith A children's book in Nahuatl, Spanish and English, illustrated in a tradition most readers never encounter. 1 recommender Uncle Tom’s Cabin Harriet Beecher Stowe Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 anti-slavery novel, which changed how Americans saw slavery in the years before the Civil War. 1 recommender Uncle Vanya Anton Chekhov A country estate where everyone has given up their life for someone who never deserved it. 1 recommender Uncommon Genius Denise Shekerjian Interviews with MacArthur "genius" grant winners on where their best ideas actually came from. 1 recommender Uncommon Type Tom Hanks A collection of seventeen warm, humane short stories, each one visited somewhere by a typewriter, from Hollywood's most beloved everyman. 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 Under the Eye of the Big Bird Hiromi Kawakami A novel in linked episodes imagining humanity's long twilight, told across vast stretches of time by the artificial minds that watch over what is left of us. 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 Unraveling Peggy Orenstein A year spent making a sweater from the sheep up, and what it taught a journalist about life. Unreasonable Hospitality Will Guidara How the co-owner of Eleven Madison Park turned service into something closer to theatre, and why giving people more than they came for is a business strategy rather than a flourish. 1 recommender 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 Us Against You Fredrik Backman The second Beartown novel, as the town faces the loss of its hockey club and an ever more bitter rivalry with its neighbor, Hed. 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 Vichy France Robert Paxton 1 recommender Victoires et déboires Paul Bairoch A Belgian economic historian's panoramic history of the world economy since Columbus, in French. 1 recommender