Must Read: 382 Popular Non Fiction Books

List Academy
August 10, 2021
September 20, 2023
Education

A People's Tragedy

A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891–1924 is a 1996 book by British historian Orlando Figes on the Russian Revolution and the years leading up to it. A People’s Tragedy won the Wolfson History Prize, the WH Smith Literary Award, the NCR Book Award, the Longman/History Today Book Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. In 2008, the Times Literary Supplement listed it as one of the “hundred most influential books since the war”. Eric Hobsbawm, reviewing the book, called it a “very impressive piece of history-writing.” Harvard University historian Richard Pipes, found scholarly shortcomings in it.

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A Brief History of Time

A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes is a book on theoretical cosmology by English physicist Stephen Hawking. It was first published in 1988. Hawking wrote the book for readers who had no prior knowledge of physics and people who are interested in learning something new about interesting subjects.
In A Brief History of Time, Hawking writes in non-technical terms about the structure, origin, development and eventual fate of the Universe, which is the object of study of astronomy and modern physics. He talks about basic concepts like space and time, basic building blocks that make up the Universe (such as quarks) and the fundamental forces that govern it (such as gravity). He writes about cosmological phenomena such as the Big Bang and black holes.

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A Preface to Morals

Walter Lippmann was an influential journalist and political theorist of the 20th century. A Preface to Morals, his best-known and most influential book, was first published in 1929.

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A Theory of Justice

A Theory of Justice is a 1971 work of political philosophy and ethics by the philosopher John Rawls, in which the author attempts to provide a moral theory alternative to utilitarianism and that addresses the problem of distributive justice (the socially just distribution of goods in a society). The theory uses an updated form of Kantian philosophy and a variant form of conventional social contract theory. Rawls’s theory of justice is fully a political theory of justice as opposed to other forms of justice discussed in other disciplines and contexts.

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Annie John

Annie John, a novel written by Jamaica Kincaid in 1985, details the growth of a girl in Antigua, an island in the Caribbean. It covers issues as diverse as mother-daughter relationships, lesbianism, racism, clinical depression, poverty, education, and the struggle between medicine based on “scientific fact” and that based on “native superstitious know-how”.

The theory of relativity

The theory of relativity usually encompasses two interrelated theories by Albert Einstein: special relativity and general relativity, proposed and published in 1905 and 1915, respectively. Special relativity applies to all physical phenomena in the absence of gravity. General relativity explains the law of gravitation and its relation to other forces of nature. It applies to the cosmological and astrophysical realm, including astronomy.

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A Bright Shining Lie

A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (1988) is a book by Neil Sheehan, a former New York Times reporter, about U.S. Army lieutenant colonel John Paul Vann (killed in action) and the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War.
Sheehan was awarded the 1988 National Book Award for Nonfiction and the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for the book. It was adapted as a film of the same name released by HBO in 1998, starring Bill Paxton and Amy Madigan.

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A Child Called It

A Child Called “It”, was listed on The New York Times Bestseller List for several years, and in 5 years had sold at least 1.6 million copies. The book has also been a source of controversy for Pelzer, with accusations of several events being fabricated coming from both family members and journalists.

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A History of the Crusades

A History of the Crusades by Steven Runciman, published in three volumes during 1951-1954, is an influential work in the historiography of the Crusades.
It has seen numerous reprints and translations and in some respects has come to be seen as a standard work on the topic.
Its scope encompasses the ascendancy of Islam in the Levant during the early 7th century through the fall of Acre in 1291, with later chapters covering through 1464, the time of pope Pius II.
The work draws on a wide range of primary sources (in Greek, Latin, Armenian, Arabic).
At the time of its initial publication it offered a novel interpretation of the crusades, less as a defensive war of Christendom against the threat of Islamic expansion but as a continuation of the destructive “barbarian invasions” that led to the fall of Rome.
Furthermore, Runciman includes the history of the Byzantine Empire in his scope, moving his focus further east and at the same time tempering the “Romantic” view of the crusades as a heroic or chivalrous enterprise.
Runciman’s approach, while it may have had value in overcoming overly romantic views of the crusades held in the 19th century, has not aged well, and is now seen as having gone beyond the mark by painting the crusaders as “simpletons or barbarians”.Thomas F. Madden (2002) called the work “terrible history yet wonderfully entertaining.”This criticism might have been encouraged by Runciman’s own attitude, which embraced subjectivity and polemics. He described his approach in the first volume of A History of the Crusades as his “one pen against the massed typewriters of the United States”. Runciman believed that, “The historian must attempt to add to his subjective study the qualities of intuitive sympathy and imaginative perception, without which he cannot hope to comprehend the fears and aspirations and convictions that have moved past generations.” This statement is a key to understanding his unique style but also explains much of the criticism leveled at it.
It is nevertheless undisputed that the work contains genuine scholarship and has been very influential on the generation of scholars educated during the 1950s to 1970s.
Bernard Hamilton wrote in 2000: “The first two volumes of Sir Steven’s History of the Crusades were published while I was an undergraduate. I read them with avidity […] I still think that his History is one of the great literary works of English historical writing, which has inspired an interest in and enthusiasm for the crusades in a whole generation.”

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A History Of The World In 100 Objects

A History of the World in 100 Objects was a joint project of BBC Radio 4 and the British Museum, comprising a 100-part radio series written and presented by British Museum director Neil MacGregor. In 15-minute presentations broadcast on weekdays on Radio 4, MacGregor used objects of ancient art, industry, technology and arms, all of which are in the British Museum’s collections, as an introduction to parts of human history.
The series, four years in planning, began on 18 January 2010 and was broadcast over 20 weeks. A book to accompany the series, A History of the World in 100 Objects by Neil MacGregor, was published by Allen Lane on 28 October 2010. The entire series is also available for download along with an audio version of the book for purchase. The British Museum won the 2011 Art Fund Prize for its role in hosting the project.

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A Mathematician's Apology

A Mathematician’s Apology is a 1940 essay by British mathematician G. H. Hardy, which offers a defence of the pursuit of mathematics. Central to Hardy’s “apology” — in the sense of a formal justification or defence (as in Plato’s Apology of Socrates) — is an argument that mathematics has value independent of possible applications. Hardy located this value in the beauty of mathematics, and gave some examples of and criteria for mathematical beauty. The book also includes a brief autobiography, and gives the layman an insight into the mind of a working mathematician.

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A New Model of the Universe

A New Model of the Universe Written by Ouspensky. Ouspensky analyzes some ancient movements, both East and West, associating them with modern ideas, and explains them in the light of twentieth-century discoveries and speculation in physics and philosophy.

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All But My Life

Gerda Weissmann Klein’s memoirs All But My Life is a fascinating tale of a three-year-old Polish teenager struggling to survive not only physically but also mentally. Like Anne Frank’s diary, the book is a classic of Holocaust literature.

Gerda’s serene and idyllic childhood is shattered when Nazis march into Poland on September 3, 1939. Although the Weissmanns were permitted to live for a while in the basement of their home, they were eventually separated and sent to German labor camps. Over the next few years Gerda experienced the slow, inexorable stripping away of “all but her life.” By the end of the war she had lost her parents, brother, home, possessions, and community; even the dear friends she made in the labor camps, with whom she had shared so many hardships, were dead.

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All the President's Men

All the President’s Men is a 1974 non-fiction book by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, two of the journalists who investigated the June 1972 break-in at the Watergate Office Building and the resultant political scandal for The Washington Post. The book chronicles the investigative reporting of Woodward and Bernstein from Woodward’s initial report on the Watergate break-in through the resignations of Nixon Administration officials H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman in April 1973, and the revelation of the Oval Office Watergate tapes by Alexander Butterfield three months later. It relates the events behind the major stories the duo wrote for the Post, naming some sources who had previously refused to be identified for their initial articles, notably Hugh Sloan. It also gives detailed accounts of Woodward’s secret meetings with his source Deep Throat, whose identity was kept hidden for over 30 years. Gene Roberts, the former executive editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer and former managing editor of The New York Times, has called the work of Woodward and Bernstein “maybe the single greatest reporting effort of all time.”A film adaptation, produced by Robert Redford, starring Redford and Dustin Hoffman as Woodward and Bernstein, respectively, was released in 1976. That same year, a sequel to the book, The Final Days, was published, which chronicled the last months of Richard Nixon’s presidency, starting around the time their previous book ended.

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American Shaolin

American Shaolin: Flying Kicks, Buddhist Monks, and the Legend of Iron Crotch: An Odyssey in the New China was published in 2007 by Gotham in the United States and Abacus in the United Kingdom. In the book, Polly discusses his experiences in China living, studying, and performing with Shaolin monks.

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An American Dilemma

An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy is a 1944 study of race relations authored by Swedish Nobel-laureate economist Gunnar Myrdal and funded by Carnegie Corporation of New York. The foundation chose Myrdal because it thought that as a non-American, he could offer a more unbiased opinion. Myrdal’s volume, at nearly 1,500 pages, painstakingly detailed what he saw as obstacles to full participation in American society that American blacks faced as of the 1940s. Ralph Bunche served as Gunnar Myrdal’s main researcher and writer at the start of the project in the Fall of 1938.It sold over 100,000 copies and went through 25 printings before going into its second edition in 1965. It was enormously influential in how racial issues were viewed in the United States, and it was cited in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case “in general”. The book was generally positive in its outlook on the future of race relations in America, taking the view that democracy would triumph over racism. In many ways it laid the groundwork for future policies of racial integration and affirmative action.

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Angela's Ashes

Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir is a 1996 memoir by the Irish-American author Frank McCourt, with various anecdotes and stories of his childhood. It details his very early childhood in Brooklyn, New York, US but focuses primarily on his life in Limerick, Ireland. It also includes his struggles with poverty and his father’s alcoholism. The book was published in 1996 and won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. A sequel, ‘Tis, was published in 1999, followed by Teacher Man in 2005.

Art and Illusion

Art and Illusion, A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, is a 1960 book of art theory and history by Ernst Gombrich, derived from the 1956 A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts. The book had a wide impact in art history, but also in history (e.g. Carlo Ginzburg, who called it “splendid”), aesthetics (e.g. Nelson Goodman’s Languages of Art), semiotics (Umberto Eco’s Theory of Semiotics), and music psychology (Robert O. Gjerdingen’s schema theory of Galant style music).
In Art and Illusion, Gombrich argues for the importance of “schemata” in analyzing works of art: he claims that artists can only learn to represent the external world by learning from previous artists, so representation is always done using stereotyped figures and methods.

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Aspects of the Novel

Aspects of the Novel is a book compiled from a series of lectures delivered by E. M. Forster at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1927, in which he discussed the English language novel. By using examples from classic texts, he highlights the seven universal aspects of the novel: story, characters, plot, fantasy, prophecy, pattern, and rhythm.Some critics have taken issue with the fact that Forster, as a renowned novelist, formulated a normative theory of how to write prose. W. Somerset Maugham commented that, having read the book, “I learned that the only way to write novels was like Mr. E.M. Forster.” Virginia Woolf, reviewing Aspects of the Novel in Nation and Athenaeum, on the other hand, praised some aspects of the book. According to Woolf, Forster, unlike other male critics, never exercises stern authority to save the lady (i.e. fiction), he merely acts as a casual friend who happens to have been admitted into the bedroom. Woolf concedes, however, that this is ultimately not very helpful when it comes to formulating rules: “So then we are back in the old bog; nobody knows anything about the laws of fiction”.

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At the Feet of the Master

At the Feet of the Master is a book attributed to Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986), authored when he was fourteen years old. Written under the name Alcyone, it was first published in 1910. The work was closely related to the so-called World Teacher Project, a contemporary messianic endeavor launched by the Theosophical Society. The book is considered a spiritual classic and was still in print as of 2012. By that time it had been published in dozens of editions and had been translated in many languages; by 2004 early editions were in the public domain. Throughout its publication history the work has also generated controversy, regarding the author’s identity.

