Books

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 Wade in the Water Tracy K. Smith Poems by a former US Poet Laureate on citizenship, motherhood and art, tied to America's founding history. 1 recommender Waiting for Anya Michael Morpurgo In occupied France, a shepherd boy helps smuggle Jewish children across the Pyrenees. Waiting for Daisy Peggy Orenstein A frank, funny memoir of cancer, infertility and one woman's determination to become a mother. 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 Wandering Memory Jan J. Dominique A stream-of-consciousness novel about a woman writer, her father, and the particular fear of migrants that they will forget everything. 1 recommender Want Gillian Anderson Gillian Anderson collects anonymous letters from women about their sexual fantasies, gathered through her Dear Gillian project. War and Peace Leo Tolstoy Five families through Napoleon's invasion, plus several hundred pages arguing with historians. 2 recommenders 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 Tristram Stuart A startling share of the world's food is thrown away. Stuart shows where, why and how to stop it. Waste and Want Susan Strasser Disposability had to be sold to people who were already expert at saving everything. 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 Watchmen Alan Moore Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's 1986 and 1987 DC Comics series set in an alternative history, collected in a 448-page edition. 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 Watership Down Richard Adams Richard Adams's debut novel, an adventure about a band of rabbits in southern England. 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. Way of the Warrior Kid 3 Jocko Willink A new kid, a harder year, and a lesson about the gap between wanting something and doing the work. Way of the Warrior Kid 4 Jocko Willink The workout, the reading list and the rules, pulled out of the stories and handed over directly. Way of the Warrior Kid 5 Jocko Willink Uncle Jake answers the letters kids actually send: about bullies, fear, and wanting to quit. We Gillian Anderson, Jennifer Nadel Gillian Anderson and Jennifer Nadel offer nine principles for a more meaningful life, written as the guide they wished they had had. We Are Displaced Malala Yousafzai Refugee girls telling their own displacement, turning a statistic back into specific interrupted lives. We Are Family LeBron James A middle-grade novel about a team falling apart, unpatronising about what young readers can handle. We Are Not Here to Be Bystanders Linda Sarsour Brooklyn to the Women's March, most interesting on the unglamorous mechanics of organising. We Must Not Think of Ourselves Lauren Grodstein Recruited in the Warsaw Ghetto to record testimony, while still living the life he is recording. 1 recommender We Saw Spain Die Paul Preston Hemingway, Gellhorn, Koestler and the other reporters who covered Spain's war and were changed by it. We the Media Dan Gillmor 1 recommender We the People Jill Lepore The Constitution treated not as settled scripture but as a two-century argument Americans are still having. 1 recommender We the Peoples Kofi Annan The Secretary-General's Nobel lecture, and the challenge to world leaders that became the Millennium Development Goals. 1 recommender We Were Never Here Andrea Bartz For the second year running, a friend's holiday ends with a body and an explanation, and the other one starts to wonder. 1 recommender