Books

Before We Were Innocent Ella Berman Two women were acquitted of a friend's death in Greece a decade ago, and the press never let it go. Now one has come back. 1 recommender Behind the Beautiful Forevers Katherine Boo A boy who makes his living sorting the airport slum's garbage, reported over three years with nothing invented. 1 recommender Behind the Cloud Marc Benioff, Carlye Adler Benioff's playbook of 111 plays for building Salesforce, from a rented apartment to an enterprise giant. 1 recommender Behold the Dreamers Imbolo Mbue Imbolo Mbue's novel follows a Cameroonian immigrant family in New York whose fortunes tangle with a Lehman Brothers executive during the crash. 1 recommender Behold, America Sarah Churchwell The surprising and troubling history of two phrases, America First and the American Dream. Beijing Coma Ma Jian Ma Jian's 2008 novel of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, narrated by a man left in a coma, translated by Flora Drew. Bel-Ami Guy de Maupassant A charming provincial nobody climbs Parisian society on other people's wives and no talent at all. 1 recommender Belladonna Daša Drndić A retired Croatian psychologist sifts through illness, memory, the Second World War and the breakup of Yugoslavia. 1 recommender Beloved Toni Morrison A woman who escaped slavery is haunted, literally, by the daughter she killed to keep from being taken back. 2 recommenders Benjamin Franklin Walter Isaacson The printer, scientist and diplomat who invented the American character, told as the life of the country's first self-made man Berkshire Hathaway Letters to Shareholders Warren Buffett The collected annual letters of Warren Buffett, chronicling decades of Berkshire Hathaway and his investing philosophy in his own words. Best Evidence David S. Lifton A controversial best-selling investigation of the JFK assassination, arguing the medical evidence was altered between Dallas and the autopsy. 1 recommender Betsy and the Great World Maud Hart Lovelace A young writer sails for Europe in 1914 to gather material, and finds rather more than planned. 1 recommender Between Meals A. J. Liebling Liebling on eating in 1920s Paris as a young man on an allowance, and on the appetite required to do it properly. 1 recommender Between the World and Me Ta-Nehisi Coates Written as a letter to his teenage son, Coates's National Book Award winner reckons with what it means to inhabit a Black body in America, and the history written on it. 1 recommender Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions Batja Mesquita Emotions as something built between people rather than felt inside one, and why that makes them culturally specific. 1 recommender Beware of Pity Stefan Zweig A young officer's pity for a disabled girl leads him into promises he cannot keep. 1 recommender Bewilderment Richard Powers Richard Powers's novel follows an astrobiologist raising his grieving, troubled young son as he searches the stars and struggles to save the boy. 1 recommender Beyond Belief Nir Eyal The author of Indistractable turns to the beliefs we hold about ourselves, arguing that the stories we tell quietly set the ceiling on what we attempt. 1 recommender Beyond Fear Dorothy Rowe A psychologist's account of how fear shapes our lives and the defences we build against it. Beyond Fundamentalism Reza Aslan Extremism recast as a global habit of mind rather than an Islamic problem: what happens when politics gets rewritten as a cosmic war. Beyond Psychology Otto Rank Freud most gifted heir walks away from the discipline entirely, arguing that people need myth and art rather than any explanation. 1 recommender Beyond the Pleasure Principle Sigmund Freud The late essay where Freud concedes something in us pulls the other way from pleasure. 1 recommender Beyond Wealth Alexander Green An investment writer steps away from markets to ask what money is actually for, in short reflective essays. 1 recommender Bienville’s Dilemma: A Historical Geography of New Orleans Richard Campanella New Orleans is built somewhere no one should build a city, and this explains why they did. 1 recommender Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature Dan Sinykin American publishing was bought up by conglomerates, and it changed what novels got written. 1 recommender Big Mistakes: The Best Investors and Their Worst Investments Michael Batnick The worst trades of the greatest investors, and why losing is the fee rather than the verdict. Big Wolf & Little Wolf: The Little Leaf That Wouldn’t Fall Nadine Brun-Cosme A leaf refuses to fall, and two wolves wait. Brun-Cosme and Tallec say something patient and unsentimental about worry, and about the shape that care takes. 1 recommender Bill Moyers: A World of Ideas Bill Moyers Moyers sat down with Asimov, Chomsky, Achebe and Tuchman in 1988, at a length and seriousness American broadcast television has not attempted since. 1 recommender Binti Nnedi Okorafor Nnedi Okorafor's Hugo and Nebula winning novella about a Himba girl who leaves Earth for an intergalactic university, from Tor.com. 1 recommender Birds and Poets John Burroughs The most widely read naturalist of his era moves between close observation of birds and essays on Whitman and Emerson, at an unhurried pace that still holds. 1 recommender Birdsong Sebastian Faulks The Somme from above and the tunnellers below it, listening in the dark for the enemy digging back. 1 recommender Bittersweet Susan Cain Susan Cain's book makes the case that sorrow and longing, not just positivity, are a source of creativity and connection. 1 recommender Black Ambrosia Elizabeth Engstrom A teenage drifter crossing the emptied Midwest, narrating what she needs and how she takes it. 1 recommender Black and Blue Anna Quindlen Anna Quindlen's novel follows a battered wife who flees with her son and tries to build a hidden new life under a false name. 1 recommender Black Buck Mateo Askaripour A satire of startup salesmanship, delivered as a how-to manual that gets more savage as it goes. 1 recommender