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Autobiographies

The autobiographies are six autobiographical works that William Butler Yeats published together in the mid-1930s to create one remarkable memory of the first fifty-eight years of his life, from his early childhood memories to winning the Nobel Prize for Literature.

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Bad Science

Bad Science is a book by Ben Goldacre, criticising mainstream media reporting on health and science issues. It was published by Fourth Estate in September 2008. It has been positively reviewed by the British Medical Journal and the Daily Telegraph and has reached the Top 10 bestseller list for Amazon Books. It was shortlisted for the 2009 Samuel Johnson Prize. Bad Science or BadScience is also the title of Goldacre’s column in The Guardian and his website.

Battle Cry of Freedom

Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era is a Pulitzer Prize-winning work on the American Civil War, published in 1988, by James M. McPherson. It is the sixth volume of the Oxford History of the United States series. An abridged, illustrated version of the book was published in 2003.

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Being and Nothingness

Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (French: L’Être et le néant : Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique), sometimes published with the subtitle A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, is a 1943 book by the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. In the book, Sartre develops a philosophical account in support of his existentialism, dealing with topics such as consciousness, perception, social philosophy, self-deception, the existence of “nothingness”, psychoanalysis, and the question of free will.
While a prisoner of war in 1940 and 1941, Sartre read Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927), which uses the method of Husserlian phenomenology as a lens for examining ontology. Sartre attributed the course of his own philosophical inquiries to his exposure to this work. Though influenced by Heidegger, Sartre was profoundly skeptical of any measure by which humanity could achieve a kind of personal state of fulfillment comparable to the hypothetical Heideggerian “re-encounter with Being”. In Sartre’s account, man is a creature haunted by a vision of “completion” (what Sartre calls the ens causa sui, meaning literally “a being that causes itself”), which many religions and philosophers identify as God. Born into the material reality of one’s body, in a material universe, one finds oneself inserted into being. In accordance with Husserl’s notion that consciousness can only exist as consciousness of something, Sartre develops the idea that there can be no form of self that is “hidden” inside consciousness. On these grounds, Sartre goes on to offer a philosophical critique of Sigmund Freud’s theories, based on the claim that consciousness is essentially self-conscious.
Being and Nothingness is regarded as both the most important non-fiction expression of Sartre’s existentialism and his most influential philosophical work, original despite its debt to Heidegger. Many have praised the book’s central notion that “existence precedes essence”, its introduction of the concept of bad faith, and its exploration of “nothingness”, as well as its novel contributions to the philosophy of sex. However, the book has been criticized for its abstruseness and for its treatment of Freud.

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Beyond Freedom and Dignity

Beyond Freedom and Dignity is a 1971 book by American psychologist B. F. Skinner. Skinner argues that entrenched belief in free will and the moral autonomy of the individual (which Skinner referred to as “dignity”) hinders the prospect of using scientific methods to modify behavior for the purpose of building a happier and better-organized society.
Beyond Freedom and Dignity may be summarized as an attempt to promote Skinner’s philosophy of science, the technology of human behavior, his conception of determinism, and what Skinner calls “cultural engineering”.

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Bhagavad-Gita As It Is

The Bhagavad-Gītā As It Is is a translation and commentary of the Bhagavad Gita by A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, founder of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), commonly known as the Hare Krishna movement. The Bhagavad Gita emphasizes a path of devotion toward the personal God, Krishna. It was first published in 1968 in English by Macmillan Publishers, and is now available in nearly sixty languages. It is primarily promoted and distributed by followers of ISKCON. The Bhagavad-Gītā As It Is is considered by adherents of the ISKCON movement and many Vedic scholars to be one of the finest literary works of Vaishnavism translated into English.

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Black Boy

Black Boy (1945) is a memoir by American author Richard Wright, detailing his upbringing. Wright describes his youth in the South: Mississippi, Arkansas and Tennessee, and his eventual move to Chicago, where he establishes his writing career and becomes involved with the Communist Party. Black Boy gained high acclaim in the United States because of Wright’s honest and profound depiction of racism in America. While the book gained significant recognition, much of the reception throughout and after the publication process was highly controversial.

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia is a travel book written by Dame Rebecca West, published in 1941 in two volumes by Macmillan in the UK and by The Viking Press in the US.
The book is over 1,100 pages in modern editions and gives an account of Balkan history and ethnography during West’s six-week trip to Yugoslavia in 1937. West’s objective was “to show the past side by side with the present it created”. Publication of the book coincided with the Nazi Invasion of Yugoslavia, and West added a foreword highly praising the Yugoslavs for their brave defiance of Germany. The book’s epigraph reads: “To my friends in Yugoslavia, who are now all dead or enslaved”.The character of “Constantine” is supposedly based on Stanislav Vinaver. Anica Savić Rebac, under the name of Milica, appears not only as a new friend, but also as the intellectual guide who eventually reveals to Rebecca West the rituals which would lead the author to the title metaphor of her vision of the Balkans.

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Born to Run

Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen, is a 2009 best-selling non-fiction written by the American author and journalist Christopher McDougall. The book has sold over three million copies.

The Canon of Medicine

The Canon of Medicine is an encyclopedia of medicine in five books compiled by Persian Muslim physician-philosopher Avicenna and completed in 1025. It presents an overview of the contemporary medical knowledge of the Islamic world, which had been influenced by earlier traditions including Greco-Roman medicine (particularly Galen), Persian medicine, Chinese medicine and Indian medicine.

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Children of Crisis

Children of Crisis is a social study of children in the United States written by child psychiatrist Robert Coles and published in five volumes by Little, Brown and Company between 1967 and 1977. In 2003, the publisher released a one-volume compilation of selections from the series with a new introduction by the author. Volumes 2 and 3 shared (with Frances FitzGerald’s Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam) the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction.

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Chinese Cinderella

Chinese Cinderella: The Secret Story of an Unwanted Daughter (Wishbones) is a non-fiction book by Chinese-American physician and author Adeline Yen Mah describing her experiences growing up in China. First published in 1999, Chinese Cinderella is a revised version of part of her 1997 autobiography, Falling Leaves. Her mother died after giving birth to her (of fever) and she is known to her family as the worst luck ever. Her father remarries a woman who stays at home and looks after the children for a living while treating Adeline and her siblings harshly and spoiling her own children with many luxurious things. An extract of this book is also part of the anthology of Edexcel English Language IGCSE new specification.

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Cider with Rosie

Cider with Rosie is a 1959 book by Laurie Lee (published in the US as Edge of Day: Boyhood in the West of England, 1960). It is the first book of a trilogy that continues with As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969) and A Moment of War (1991). It has sold over six million copies worldwide.
The novel is an account of Lee’s childhood in the village of Slad, Gloucestershire, England, in the period soon after the First World War. It chronicles the traditional village life which disappeared with the advent of new developments, such as the coming of the motor car, and relates the experiences of childhood seen from many years later. The identity of Rosie was revealed years later to be Lee’s distant cousin Rosalind Buckland.

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Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution

Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution is a book by the historian Simon Schama, published in 1989, the bicentenary of the French Revolution.
“The terror,” declared Schama in the book, “was merely 1789 with a higher body count; violence … was not just an unfortunate side effect … it was the Revolution’s source of collective energy. It was what made the Revolution revolutionary.” In short, “From the very beginning […] violence was the motor of revolution.” Schama considers that the French Revolutionary Wars were the logical corollary of the universalistic language of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, and of the universalistic principles of the Revolution which led to inevitable conflict with old-regime Europe.

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Civil Disobedience

Resistance to Civil Government, called Civil Disobedience for short, is an essay by American transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau that was first published in 1849. In it, Thoreau argues that individuals should not permit governments to overrule or atrophy their consciences, and that they have a duty to avoid allowing such acquiescence to enable the government to make them the agents of injustice. Thoreau was motivated in part by his disgust with slavery and the Mexican–American War (1846–1848).

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Collected Essays of George Orwell

George Orwell covers in this selection of essays, from his childhood schooling and writing profession to his thoughts on the Spanish Civil War and British Imperialism.

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Common Sense

Common Sense is a 47-page pamphlet written by Thomas Paine in 1775–1776 advocating independence from Great Britain to people in the Thirteen Colonies. Writing in clear and persuasive prose, Paine marshaled moral and political arguments to encourage common people in the Colonies to fight for egalitarian government. It was published anonymously on January 10, 1776 at the beginning of the American Revolution and became an immediate sensation.
It was sold and distributed widely and read aloud at taverns and meeting places. In proportion to the population of the colonies at that time (2.5 million), it had the largest sale and circulation of any book published in American history. As of 2006, it remains the all-time best-selling American title and is still in print today.Common Sense made public a persuasive and impassioned case for independence, which had not yet been given serious intellectual consideration. Paine connected independence with common dissenting Protestant beliefs as a means to present a distinctly American political identity and structured Common Sense as if it were a sermon. Historian Gordon S. Wood described Common Sense as “the most incendiary and popular pamphlet of the entire revolutionary era.”The text was translated into French by Antoine Gilbert Griffet de Labaume in 1790.

Contours of American History

William Appleman Williams was one of America’s greatest critics of American imperialism. The Contours of American History, first published in 1961. Williams’ message was a deeply heretical one, and yet the Modern Library ultimately chose Contour as one of the 100 Best Nonfiction Books of the 20th Century.

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Critique of Pure Reason

Critique of Pure Reason (German: Kritik der reinen Vernunft; 1781; second edition 1787) is a book by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, in which the author seeks to determine the limits and scope of metaphysics. Also referred to as Kant’s “First Critique”, it was followed by his Critique of Practical Reason (1788) and Critique of Judgment (1790). In the preface to the first edition, Kant explains that by a “critique of pure reason” he means a critique “of the faculty of reason in general, in respect of all knowledge after which it may strive independently of all experience” and that he aims to reach a decision about “the possibility or impossibility of metaphysics.”

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Cybernetics

Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine is a book written by Norbert Wiener and published in 1948. It is the first public usage of the term “cybernetics” to refer to self-regulating mechanisms. The book laid the theoretical foundation for servomechanisms (whether electrical, mechanical or hydraulic), automatic navigation, analog computing, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and reliable communications.
A second edition with minor changes and two additional chapters was published in 1961.

Das Kapital

Das Kapital, also known as Capital: A Critique of Political Economy is a foundational theoretical text in materialist philosophy, economics and politics by Karl Marx. Marx aimed to reveal the economic patterns underpinning the capitalist mode of production in contrast to classical political economists such as Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say, David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill.

Darkness Visible

Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness is a memoir by American writer William Styron about his descent into depression and the triumph of recovery. It is among the last books published by Styron and is widely considered one of his best and most influential works. Darkness Visible also helped raise awareness for depression, which was relatively unknown at the time.
First published in December 1989 in Vanity Fair, the book grew out of a lecture that Styron originally delivered at a symposium on affective disorders at the Department of Psychiatry of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.Through the employment of anecdotes, speculation, and reportage, Styron reflects on the causes and effects of depression, drawing links between his own illness and that of other writers and public figures.

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Dionysus: A Social History Of The Wine Vine

Edward Hyams is the author of Dionysus: A Social History of the Wine Vine. Dionysus tells the extraordinary story of a plant (Vitis vinifera) commonly known as the grape-vine.

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Dispatches

Dispatches is a New Journalism book by Michael Herr that describes the author’s experiences in Vietnam as a war correspondent for Esquire magazine. First published in 1977, Dispatches was one of the first pieces of American literature that portrayed the experiences of soldiers in the Vietnam War for American readers.
Featured in the book are fellow war correspondents Sean Flynn, Dana Stone, and Dale Dye, and photojournalist Tim Page.
Dispatches was reprinted in 2009 by Everyman’s Library as a contemporary classic.

Eats, Shoots & Leaves

Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation is a non-fiction book written by Lynne Truss, the former host of BBC Radio 4’s Cutting a Dash programme. In the book, published in 2003, Truss bemoans the state of punctuation in the United Kingdom and the United States and describes how rules are being relaxed in today’s society. Her goal is to remind readers of the importance of punctuation in the English language by mixing humour and instruction.
Truss dedicates the book “to the memory of the striking Bolshevik printers of St. Petersburg who, in 1905, demanded to be paid the same rate for punctuation marks as for letters, and thereby directly precipitated the first Russian Revolution”; she added this dedication as an afterthought after finding the factoid in a speech from a librarian.

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Eichmann in Jerusalem

Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil is a 1963 book by political theorist Hannah Arendt. Arendt, a Jew who fled Germany during Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, reported on Adolf Eichmann’s trial for The New Yorker. A revised and enlarged edition was published in 1964.

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Enrique's Journey

Enrique’s Journey: The Story of a Boy’s Dangerous Odyssey to Reunite with his Mother is a national best-seller by Sonia Nazario about a 17-year-old boy from Honduras who travels to the United States in search of his mother. It was first published in 2006 by Random House. The non-fiction book has been published in eight languages, and is sold in both English and Spanish editions in the United States. A young adult version was also published in 2013. The young adult version was published in Spanish in July 2015. It is based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning series of articles in the Los Angeles Times published in 2002 also by Sonia Nazario.

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Escape from Freedom

Escape from Freedom is a book by the Frankfurt-born psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, first published in the United States by Farrar & Rinehart in 1941 with the title Escape from Freedom and a year later as The Fear of Freedom in UK by Routledge & Kegan Paul. It was translated into German and first published in 1952 under the title ‘Die Angst vor der Freiheit’ (The Fear of Freedom). In the book, Fromm explores humanity’s shifting relationship with freedom, with particular regard to the personal consequences of its absence. His special emphasis is the psychosocial conditions that facilitated the rise of Nazism.

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Facundo

Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism is a book written in 1845 by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, a writer and journalist who became the seventh president of Argentina. It is a cornerstone of Latin American literature: a work of creative non-fiction that helped to define the parameters for thinking about the region’s development, modernization, power, and culture. Subtitled Civilization and Barbarism, Facundo contrasts civilization and barbarism as seen in early 19th-century Argentina.

First They Killed My Father

For the 2017 film adaptation, see First They Killed My Father (film).First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers is a 2000 non-fiction book written by Loung Ung, a Cambodian author and childhood survivor of Democratic Kampuchea. It is her personal account of her experiences during the Khmer Rouge regime.

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First Things First

First Things First (1994) is a self-help book written by Stephen Covey, A. Roger Merrill, and Rebecca R. Merrill. It offers a time management approach that, if established as a habit, is intended to help readers achieve “effectiveness” by aligning themselves to “First Things”. The approach is a further development of the approach popularized in Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and other titles.

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Florence Nightingale

The first official biography of Florence Nightingale that draws on new material and creates a powerful, soulful portrait. Because here is a woman who disregarded her beauty and her good background, an amazing qualification for the organization, who avoided all public recognition.

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Funny in Farsi

Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America is a 2003 memoir by Iranian American author Firoozeh Dumas. The book describes Dumas’s move with her family in 1972, at age seven, from Iran to Whittier, California, and her life in the United States for the next several decades (with a brief return to Iran). The book describes adjusting to the different culture and dealing with her extended family, most of whom also moved to the U.S. in the 1970s. It was Dumas’s first book.
Funny in Farsi was on the bestseller lists of the San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times.The book was translated into Persian language and became a bestseller in Iran in 2005, selling over 100,000 copies. In 2012, the book’s Iranian translator, Mohammed Soleimani Nia, was arrested by Iranian authorities, although this may have been unrelated to the book.In 2008, Dumas followed up Funny in Farsi with a second memoir, Laughing Without an Accent.

The Great Bridge

The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge is a 1972 book about the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge written by popular historian David McCullough. It provides a history of the engineering that went into the building of the bridge as well as the toils John A. Roebling, the designer of the bridge, went through with his son Washington Roebling to bring the bridge to its completion. The book went on to win two awards in 1973; the Certificate of Merit Municipal Art Society, NY, and the New York Diamond Jubilee Award.The documentary film, Brooklyn Bridge, released in 1981 by Ken Burns, Roger Sherman, Buddy Squires, and Amy Stechler drew inspiration from McCullough’s work. He was also chosen to be the narrator for the film.

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Guerrilla Warfare

Guerrilla Warfare (Spanish: La Guerra de Guerrillas) is a military handbook written by Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara. Published in 1961 following the Cuban Revolution, it became a reference for thousands of guerrilla fighters in various countries around the world. The book draws upon Guevara’s personal experience as a guerrilla soldier during the Cuban Revolution, generalizing for readers who would undertake guerrilla warfare in their own countries.
The book identifies reasons for, prerequisites, and lessons of guerrilla warfare. The principal reason to conduct guerrilla warfare within a country is because all peaceful and legal means of recourse have been exhausted. The most important prerequisite for conducting guerrilla warfare in a country is the popular support of its people for the guerrilla army. Che asserted that the success of the Cuban Revolution provided three lessons: popular forces can win a war against a regular army, guerrillas can create their own favorable conditions (not needing to wait for ideal conditions to take shape), and in underdeveloped America, the basic place of operation for a guerrilla army is the countryside.

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Hell's Angels

Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs is a book written by Hunter S. Thompson, published in 1967 by Random House. It was widely lauded for its up-close and uncompromising look at the Hells Angels motorcycle club, during a time when the gang was highly feared and accused of numerous criminal activities. The New York Times described Thompson’s portrayal as “a world most of us would never dare encounter.”It was Thompson’s first published book and his first attempt at a nonfiction novel.

Hiroshima (book)

Hiroshima is a 1946 book by American author John Hersey. It tells the stories of six survivors of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It is regarded as one of the earliest examples of the New Journalism, in which the story-telling techniques of fiction are adapted to non-fiction reporting.
The work was originally published in The New Yorker, which had planned to run it over four issues but instead dedicated the entire edition of August 31, 1946, to a single article. Less than two months later, the article was printed as a book by Alfred A. Knopf. Never out of print, it has sold more than three million copies. “Its story became a part of our ceaseless thinking about world wars and nuclear holocaust,” New Yorker essayist Roger Angell wrote in 1995.

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The I Ching: Or, Book of Changes

The I Ching or Yi Jing, usually translated as Book of Changes or Classic of Changes, is an ancient Chinese divination text and among the oldest of the Chinese classics. Originally a divination manual in the Western Zhou period (1000–750 BC), over the course of the Warring States period and early imperial period (500–200 BC) it was transformed into a cosmological text with a series of philosophical commentaries known as the “Ten Wings”.

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I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is a 1969 autobiography describing the early years of American writer and poet Maya Angelou. The first in a seven-volume series, it is a coming-of-age story that illustrates how strength of character and a love of literature can help overcome racism and trauma. The book begins when three-year-old Maya and her older brother are sent to Stamps, Arkansas, to live with their grandmother and ends when Maya becomes a mother at the age of 16. In the course of Caged Bird, Maya transforms from a victim of racism with an inferiority complex into a self-possessed, dignified young woman capable of responding to prejudice.

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If This Is a Man

If This Is a Man is a memoir by Italian Jewish writer Primo Levi, first published in 1947. It describes his arrest as a member of the Italian anti-fascist resistance during the Second World War, and his incarceration in the Auschwitz concentration camp (Monowitz) from February 1944 until the camp was liberated on 27 January 1945.

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In Cold Blood

In Cold Blood is a non-fiction novel by American author Truman Capote, first published in 1966. It details the 1959 murders of four members of the Herbert Clutter family in the small farming community of Holcomb, Kansas.
Capote learned of the quadruple murder before the killers were captured, and he traveled to Kansas to write about the crime. He was accompanied by his childhood friend and fellow author Harper Lee, and they interviewed residents and investigators assigned to the case and took thousands of pages of notes. Killers Richard Hickock and Perry Smith were arrested six weeks after the murders and later executed by the state of Kansas. Capote ultimately spent six years working on the book.
In Cold Blood was an instant success and is the second-best-selling true crime book in history, behind Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter (1974) about the Charles Manson murders. Some critics consider Capote’s work the original non-fiction novel, although other writers had already explored the genre, such as Rodolfo Walsh in Operación Masacre (1957). In Cold Blood has been lauded for its eloquent prose, extensive detail, and triple narrative which describes the lives of the murderers, the victims, and other members of the rural community in alternating sequences. The psychologies and backgrounds of Hickock and Smith are given special attention, as is the pair’s complex relationship during and after the murders. In Cold Blood is regarded by critics as a pioneering work in the true crime genre, although Capote was disappointed that the book failed to win the Pulitzer Prize. Parts of the book differ from the real events, including important details.

In Search of the Miraculous

In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching is a 1949 book by Russian philosopher P. D. Ouspensky which recounts his meeting and subsequent association with George Gurdjieff. It is widely regarded as the most comprehensive account of Gurdjieff’s system of thought ever published. It is regarded as “fundamental textbook” by many modern followers of Gurdjieff’s teachings, who often use it as a means of introducing new students to Gurdjieff’s system of self-development.

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Jefferson and His Time

Jefferson and His Time is a six-volume biography of US President Thomas Jefferson by American historian Dumas Malone, published between 1948 and 1981.
The six volumes were published individually as follows:

Jefferson the Virginian (1948)
Jefferson and the Rights of Man (1951)
Jefferson and the Ordeal of Liberty (1962)
Jefferson the President: First Term, 1801–1805 (1970)
Jefferson the President: Second Term, 1805–1809 (1974)
The Sage of Monticello (1981)His work on the series gave Malone a reputation as “the world’s leading Jefferson scholar”. For the fifth volume, he was awarded the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for History.

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Kaffir Boy

Kaffir Boy: The True Story of a Black Youth’s Coming of Age in Apartheid South Africa is Mark Mathabane’s 1986 autobiography about life under the South African apartheid regime. It focuses on the brutality of the apartheid system and how he escaped from it, and from the township Alexandra, to become a well-known tennis player.
He also depicted how the young black children dealt with racism and stereotypes. By embracing education, he is able to rise out of despair and destitution.

Kamasutra

The Kama Sutras uniquely stand out as a work of psychology, sociology, Hindu dogma and sexology. It has been a celebrated classic of Indian literature for over 1,700 years and is a window to the West into the culture and mysticism of the East.

Kitchen Confidential (book)

Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly is a New York Times bestselling nonfiction book written by American chef Anthony Bourdain, first published in 2000. In 2018, it topped the New York Times non-fiction paperback and non-fiction combined e-book & print lists.In 1999, Bourdain’s essay “Don’t Eat Before Reading This” was published in the New Yorker. This served as the foundation for Kitchen Confidential.Released in 2000, the book is both Bourdain’s professional memoir and a behind-the-scenes look at restaurant kitchens. The book is known for its treatment of the professional culinary industry, which he describes as an intense, unpleasant, and sometimes hazardous workplace staffed by who he describes as misfits.

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Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is a book with text by American writer James Agee and photographs by American photographer Walker Evans, first published in 1941 in the United States. The work documents the lives of impoverished tenant farmers during the Great Depression. Although it is in keeping with Evans’s work with the Farm Security Administration, the project was initiated not by the FSA, but by Fortune magazine. The title derives from a passage in the Wisdom of Sirach (44:1) that begins, “Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us”.

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Life on the Mississippi

Life on the Mississippi (1883) is a memoir by Mark Twain of his days as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River before the American Civil War. It is also a travel book, recounting his trip up the Mississippi River from New Orleans to Saint Paul many years after the war.

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Listen, Little Man!

Listen, Little Man! (German: Rede an den kleinen Mann) is a 1945 essay by Austro-Hungarian-American psychologist Wilhelm Reich outlining his libertarian socialist political philosophy, in particular its views on direct action as the only means for the working class to achieve liberation. It was translated into English in 1948 by Theodore Peter Wolfe.

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The Lives of the Artists

Vasari was first and foremost a frugal businessman. He realized that “artistic influence” may have a role in enhancing the value associated with an artwork.

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London: The Biography

London: The Biography is a 2000 non-fiction book by Peter Ackroyd published by Chatto & Windus. Ackroyd’s work, following his previous work on London in one form or another, is a history of the city. It is chronologically wide in scope, proceeding from the period of the Upper Jurassic through to the period of the Druids and on to the 21st century.

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Long Walk to Freedom

Long Walk to Freedom is an autobiography written by South African President Nelson Mandela, and first published in 1994 by Little Brown & Co. The book profiles his early life, coming of age, education and 27 years in prison. Under the apartheid government, Mandela was regarded as a terrorist and jailed on the infamous Robben Island for his role as a leader of the then-outlawed African National Congress (ANC). He later achieved international recognition for his leadership as president in rebuilding the country’s once segregationist society.

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Man and His Symbols

Man and His Symbols is the last work undertaken by Carl Jung before his death in 1961. First published in 1964, it is divided into five parts, four of which were written by associates of Jung: Marie-Louise von Franz, Joseph L. Henderson, Aniela Jaffé, and Jolande Jacobi. The book, which contains numerous illustrations, seeks to provide a clear explanation of Jung’s complex theories for a wide non-specialist readership.

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Maus

Maus is a graphic novel by American cartoonist Art Spiegelman. Serialized from 1980 to 1991, it depicts Spiegelman interviewing his father about his experiences as a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor. The work employs postmodernist techniques and represents Jews as mice, Germans as cats, and Poles as pigs. Critics have classified Maus as memoir, biography, history, fiction, autobiography, or a mix of genres. In 1992, it became the first (and is still the only) graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize (the Special Award in Letters).

Meetings with Remarkable Men

Meetings with Remarkable Men’, autobiographical in nature, is the second volume of the All and Everything trilogy written by the Greek-Armenian spiritual teacher G. I. Gurdjieff. Gurdjieff started working on the Russian manuscript in 1927, revising it several times over the coming years. An English translation by A. R. Orage was first published in 1963.

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Melbourne

David Cecil’s classic biographies The Young Melbourne (and The Story of His Marriage with Lady Caroline Lamb) and Lord M (or The Later Life of Lord Melbourne) are published here in a single volume. Melbourne was one of the great masters of the art of conversation and thus a wonderful subject for biographers.

Microbe Hunters

Publishing as Paul de Kruif, he is most noted for his 1926 book, Microbe Hunters. This book was not only a bestseller for a lengthy period after publication, but has remained high on lists of recommended reading for science and has been an inspiration for many aspiring physicians and scientists.

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BROKEN (IN THE BEST POSSIBLE WAY)

In this book through you will be highlights such type of lines These anonymous people who are struggling have no idea that they saved people’s lives. I just think it really speaks to how wonderful it is when we can share our struggles and realize that we’re not alone.

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A Modest Proposal

A Modest Proposal For preventing the Children of Poor People From being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and For making them Beneficial to the Public, commonly referred to as A Modest Proposal, is a Juvenalian satirical essay written and published anonymously by Jonathan Swift in 1729.

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On Food And Cooking: The Science And Lore Of The Kitchen

The book provides a reference to the scientific understanding and preparation of food. It has been described by Alton Brown as “the Rosetta stone of the culinary world”, Daniel Boulud has called the book a “must for every cook who possesses an inquiring mind”, while Heston Blumenthal has stated it is “the book that has had the greatest single impact on my cooking”.

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On Growth and Form

The book covers many topics including the effects of scale on the shape of animals and plants, large ones necessarily being relatively thick in shape; the effects of surface tension in shaping soap films and similar structures such as cells; the logarithmic spiral as seen in mollusc shells and ruminant horns; the arrangement of leaves and other plant parts.

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On the Origin of Species

On the Origin of Species more completely, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, published on 24 November 1859, is a work of scientific literature by Charles Darwin that is considered to be the foundation of evolutionary biology. Darwin’s book introduced the scientific theory that populations evolve over the course of generations through a process of natural selection.

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On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft is a memoir by American author Stephen King that describes his experiences as a writer and his advice for aspiring writers. Originally published in 2000 by Charles Scribner’s Sons, On Writing is King’s first book after he was involved in a car accident a year earlier. Scribner later republished the memoir twice, in 2010 and 2020. The 10th anniversary edition featured an updated reading list from King; whereas the 20th anniversary edition includes contributions from King’s two sons.

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One Two Three... Infinity: Facts and Speculations of Science

One Two Three… Infinity: Facts and Speculations of Science is a popular science book by theoretical physicist George Gamow, first published in 1947, but still (as of 2020) available in print and electronic formats. The book explores a wide range of fundamental concepts in mathematics and science, written at a level understandable by middle school students up through “intelligent layman” adults.

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One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society

One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society is a 1964 book by the philosopher Herbert Marcuse, in which the author offers a wide-ranging critique of both contemporary capitalism and the Communist society of the Soviet Union, documenting the parallel rise of new forms of social repression in both these societies, as well as the decline of revolutionary potential in the West.

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Our Band Could Be Your Life

Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981–1991 is a book by Michael Azerrad. It chronicles the careers of several underground rock bands who, while finding little or no mainstream success, were hugely influential in establishing American alternative and indie rock, mostly through nearly constant touring and records released on small, regional independent record labels.

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Out of Africa

Out of Africa is a memoir by the Danish author Karen Blixen. The book, first published in 1937, recounts events of the seventeen years when Blixen made her home in Kenya, then called British East Africa. The book is a lyrical meditation on Blixen’s life on her coffee plantation, as well as a tribute to some of the people who touched her life there.

Parallel Lives

Parallel Lives is a series of 48 biographies of famous men, arranged in pairs to illuminate their common moral virtues or failings, probably written at the beginning of the second century AD. The surviving Parallel Lives comprises 23 pairs of biographies, each pair consisting of one Greek and one Roman of similar destiny, such as Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, or Demosthenes and Cicero. It is a work of considerable importance, not only as a source of information about the individuals described, but also about the times in which they have lived.

Patriotic Gore

Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War is a 1962 book of historical and literary criticism written by Edmund Wilson. It consists of 26 chapters about the works and lives of almost 30 writers, including Ambrose Bierce, George Washington Cable, Mary Boykin Chesnut, Kate Chopin, John William De Forest Charlotte Forten, Ulysses Grant, Francis Grierson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hinton Rowan Helper, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Henry James, Sidney Lanier, Abraham Lincoln, John S. Mosby, Frederick Law Olmsted, Thomas Nelson Page, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Albion W. Tourgée John Townsend Trowbridge, Mark Twain, and Walt Whitman.

Phenomenology Of Mind

The Phenomenology of Mind, idealist philosopher Georg Hegel (1770–1831) defied the traditional epistemological distinction of objective from subjective and developed his own dialectical alternative. Remarkable for the breadth and profundity of its philosophical insights, this work combines psychology, logic, moral philosophy, and history to form a comprehensive view that encompasses all forms of civilization.

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Philosophical Investigations

Philosophical Investigations is a work by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. The book was published posthumously in 1953. Wittgenstein discusses numerous problems and puzzles in the fields of semantics, logic, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of psychology, philosophy of action, and philosophy of mind, putting forth the view that conceptual confusions surrounding language use are at the root of most philosophical problems.

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Pilgrim At Tinker Creek

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is a 1974 nonfiction narrative book by American author Annie Dillard. Told from a first-person point of view, the book details an unnamed narrator’s explorations near her home, and various contemplations on nature and life. The title refers to Tinker Creek, which is outside Roanoke in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. Dillard began writing Pilgrim in the spring of 1973, using her personal journals as inspiration. Separated into four sections that signify each of the seasons, the narrative takes place over the period of one year.

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Present At The Creation

Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department is a memoir by US Secretary of State Dean Acheson, published by W. W. Norton in 1969, which won the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for History.

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Principia Ethica

Principia Ethica is a 1903 book by the British philosopher G. E. Moore, in which the author insists on the indefinability of “good” and provides an exposition of the naturalistic fallacy. Principia Ethica was influential, and Moore’s arguments were long regarded as path-breaking advances in moral philosophy, though they have been seen as less impressive and durable than his contributions in other fields.

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Profiles In Courage

Profiles in Courage is a 1956 volume of short biographies describing acts of bravery and integrity by eight United States Senators. Then-Senator John F. Kennedy won the Pulitzer Prize for the work. The book profiles senators who defied the opinions of their party and constituents to do what they felt was right and suffered severe criticism and losses in popularity because of their actions.

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Psychoanalysis And The Unconscious

This book is Written in D. H. Lawrence’s most productive period, ‘Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious’ (1921) and ‘Fantasia of the Unconscious’ (1922) were undertaken initially in response to psychoanalytic criticism of his novel Sons and Lovers. They soon developed more generally to propose an alternative to what Lawrence perceived as the Freudian psychoanalytic theory of the unconscious and the incest motive. The essays also develop his ideas about the upbringing and education of children, about marriage, and about social and even political action. Lawrence described them as ‘this pseudo-philosophy of mine which was deduced from the novels and poems, not the reverse.

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Psychological Types

Psychological Types is a book by Carl Jung that was originally published in German by Rascher Verlag in 1921, and translated into English in 1923, becoming volume 6 of The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. In the book, Jung proposes four main functions of consciousness: two perceiving or non-rational functions (Sensation and Intuition), and two judging or rational functions (Thinking and Feeling).

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Psychosynthesis

Psychosynthesis is an approach to psychology that expands the boundaries of the field by identifying a deeper center of identity, which is the postulate of the Self. It considers each individual unique in terms of purpose in life and places value on the exploration of human potential. The approach combines spiritual development with psychological healing by including the life journey of an individual or their unique path to self-realization.

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Reading Lolita In Tehran

The book is divided into four sections: “Lolita”, “Gatsby”, “James”, and “Austen”. “Lolita” deals with Nafisi as she resigns from The University of Allameh Tabatabei and starts her private literature class with students Mahshid, Yassi, Mitra, Nassrin, Azin, Sanaz and Manna. They talk not just about Lolita, but One Thousand and One Nights and Invitation to a Beheading. The main themes are oppression, jailers as revolutionary guards try to assert their authority through certain events such as a vacation gone awry and a runaway convict.

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Red Scarf Girl

Red Scarf Girl is a historical memoir written by Ji-li Jiang about her experiences during the Cultural Revolution of China, with a foreword by David Henry Hwang. Ji-li Jiang was very important in her classroom and was respected until 1966 when the Cultural Revolution started. In Red Scarf Girl, Ji-li was at the top of her class and the da-dui-zhang, or Student Council President, of her school. However, her father prevents her from auditioning for the Central Liberation Army Arts Academy due to their political status, which she had no knowledge of at the time.

Religion And The Rise Of Capitalism

in this book- in one of the true classics of twentieth-century political economy, R. H. Tawney investigates the way religion has moulded social and economic practice. He tracks the influence of religious thought on capitalist economy and ideology since the Middle Ages, shedding light on the question of why Christianity continues to exert a unique role in the marketplace.

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Reveille In Washington

The American capital is sprawling, fractured, squalid, colored by patriotism and treason, and deeply divided along the political lines that will soon embroil the nation in bloody conflict. Chaotic and corrupt, the young city is populated by bellicose congressmen, Confederate conspirators, and enterprising prostitutes. Soldiers of a volunteer army swing from the dome of the Capitol, assassins stalk the avenues, and Abraham Lincoln struggles to justify his presidency as the Union heads to war.

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Rights of Man

Rights of Man (1791), a book by Thomas Paine, including 31 articles, posits that popular political revolution is permissible when a government does not safeguard the natural rights of its people. Using these points as a base it defends the French Revolution against Edmund Burke’s attack in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). It was published in two parts in March 1791 and February 1792.

Science and Civilisation in China

Science and Civilisation in China (1954–present) is an ongoing series of books about the history of science and technology in China published by Cambridge University Press. It was initiated and edited by British historian Joseph Needham (1900–1995). Needham was a well-respected scientist before undertaking this encyclopedia and was even responsible for the “S” in UNESCO. To date there have been seven volumes in twenty-seven books. The series was on the Modern Library Board’s 100 Best Nonfiction books of the 20th century.

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Selected Essays Of T. S. Eliot

Selected Essays, 1917-1932 is a collection of prose and literary criticism by T. S. Eliot. Eliot’s work fundamentally changed literary thinking and Selected Essays provides both an overview and an in-depth examination of his theory. It was published in 1932 by his employers, Faber & Faber, costing 12/6 . In addition to his poetry, by 1932, Eliot was already accepted as one of English Literature’s most important critics. In this position he was instrumental in the reviving interest in the long‐neglected Jacobean playwrights.

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selected writings

Composed during a critical time in the evolution of European intellectual life, the works of Meister Eckhart (c. 1260-1327) are some of the most powerful medieval attempts to achieve a synthesis between ancient Greek thought and the Christian faith.

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Shadow And Act

Shadow and Act is a collection of essays by Ralph Ellison, published in 1964. The writings encompass the two decades that began with Ellison’s involvement with African-American political activism and print media in Harlem, Ellison’s emergence as a highly acclaimed writer with the publication of Invisible Man, and culminating with his 1964 challenge of Irving Howe’s characterization of African-American life, “Black Boys and Native Sons”, with his now famous essay, “The World and the Jug”.

Silent Spring

Silent Spring is an environmental science book by Rachel Carson. The book was published on September 27, 1962, documenting the adverse environmental effects caused by the indiscriminate use of pesticides. Carson accused the chemical industry of spreading disinformation, and public officials of accepting the industry’s marketing claims unquestioningly. Starting in the late 1950s, prior to the book’s publication, Carson had focused her attention on environmental conservation, especially environmental problems that she believed were caused by synthetic pesticides.

Speak, Memory

Speak, Memory is an autobiographical memoir by writer Vladimir Nabokov. The book includes individual essays published between 1936 and 1951 to create the first edition in 1951. Nabokov’s revised and extended edition appeared in 1966. External links Scope The book is dedicated to his wife, Vera, and covers his life from 1903 until his emigration to America in 1940. The first twelve chapters describe Nabokov’s remembrance of his youth in an aristocratic family living in pre-revolutionary Saint Petersburg and at their country estate Vyra, near Siverskaya.

Spiritual Sayings

Spiritual Sayings of Kahlil GibranKahlil Gibran 1883-1931Author of The Prophet Poet, philosopher, and artist, was born in Lebanon, a land that has produced many prophets. The millions of Arabic-speaking peoples familiar with his writings in that language consider him the genius of his age. But he was a man whose fame and influence spread far beyond the Near East. His poetry has been translated into more than twenty languages.

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Syntactic Structures

Syntactic Structures is an influential work in linguistics by American linguist Noam Chomsky, originally published in 1957. It is an elaboration of his teacher’s, Zellig Harris’s, model of transformational generative grammar. A short monograph of bout a hundred pages, Chomsky’s presentation is recognized as one of the most significant studies of the 20th century. It contains the now-famous sentence “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously”, which Chomsky offered as an example of a grammatically correct sentence that has no discernible meaning.

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Tales And Parables Of Sri Ramakrishna

A collection of the teachings of Ramakrishna, a great saint of India, told in the form of stories and parables.

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Tales Of The Hasidim

Tales of the Hasidim is a book of collected tales by Martin Buber. It is based on stories—both written and spoken—based in the Hasidim. Buber wrote these tales based on the lore of the Baal Shem Tov. Many of the stories are parables passed down via both the written and spoken word. Tales of the Hasidim was originally published in Hebrew by Schocken Press in Israel in 1946 under the title Or HaGanuz. It was translated into English by Olga Marx and published in 1947.

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Tao Te Ching

The Tao Te Ching, along with the Zhuangzi, is a fundamental text for both philosophical and religious Taoism. It also strongly influenced other schools of Chinese philosophy and religion, including Legalism, Confucianism, and Buddhism, which was largely interpreted through the use of Taoist words and concepts when it was originally introduced to China.

The Affluent Society

The book sought to clearly outline the manner in which the post–World War II United States was becoming wealthy in the private sector but remained poor in the public sector, lacking social and physical infrastructure, and perpetuating income disparities. The book sparked much public discussion at the time. It is also credited with popularizing the term “conventional wisdom”.

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The Age Of Reason

The Age of Reason; Being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology is a work by English and American political activist Thomas Paine, arguing for the philosophical position of deism. It follows in the tradition of 18th-century British deism, and challenges institutionalized religion and the legitimacy of the Bible. It was published in three parts in 1794, 1795, and 1807. It was a best-seller in the United States, where it caused a short-lived deistic revival.

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The American Political Tradition

The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It is a 1948 book by Richard Hofstadter, an account of the ideology of previous Presidents of the United States and other political figures. Hofstadter’s introduction argues that the major political traditions in the United States, despite contentious battles, have all “shared a belief in the rights of property, the philosophy of economic individualism, the value of competition … [T]hey have accepted the economic virtues of a capitalist culture as necessary qualities of man”.

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The Analects

The Analects also known as the Analects of Confucius, is an ancient Chinese book composed of a large collection of sayings and ideas attributed to the Chinese philosopher Confucius and his contemporaries, traditionally believed to have been compiled and written by Confucius’s followers. It is believed to have been written during the Warring States period (475–221 BC), and it achieved its final form during the mid-Han dynasty (206 BC–220 AD).

The Art Of Memory

The Art of Memory is a 1966 non-fiction book by British historian Frances A. Yates. The book follows the history of mnemonic systems from the classical period of Simonides of Ceos in Ancient Greece to the Renaissance era of Giordano Bruno, ending with Gottfried Leibniz and the early emergence of the scientific method in the 17th century. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, its publication was “an important stimulus to the flowering of experimental research on imagery and memory.

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The Artist's Way

The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path To Higher Creativity is a 1992 self-help book by American author Julia Cameron. The book was written to help people with artistic creative recovery, which teaches techniques and exercises to assist people in gaining self-confidence in harnessing their creative talents and skills. Correlation and emphasis is used by the author to show a connection between artistic creativity and a spiritual connection with God.

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The Beauty Myth

The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women is a nonfiction book by Naomi Wolf, originally published in 1990 by Chatto & Windus in the UK and William Morrow & Co (1991) in the United States. The basic premise of The Beauty Myth is that as the social power and prominence of women have increased, the pressure they feel to adhere to unrealistic social standards of physical beauty has also grown stronger because of commercial influences on the mass media.

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The Book On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

This story tells us Alan Watts asks what is the cause of the illusion that the self is a separate ego, housed in a bag of skin, and which confronts a universe of physical objects that are alien to it. Rather a person’s identity (their ego) binds them to the physical universe, creating a relationship with their environment and other people.

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The Bookseller Of Kabul

The Bookseller of Kabul is a non-fiction book written by Norwegian journalist Åsne Seierstad, about a bookseller, Shah Muhammad Rais (whose name was changed to Sultan Khan), and his family in Kabul, Afghanistan, It takes a novelistic approach, focusing on characters and the daily issues that they face. Asne Seierstad entered Afghanistan two weeks after the September 11 attacks and followed the Northern Alliance into Kabul where she spent three months.

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The Origins Of Totalitarianism

The Origins of Totalitarianism, like many of Arendt’s books is structured as three essays, “Antisemitism”, “Imperialism” and “Totalitarianism”. The book describes the various preconditions and subsequent rise of anti-Semitism in central, eastern, and western Europe in the early-to-mid 19th century; then examines the New Imperialism, from 1884 to the start of the First World War (1914–18); then traces the emergence of racism as an ideology, and its modern application as an “ideological weapon for imperialism”, by the Boers during the Great Trek in the early 19th century (1830s–40s).

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The City In History

The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects is a 1961 National Book Award winner by American historian Lewis Mumford. It was first published by Harcourt, Brace & World (New York). Mumford argues for a world not in which technology rules, but rather in which it achieves a balance with nature.

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The Color Of Water

The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother, is the autobiography and memoir of James McBride first published in 1995; it is also a tribute to his mother, whom he calls Mommy, or Ma. The chapters alternate between James McBride’s descriptions of his early life and first-person accounts of his mother Ruth’s life, mostly taking place before her son was born.

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130

The Color Purple

The Color Purple is a 1982 epistolary novel by American author Alice Walker which won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction. It was later adapted into a film and musical of the same name. The novel has been the frequent target of censors and appears on the American Library Association list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2000–2009 at number seventeen because of the sometimes explicit content, particularly in terms of violence.

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131

The Common Sense Book Of Baby And Child Care

The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care is a book by American pediatrician Benjamin Spock and one of the best-selling books of the twentieth century, selling 500,000 copies in the six months after its initial publication in 1946 and 50 million by the time of Spock’s death in 1998. As of 2011, the book had been translated into 39 languages. Spock and his manual helped revolutionize child-rearing methods for the post-World War II generation.

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132

The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is a six-volume work by the English historian Edward Gibbon. It traces Western civilization (as well as the Islamic and Mongolian conquests) from the height of the Roman Empire to the fall of Byzantium. Volume I was published in 1776 and went through six printings.

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133

The Devil In The White City

This book is set in Chicago in 1893, interweaving the true tales of Daniel Burnham, the architect behind the 1893 World’s Fair, and H. H. Holmes, a serial killer who lured his victims to their deaths in his elaborately constructed “Murder Castle”. The Devil in the White City is divided into four parts, the first three happening in Chicago between 1890 and 1893, while part four of the book takes place in Philadelphia circa 1895.

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134

The Dhammapada

The Dhammapada (Sanskrit: Dharmapada) is a collection of sayings of the Buddha in verse form and one of the most widely read and best known Buddhist scriptures. The original version of the Dhammapada is in the Khuddaka Nikaya, a division of the Pali Canon of Theravada Buddhism.

The Diary Of A Young Girl

The Diary of a Young Girl, also known as The Diary of Anne Frank, is a book of the writings from the Dutch-language diary kept by Anne Frank while she was in hiding for two years with her family during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. The family was apprehended in 1944, and Anne Frank died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945.

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136

The Double Helix

The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA is an autobiographical account of the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA written by James D. Watson and published in 1968. It has earned both critical and public praise, along with continuing controversy about credit for the Nobel award and attitudes towards female scientists at the time of the discovery.

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137

The Education Of Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams is an autobiography that records the struggle of Bostonian Henry Adams (1838–1918), in his later years, to come to terms with the dawning 20th century, so different from the world of his youth. It is also a sharp critique of 19th-century educational theory and practice. In 1907, Adams began privately circulating copies of a limited edition printed at his own expense.

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138

The Face of Battle

The Face of Battle is a 1976 non-fiction book on military history by the English military historian John Keegan. It deals first with the structure of historical writing clarification neededabout battles, the strengths and weaknesses of the “battle piece,” and then with the structure of warfare in three time periods—medieval Europe, the Napoleonic Era, and World War I—by analyzing three battles: Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme, all of which involved English soldiers and occurred in approximately the same geographical area.

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139

The Feminine Mystique

The Feminine Mystique is a book by Betty Friedan that is widely credited with sparking the beginning of second-wave feminism in the United States. It was published on February 19, 1963 by W. W. Norton. In 1957, Friedan was asked to conduct a survey of her former Smith College classmates for their 15th anniversary reunion; the results, in which she found that many of them were unhappy with their lives as housewives, prompted her to begin research for The Feminine Mystique, conducting interviews with other suburban housewives, as well as researching psychology, media, and advertising.

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140

The Feynman Lectures On Physics

The Feynman Lectures on Physics is a physics textbook based on some lectures by Richard Feynman, a Nobel laureate who has sometimes been called “The Great Explainer”. The lectures were presented before undergraduate students at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), during 1961–1963. The book’s co-authors are Feynman, Robert B. Leighton, and Matthew Sands. The Feynman Lectures on Physics is perhaps the most popular physics book ever written.

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141

The Fire Next Time

The Fire Next Time is a 1963 non-fiction book by James Baldwin, containing two essays: “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to my Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation” and “Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region of My Mind”. The book’s title comes from a couplet in “Mary Don’t You Weep”, an African-American spiritual.

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142

The First and Last Freedom

The First and Last Freedom is a book by 20th-century Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986). Originally published 1954 with a comprehensive foreword by Aldous Huxley, it was instrumental in broadening Krishnamurti’s audience and exposing his ideas. It was one of the first Krishnamurti titles in the world of mainstream, commercial publishing, where its success helped establish him as a viable author.

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143

The General Theory Of Employment, Interest And Money

The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money of 1936 is a book by English economist John Maynard Keynes. It caused a profound shift in economic thought, giving macroeconomics a central place in economic theory and contributing much of its terminology – the “Keynesian Revolution”. It had equally powerful consequences in economic policy, being interpreted as providing theoretical support for government spending in general, and for budgetary deficits, monetary intervention and counter-cyclical policies in particular.

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144

The Golden Bough

The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion (retitled The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion in its second edition) is a wide-ranging, comparative study of mythology and religion, written by the Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer. The Golden Bough was first published in two volumes in 1890; in three volumes in 1900; and in twelve volumes in the third edition, published 1906–1915.

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145

The Good War

“The Good War”: An Oral History of World War II (1984) is an oral history of World War II compiled by Studs Terkel. The work received the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. “The Good War” consists of a series of interviews with various men and women from across the globe who directly experienced the events leading up to, including, and following the Second World War.

The Gospel Of Sri Ramakrishna

The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna is an English translation of the Bengali religious text Sri Sri Ramakrishna Kathamrita by Swami Nikhilananda. The text records conversations of Ramakrishna with his disciples, devotees and visitors, recorded by Mahendranath Gupta, who wrote the book under the pseudonym of “M.” The first edition was published in 1942.

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147

The Great War And Modern Memory

The Great War and Modern Memory is a book of literary criticism written by Paul Fussell and published in 1975 by Oxford University Press. It describes the literary responses by English participants in World War I to their experiences of combat, particularly in trench warfare. The perceived futility and insanity of this conduct became, for many gifted Englishmen of their generation, a metaphor for life.

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148

The Gulag Archipelago

The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation is a three-volume non-fiction text written between 1958 and 1968 by Russian writer and dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. It was first published in 1973, and translated into English, and French, the following year.

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149

The Guns Of August

The Guns of August (1962) (published in the UK as August 1914) is a volume of history by Barbara W. Tuchman. It is centered on the first month of World War I. After introductory chapters, Tuchman describes in great detail the opening events of the conflict. Its focus then becomes a military history of the contestants, chiefly the great powers.

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150

The Hare with Amber Eyes

The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010) is a family memoir by British ceramicist Edmund de Waal. De Waal tells the story of his family, the Ephrussi, once a very wealthy European Jewish banking dynasty, centred in Odessa, Vienna and Paris, and peers of the Rothschild family.

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151

The House Of Morgan

The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance is a non-fiction book by Ron Chernow, published in 1990. It traces the history of four generations of the J.P. Morgan financial empire, on both sides of the Atlantic, from its obscure beginnings in Victorian London to the crash of 1987.

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152

The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2010) is a non-fiction book by American author Rebecca Skloot. It was the 2011 winner of the National Academies Communication Award for best creative work that helps the public understanding of topics in science, engineering or medicine.

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153

The Importance Of Living

The Importance of Living is a wry, witty antidote to the dizzying pace of the modern world. Lin Yutang’s prescription is the classic Chinese philosophy of life: Revere inaction as much as action, invoke humor to maintain a healthy attitude, and never forget that there will always be plenty of fools around who are willing-indeed.

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154

The Influence Of Sea Power Upon History

The Influence of Sea Power Upon History: 1660–1783 is a history of naval warfare published in 1890 by Alfred Thayer Mahan. It details the role of sea power during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and discussed the various factors needed to support and achieve sea power, with emphasis on having the largest and most powerful fleet. Scholars considered it the single most influential book in naval strategy.

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155

The Interpretation Of Dreams

The Interpretation of Dreams is an 1899 book by Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, in which the author introduces his theory of the unconscious with respect to dream interpretation, and discusses what would later become the theory of the Oedipus complex.

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156

I Am That

I Am That is a compilation of talks on Shiva Advaita (Nondualism) philosophy by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, a Hindu spiritual teacher who lived in Mumbai. The English translation of the book from the original Marathi recordings was done by Maurice Frydman, edited by Sudhakar S. Dixit and first published in 1973 by Chetana Publications. The book was revised and reedited in July 1981.

The Journalist and the Murderer

The Journalist and the Murderer is a study by Janet Malcolm about the ethics of journalism, published by Alfred A. Knopf/Random House in 1990. It is an examination of the professional choices that shape a work of non-fiction, as well as a rumination on the morality that underpins the journalistic enterprise. The journalist in question is Joe McGinniss; the murderer is the former Special Forces captain Dr. Jeffrey R. MacDonald, who became the subject of McGinniss’s 1983 book Fatal Vision.

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158

The Liars' Club

The Liars’ Club is a memoir by the American author Mary Karr. Published in 1995 by Viking Adult, the book tells the story of Karr’s childhood in the 1960s in a small industrial town in Southeast Texas. The title refers to her father and his friends who would gather together to drink and tell stories when they were not working at the local oil refinery or the chemical plant.

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159

The Liberal Imagination

The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (1950) is a collection of sixteen essays by American literary critic Lionel Trilling, published by Viking in 1950. The book was edited by Pascal Covici, who had worked with Trilling when he edited and introduced Viking’s Portable Matthew Arnold in 1949.

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160

The Light Of Asia

The Light of Asia, or The Great Renunciation (Mahâbhinishkramana), is a book by Sir Edwin Arnold. The first edition of the book was published in London in July 1879. In the form of a narrative poem, the book endeavours to describe the life and time of Prince Gautama Buddha, who, after attaining enlightenment, became the Buddha, The Awakened One. The book presents his life, character, and philosophy in a series of verses. It is a free adaptation of the Lalitavistara.

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161

The Lives Of A Cell

The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher (1974) is collection of 29 essays written by Lewis Thomas for the New England Journal of Medicine between 1971 and 1973. Throughout his essays, Thomas touches on subjects as various as biology, anthropology, medicine, music (showing a particular affinity for Bach), etymology, mass communication, and computers.

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162

The Logic Of Scientific Discovery

The Logic of Scientific Discovery is a 1959 book about the philosophy of science by the philosopher Karl Popper. Popper rewrote his book in English from the 1934 (imprint ‘1935’) German original, titled Logik der Forschung. Zur Erkenntnistheorie der modernen Naturwissenschaft, which literally translates as, “Logic of Research: On the Epistemology of Modern Natural Science”.

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163

The Mahabharata

The Mahābhārata Sanskrit: महाभारतम्, Mahābhārata is one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India, the other being the Rāmāyaṇa. It narrates the struggle between two groups of cousins in the Kurukshetra War and the fates of the Kaurava and the Pāṇḍava princes and their successors.

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164

The Making Of The Atomic Bomb

The Making of the Atomic Bomb is a contemporary history book written by the American journalist and historian Richard Rhodes, first published by Simon & Schuster in 1987. It won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, the National Book Award for Nonfiction, and a National Book Critics Circle Award.

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165

The Making Of The English Working Class

The Making of the English Working Class is a work of English social history written by E. P. Thompson, a New Left historian. It was first published in 1963 and revised in 1968 by Victor Gollancz Ltd, republished by Pelican and became an early Open University set book. It concentrates on English artisan and working class society “in its formative years 1780 to 1832”.

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166

The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales is a 1985 book by neurologist Oliver Sacks describing the case histories of some of his patients. Sacks chose the title of the book from the case study of one of his patients who has visual agnosia, a neurological condition that leaves him unable to recognize faces and objects.

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167

The Masnavi

The Masnavi, or Masnavi-ye-Ma’navi also written Mathnawi, or Mathnavi, is an extensive poem written in Persian by Jalal al-Din Muhammad Balkhi, also known as Rumi. The Masnavi is one of the most influential works of Sufism, commonly called “the Quran in Persian”. It has been viewed by many commentators as the greatest mystical poem in world literature.

The Mind And Society

The Mind and Society (Italian: Trattato di Sociologia Generale, lit. “Treatise on General Sociology”) is a 1916 book by the Italian sociologist and economist Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923). In this book Pareto presents the first sociological cycle theory, centered on the concept of an elite social class.

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169

The Mirror And The Lamp

M.H. Abrams has given us a remarkable study, admirably conceived and executed, a book of quite exceptional and no doubt lasting significance for a number of fields – for the history of ideas and comparative literature as well as for English literary history, criticism and aesthetics.

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170

The Mismeasure Of Man

The Mismeasure of Man is a 1981 book by paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. The book is both a history and critique of the statistical methods and cultural motivations underlying biological determinism, the belief that “the social and economic differences between human groups—primarily races, classes, and sexes—arise from inherited, inborn distinctions and that society, in this sense, is an accurate reflection of biology.

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171

The Myth Of Sisyphus

The Myth of Sisyphus is a 1942 philosophical essay by Albert Camus. Influenced by philosophers such as Søren Kierkegaard, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Friedrich Nietzsche, Camus introduces his philosophy of the absurd. The absurd lies in the juxtaposition between the fundamental human need to attribute meaning to life and the “unreasonable silence” of the universe in response.

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172

The New Science

The New Science is the major work of Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico. It was first published in 1725 to little success, but has gone on to be highly regarded and influential in the philosophy of history, sociology, and anthropology. The central concepts were highly original and prefigured the Age of Enlightenment.

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173

The Odyssey

The Odyssey is one of two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer. It is one of the oldest extant works of literature still read by contemporary audiences. As with the Iliad, the poem is divided into 24 books. It follows the Greek hero Odysseus, king of Ithaca, and his journey home after the Trojan War.

The Origins Of The Second World War

The Origins of the Second World War is a non-fiction book by the English historian A. J. P. Taylor, examining the causes of World War II. It was first published in 1961 by Hamish Hamilton. Taylor had previously written The Struggle for Mastery in Europe 1848–1918. As he later wrote in his autobiography:

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175

The Path To Power

The Years of Lyndon Johnson is the political biography of our time. No president—no era of American politics—has been so intensively and sharply examined at a time when so many prime witnesses to hitherto untold or misinterpreted facets of a life, a career, and a period of history could still be persuaded to speak.

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176

The Power Broker

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York is a 1974 biography of Robert Moses by Robert Caro. The book focuses on the creation and use of power in local and state politics, as witnessed through Moses’ use of unelected positions to design and implement dozens of highways and bridges, sometimes at great cost to the communities he nominally served.

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177

The Prince

The Prince is a 16th-century political treatise written by Italian diplomat and political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli as an instruction guide for new princes and royals. The general theme of The Prince is of accepting that the aims of princes – such as glory and survival – can justify the use of immoral means to achieve those ends.

The Promise Of American Life

The Promise of American Life is a book published by Herbert Croly, founder of The New Republic, in 1909. This book opposed aggressive unionization and supported economic planning to raise general quality of life. By Croly’s death in 1930, only 7,500 copies of The Promise of American Life had been sold. Despite this, the book was immensely influential, influencing Theodore Roosevelt to adopt the platform of the New Nationalism after reading it, and being popular with intellectuals and political leaders of the later New Deal.

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179

The Proper Study Of Mankind

Isaiah Berlin was one of the leading thinkers of our time and one of its finest writers. The Proper Study of Mankind brings together his most celebrated writing: here the reader will find Berlin’s famous essay on Tolstoy, “The Hedgehog and the Fox”; his penetrating portraits of contemporaries from Pasternak and Akhmatova to Churchill and Roosevel.

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The Psychology Of Man's Possible Evolution

Reading them as a book gives practically no measure of the scale of time and study needed to realize, even partially, the ideas which are expressed or why Ouspensky expressed them in this short form. In the forty or fifty years since the lectures were composed, analytical, introspective psychology has captured the interest of the masses.

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181

The Rise Of Theodore Roosevelt

The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (1979) is a biography of United States President Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris and published by Coward, McCann & Geoghegan when the author was forty years old. It is the first in a trilogy continued more than twenty and thirty years later by Theodore Rex (2001) and Colonel Roosevelt (2010). It won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography and the 1980 National Book Award in Biography.

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182

The Road From Coorain

The Road from Coorain is a 1989 memoir by Jill Ker Conway. The Road from Coorain was the first in Conway’s trilogy of memoirs. True North (1994) is the story of her immigration to America in pursuit of intellectual fulfilment and a Harvard PhD in history. A Woman’s Education (2001) tells the story of her move from history professor at the University of Toronto to the Presidency of Smith College.

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183

The Road To Serfdom

The Road to Serfdom is a book written between 1940 and 1943 by Austrian-British economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek. Since its publication in 1944, The Road to Serfdom has been an influential and popular exposition of liberalism. It has been translated into more than 20 languages and sold over two million copies (as of 2010).

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184

The Second Sex

The Second Sex is a 1949 book by the French existentialist Simone de Beauvoir, in which the author discusses the treatment of women throughout history. Beauvoir researched and wrote the book in about 14 months between 1946 and 1949.

The Second World War

The Second World War is a narrative history of World War II by the British historian Antony Beevor. The book starts with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, and covers the entire Second World War ending with the final surrender of Axis forces. In the introduction, Beevor discusses Yang Kyoungjong, a Korean soldier forcibly conscripted by the Kwantung Army, then in turn taken prisoner by the Red Army and the Wehrmacht, eventually being captured by American troops.

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186

The Secret Doctrine

The Secret Doctrine, the Synthesis of Science, Religion and Philosophy, is a pseudo-scientific esoteric book originally published as two volumes in 1888 written by Helena Blavatsky. The first volume is named Cosmogenesis, the second Anthropogenesis. It was an influential example of the revival of interest in esoteric and occult ideas in the modern age, in particular because of its claim to reconcile ancient eastern wisdom with modern science.

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187

The Selfish Gene

The Selfish Gene is a 1976 book on evolution by the Ethologist Richard Dawkins, in which the author builds upon the principal theory of George C. Williams’s Adaptation and Natural Selection (1966). Dawkins uses the term “selfish gene” as a way of expressing the gene-centred view of evolution (as opposed to the views focused on the organism and the group), popularising ideas developed during the 1960s by W. D. Hamilton and others.

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188

The Sickness unto Death

The Sickness Unto Death is a book written by Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard in 1849 under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus. A work of Christian existentialism, the book is about Kierkegaard’s concept of despair, which he equates with the Christian concept of sin, which he terms, “the sin of despair.”

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189

The Snow Leopard

The Snow Leopard is a 1978 book by Peter Matthiessen. It is an account of his two-month search for the snow leopard with naturalist George Schaller in the Dolpo region on the Tibetan Plateau in the Himalaya. The book recounts the journey of Matthiessen and Schaller in 1973 to Shey Gompa in the inner Dolpo region of Nepal.

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The Social Contract

“Social Agreement” redirects here. For the Greek political party, see Social Agreement (Greece). For Rousseau’s 1762 treatise on the concept, see The Social Contract. For other uses, see Social Contract. The original cover of Thomas Hobbes’s work Leviathan (1651), in which he discusses the concept of the social contract theory In moral and political philosophy, the social contract is a theory or model that originated during the Age of Enlightenment and usually concerns the legitimacy of the authority of the state over the individual.

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191

The Souls Of Black Folk

The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches is a 1903 work of American literature by W. E. B. Du Bois. It is a seminal work in the history of sociology and a cornerstone of African-American literature. The book contains several essays on race, some of which had been published earlier in The Atlantic Monthly.

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192

The Strange Career Of Jim Crow

Vann Woodward In his book, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, clearly points out, the segregation of the races was really a political stratagem employed by the emerging Bourbon interests in the South to keep the southern masses divided and southern labor the cheapest in the land.

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193

The Strange Death of Liberal England

The Strange Death of Liberal England is a book written by George Dangerfield published in 1935. Its thesis is that Liberal Party in Great Britain ruined itself in dealing with the House of Lords, women’s suffrage, the Irish question, and trade unions, 1906–1914. It was named by publisher Modern Library in 1999 as one of the “100 Best Nonfiction Books” published in the 20th century. In recent decades, most scholars have rejected its main interpretations.

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194

The Stranger

The Stranger’s first edition consisted of only 4,400 copies, which was so few that it could not be a best-seller. Since the novella was published during the Nazi occupation of France, there was a possibility that the Propaganda-Staffel would censor it, but a representative of the Occupation authorities felt it contained nothing damaging to their cause, so it was published without omissions.

The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a book about the history of science by the philosopher Thomas S. Kuhn. Its publication was a landmark event in the history, philosophy, and sociology of science. Kuhn challenged the then prevailing view of progress in science in which scientific progress was viewed as “development-by-accumulation” of accepted facts and theories.

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196

The Sufis

The Sufis is one of the best known books on Sufism by the writer Idries Shah. First published in 1964 with an introduction by Robert Graves, it introduced Sufi ideas to the West in a format acceptable to non-specialists at a time when the study of Sufism had largely become the reserve of Orientalists.

The Taming Of Chance

The Taming of Chance has been described as ground-breaking. The book received positive reviews from the statistician Dennis Lindley in Nature, the philosopher Stephen P. Turner in the American Journal of Sociology, the historian of science Theodore M. Porter in American Scientist and in Poetics Today, and Timothy L. Alborn in Isis. The book received mixed reviews from the philosopher Margaret Schabas in Science and Bruce Kuklick in American Historical Review.

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198

The Theater And Its Double

The Theatre and Its Double was originally published 1 February 1938 as part of Gallimard’s Métamorpheses Collection in an edition limited to 400 copies. The books consists of Artaud’s collected essays on theatre dating from the early thirties, many of which were published in Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF). Artaud was in “a near catatonic state in the mental hospital of Sainte-Anne” in Paris when the book was finally published.

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199

The Three Pillars Of Zen

Through explorations of the three pillars of Zen–teaching, practice, and enlightenment–Roshi Philip Kapleau presents a comprehensive overview of the history and discipline of Zen Buddhism

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200

The Tibetan Book Of The Dead

The first complete translation of a classic Buddhist text on the journey through living and dying. Graced with opening words by His Holiness The Dalai Lama, the Penguin Deluxe Edition of The Tibetan Book of the Dead is “immaculately rendered in an English both graceful and precise.

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201

The Trial And Death Of Socrates

Plato is among the most influential philosophers of all time. Along with his teacher Socrates and his pupil Aristotle, he can be said to have laid the foundations for Western philosophy, science and ethics, as well as establishing the first academy for higher learning in the Western world.

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202

The Two-ocean War: A Short History Of The United States Navy In The Second World War

The Two Ocean War by U.S. naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison, is a revised and shortened version of his multi-volume History of United States Naval Operations in World War II. The one-volume book is 611 pages long. The book was reviewed several times after being published.

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203

The Varieties Of Religious Experience

The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature is a book by Harvard University psychologist and philosopher William James. It comprises his edited Gifford Lectures on natural theology, which were delivered at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland between 1901 and 1902.

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204

The Vedanta-sutra (brahma Sutras) Of Badarayana

The Brahma Sūtras (Sanskrit: ब्रह्म सूत्र) is a Sanskrit text, attributed to the sage Badarayana or sage Vyasa, estimated to have been completed in its surviving form in approx. 400-450 CE, while the original version might be ancient and composed between 500 BCE and 200 BCE.The text systematizes and summarizes the philosophical and spiritual ideas in the Upanishads.

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205

The Voices of Marrakesh: A Record of a Visit

Winner of the 1981 Nobel Prize for Literature, Elias Canetti uncovers the secret life hidden beneath Marrakesh’s bewildering array of voices, gestures and faces. In a series of sharply etched scenes, he portrays the languages and cultures of the people who fill its bazaars, cafes, and streets.

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206

The Wealth Of Nations

The Wealth of Nations, is the magnum opus of the Scottish economist and moral philosopher Adam Smith. First published in 1776, the book offers one of the world’s first collected descriptions of what builds nations’ wealth, and is today a fundamental work in classical economics. By reflecting upon the economics at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the book touches upon such broad topics as the division of labour, productivity, and free markets.

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207

The Will To Power

The will to power is a prominent concept in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. The will to power describes what Nietzsche may have believed to be the main driving force in humans. However, the concept was never systematically defined in Nietzsche’s work, leaving its interpretation open to debate. Alfred Adler incorporated the will to power into his individual psychology.

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208

The Woman Warrior

The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts is a book written by Chinese American author Maxine Hong Kingston and published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1976. The book blends autobiography with old Chinese folktales. The Woman Warrior won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was named one of TIME magazine’s top nonfiction books of the 1970s.

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209

The Works Of Archimedes

The complete works of antiquity’s great geometer appear here in a highly accessible English translation by a distinguished scholar. Remarkable for his range of thought and his mastery of treatment, Archimedes addressed such topics as the famous problems of the ratio of the areas of a cylinder and an inscribed sphere; the measurement of a circle; the properties of conoids, spheroids, and spirals; and the quadrature of the parabola

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210

The Year Of Magical Thinking

The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), by Joan Didion (b. 1934), is an account of the year following the death of the author’s husband John Gregory Dunne (1932–2003). Published by Knopf in October 2005, The Year of Magical Thinking was immediately acclaimed as a classic book about mourning.

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211

The Yoga Sutras

The Yoga Sutras of Patañjali is a collection of Sanskrit sutras (aphorisms) on the theory and practice of yoga – 195 sutras (according to Vyāsa and Krishnamacharya) and 196 sutras (according to other scholars including BKS Iyengar). The Yoga Sutras was compiled sometime between 500 BCE and 400 CE, by the sage Patanjali in India who synthesized and organized knowledge about yoga from much older traditions.

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212

The Zen Teaching Of Huang Po: On The Transmission Of Mind

This complete translation of the original collection of sermons, dialogues, and anecdotes of Huang Po, the illustrious Chinese master of the Tang Dynasty, allows the Western reader to gain an understanding of Zen from the original source, one of the key works in its teachings; it also offers deep and often startling insights into the rich treasures of Eastern thought.

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213

Thoughts And Meditations

This collection of thoughts by Kahlil Gibran, author of “The Prophet,” “The Broken Wings,” “The Voice of the Master,” and other twentieth-century classics, demonstrates three major aspects of his genius. Here is the fiery prophet, assailing the corruptions of Syrian governmental and upper social circles with the wrath and scorn of Biblical seers.

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214

Three Cups Of Tea

Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace … One School at a Time is a memoir book by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin published by Penguin in 2007. The book describes Mortenson’s transition from a registered nurse and mountain climber to a humanitarian committed to reducing poverty and elevating education for girls in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

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Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality

Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality sometimes titled Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex, is a 1905 work by Sig mund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, in which the author advances his theory of sexuality, in particular its relation to childhood.

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Travels With Charley

Travels with Charley: In Search of America is a 1962 travelogue written by American author John Steinbeck. It depicts a 1960 road trip around the United States made by Steinbeck, in the company of his standard poodle Charley. Steinbeck wrote that he was moved by a desire to see his country on a personal level because he made his living writing about it.

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Tristes Tropiques

Tristes Tropiques (the French title translates literally as “Sad Tropics”) is a memoir, first published in France in 1955, by the anthropologist and structuralist Claude Lévi-Strauss. It documents his travels and anthropological work, focusing principally on Brazil, though it refers to many other places, such as the Caribbean and India.

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Two Essays On Analytical Psychology

Two Essays on Analytical Psychology is volume 7 of The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, presenting the core of Carl Jung’s views about psychology. Known as one of the best introductions to Jung’s work, the volumes includes the essays “The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious” and “On the Psychology of the Unconscious.”

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Unbroken: A World War Ii Story Of Survival, Resilience And Redemption

Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption is a 2010 non-fiction book by Laura Hillenbrand. Unbroken is a biography of World War II veteran Louis Zamperini, a former Olympic track star who survived a plane crash in the Pacific Theater, spent 47 days drifting on a raft, and then survived more than two and a half years as a prisoner of war (POW) in three Japanese POW camps.

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220

Uncle Tom's Cabin

Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly is an anti-slavery novel by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Published in 1852, the novel had a profound effect on attitudes toward African Americans and slavery in the U.S. and is said to have “helped lay the groundwork for the Civil War”.

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Up From Slavery

Up from Slavery is the 1901 autobiography of American educator Booker T. Washington (1856–1915). The book describes his personal experience of having to work to rise up from the position of a slave child during the Civil War, to the difficulties and obstacles he overcame to get an education at the new Hampton Institute.

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Voyager: The Art Of Pure Awareness

Inspired by the Upanishads sacred writings and the poetry of Zen and Taoism, Voyager is an inspirational and transformational work that conveys the ineffable truth of existence — we are pure awareness at our centre, human in appearance.

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Wandering On The Way

Acclaimed for his authoritative translation of the Tao Te Ching, Victor Mair, one of the foremast translators of ancient Chinese, reclaims for the modern reader another of the great books of Eastern wisdom. Although less well known in the West than the Tao Te Ching, the work of Chuang Tzu is every bit its equal as a classic of Taoist thought.

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What It Takes

From Blackstone chairman, CEO, and co-founder Stephen A. Schwarzman, a long-awaited book that uses impactful episodes from Schwarzman’s life to show readers how to build, transform, and lead thriving organizations. Whether you are a student, entrepreneur, philanthropist, executive, or simply someone looking for ways to maximize your potential, the same lessons apply.

Who Am I?: The Teachings Of Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi

A set of questions and answers on Self-enquiry that were put to Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi by Sri M. Sivaprakasam Pillai in 1902.

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Why We Can't Wait

Why We Can’t Wait is a 1964 book by Martin Luther King Jr. about the nonviolent movement against racial segregation in the United States, and specifically the 1963 Birmingham campaign. The book describes 1963 as a landmark year in the civil rights movement, and as the beginning of America’s “Negro Revolution”.

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Working

Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do is a 1974 nonfiction book by the oral historian and radio broadcaster Studs Terkel. Working investigates the meaning of work for different people under different circumstances, showing it can vary in importance.

You Can Heal Your Life

You Can Heal Your Life is 1984 self-help and new thought book by Louise L. Hay. It was the second book by the author, after Heal Your Body which she wrote at age 60. After Hay appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show and Donahue in the same week in March 1988, the book appeared on the New York Times Best Seller list, and by 2008, over 35 million copies worldwide had been sold in over 30 languages, becoming the best-selling non-fiction book of all time.

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229

Zen Flesh, Zen Bones

When Zen Flesh, Zen Bones was published in 1957 it became an instant sensation with an entire generation of readers who were just beginning to experiment with Zen. Over the years it has inspired leading American Zen teachers, students, and practitioners. Its popularity is as high today as ever.

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230

Zen Teaching of Instantaneous Awakening

Zen teaching of instantaneous awakening A complete translation of the teaching of the Chinese Ch’an Master Hui Hai by John Blofeld, with a foreword by Charles Luk Hui Hai, was one of the great Ch’an (Zen) Masters. He was a contemporary of both Ma Tsu and Huang Po, those early masters who established Ch’an after the death of Hui Neng, the sixth Patriarch.

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Écrits

In this book, Brilliant and innovative, Jacques Lacan’s work lies at the epicenter of modern thought about otherness, subjectivity, sexual difference, the drives, the law, and enjoyment. This new translation of his complete works offers welcome, readable access to Lacan’s seminal thinking on diverse subjects touched upon over the course of his inimitable intellectual career.

Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West is a 1970 non-fiction book by American writer Dee Brown that covers the history of Native Americans in the American West in the late nineteenth century. The book expresses details of the history of American expansionism from a point of view that is critical of its effects on the Native Americans.

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H Is For Hawk

H is for Hawk tells Macdonald’s story of the year she spent training a northern goshawk in the wake of her father’s death. Her father, Alisdair Macdonald, was a respected photojournalist who died suddenly of a heart attack in 2007. Having been a falconer for many years, she purchased a young goshawk to help her through the grieving process.

We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families

We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda is a 1998 non-fiction book by The New Yorker writer Philip Gourevitch about the 1994 Rwandan genocide, in which an estimated 1,000,000 Tutsis and Hutus were killed.

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Never Cry Wolf

Never Cry Wolf is an account of the author’s experience observing wolves in subarctic Canada by Farley Mowat, first published in 1963 by McClelland and Stewart. It was adapted into a film of the same name in 1983. It has been credited for dramatically changing the public image of the wolf to a more positive one.

Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage

Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage, is a 1959 book written by Alfred Lansing, about the failure of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition led by Sir Ernest Shackleton, in its attempt to cross the Antarctic continent in 1914. The book details the almost two-year struggle for survival endured by the twenty-eight man crew of the ship Endurance.

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237

Fever Pitch

Fever Pitch, first published in 1992, is a memoir and Hornby’s second book. It tells the story of the author’s relationship with football, and with Arsenal Football Club in particular. It consists of several chapters in chronological order, from the time the author first became a football fan as a child until his early thirties.

We Should All Be Feminists

We Should All Be Feminists is a book-length essay by the Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. First published in 2014 by Fourth Estate, it talks about the definition of feminism for the 21st century. The essay was adapted from Adichie’s 2012 TEDx talk of the same name, first delivered at TEDx Euston in London, which has been viewed more than six million times.

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Alive

Alive tells the story of an Uruguayan Rugby team (who were alumni of Stella Maris College), and their friends and family who were involved in the airplane crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571. The plane crashed into the Andes mountains on Friday, 13 October 1972. Of the 45 people on the flight, only 16 survived in sub-zero temperatures.

Bad Blood

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup is a nonfiction book by journalist John Carreyrou, released May 21, 2018. It covers the rise and fall of Theranos, the multibillion-dollar biotech startup headed by Elizabeth Holmes. The book received critical acclaim, winning the 2018 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award.

How To Cook A Wolf

M.F.K. Fisher’s guide to living happily even in trying times, which was first published during the Second World War in the days of ration cards; includes more than seventy recipes based on food staples and features sections such as “How to Keep Alive” and “How to Comfort Sorrow.”

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A Moveable Feast

A Moveable Feast is a 1964 memoir by American author Ernest Hemingway about his years as a struggling expat journalist and writer in Paris during the 1920s. It was published posthumously. The book details Hemingway’s first marriage to Hadley Richardson and his associations with other cultural figures of the Lost Generation in Interwar France.

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A Short History Of Nearly Everything

A Short History of Nearly Everything by American-British author Bill Bryson is a popular science book that explains some areas of science, using easily accessible language that appeals more to the general public than many other books dedicated to the subject. It was one of the bestselling popular science books of 2005 in the United Kingdom, selling over 300,000 copies.

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Alexander Hamilton

Alexander Hamilton is a 2004 biography of American statesman Alexander Hamilton, written by historian and biographer Ron Chernow. Hamilton, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, was an instrumental promoter of the U.S. Constitution, founder of the nation’s financial system, and its first Secretary of the Treasury.

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Blink

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking is a 2005 book by Malcolm Gladwell. it on that adaptable subconscious; The mental processes that act quickly and automatically on relatively little information present research from psychology and applied economics into popular science. It considers both the power of the adaptive subconscious, for example in expert judgment, and its difficulties, such as stereotypes.

Stalingrad

Stalingrad is a narrative history written by Antony Beevor of the battle fought in and around the city of Stalingrad during World War II, as well as the events leading up to it. It was first published by Viking Press in 1998. The book won the first Samuel Johnson Prize, the Wolfson History Prize and the Hawthornden Prize for Literature in 1999.

Dreams From My Father

Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995) is a memoir by Barack Obama that explores the events of his early years in Honolulu and Chicago until his entry into Harvard Law School in 1988. Obama originally published his memoir in 1995, when he was starting his political campaign for the Illinois Senate.

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How To Win Friends And Influence People

How to Win Friends and Influence People is a self-help book written by Dale Carnegie, published in 1936. Over 30 million copies have been sold worldwide, making it one of the best-selling books of all time. In 2011, it was number 19 on Time Magazine’s list of the 100 most influential books.

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If They Come In The Morning

f They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance is a collection of writings about U.S. legal trials and prisons, edited by Angela Davis and published in 1971. Contributors included Black Panther Party members and the Soledad Brothers. As Davis’ first book, it contains description of her experiences in prison. The book was positively received by African-American and communist media of the time.

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Narrative Of The Life Of Frederick Douglass

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is an 1845 memoir and treatise on abolition written by famous orator and former slave Frederick Douglass during his time in Lynn, Massachusetts. It is generally held to be the most famous of a number of narratives written by former slaves during the same period.

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The Road To Wigan Pier

The Road to Wigan Pier is a book by the English writer George Orwell, first published in 1937. The first half of this work documents his sociological investigations of the bleak living conditions among the working class in Lancashire and Yorkshire in the industrial north of England before World War II.

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Friday Night Lights

Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream is a 1990 non-fiction book written by H. G. Bissinger. The book follows the story of the 1988 Permian High School Panthers football team from Odessa, Texas, as they made a run towards the Texas state championship.

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Locking Up Our Own: Crime And Punishment In Black America

Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America is a 2017 book by James Forman Jr. on support for the 1970s War on Crime from Black leaders in American cities. It won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and the Lillian Smith Book Award.

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Into Thin Air

Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster is a 1997 bestselling non-fiction book written by Jon Krakauer. It details Krakauer’s experience in the 1996 Mount Everest disaster, in which eight climbers were killed and several others were stranded by a storm.

The Omnivore's Dilemma

The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals is a nonfiction book written by American author Michael Pollan published in 2006. As omnivores, humans are faced with a wide variety of food choices. In the book, Pollan investigates the environmental and animal welfare impacts of various food choices.

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I'll Be Gone In The Dark

I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer is a true crime book by the American writer Michelle McNamara about the investigation to uncover the Golden State Killer. The book was released on February 27, 2018, nearly two years after McNamara’s death and two months before an arrest would be made in the case.

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No Logo

No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies is a book by the Canadian author Naomi Klein. First published by Knopf Canada and Picador in December 1999, shortly after the 1999 WTO Ministerial Conference protests in Seattle had generated media attention around such issues, it became one of the most influential books about the alter-globalization movement and an international bestseller.

Between The World And Me

Between the World and Me is a 2015 nonfiction book written by American author Ta-Nehisi Coates and published by Spiegel & Grau. It is written as a letter to the author’s teenage son about the feelings, symbolism, and realities associated with being Black in the United States. Coates recapitulates American history and explains to his son the “racist violence that has been woven into American culture.”

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The Emperor Of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer is a book written by Siddhartha Mukherjee, an Indian-born American physician and oncologist. Published on 16 November 2010 by Scribner, it won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction: the jury called it “an elegant inquiry, at once clinical and personal”.

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The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History is a 2014 non-fiction book written by Elizabeth Kolbert and published by Henry Holt and Company. The book argues that the Earth is in the midst of a modern, man-made, sixth extinction. In the book, Kolbert chronicles previous mass extinction events, and compares them to the accelerated, widespread extinctions during our present time.

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How To Survive A Plague

A riveting, powerful telling of the story of the grassroots movement of activists, many of them in a life-or-death struggle, who seized upon scientific research to help develop the drugs that turned HIV from a mostly fatal infection to a manageable disease.

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The Art Of Cruelty: A Reckoning

Today both reality and entertainment crowd our fields of vision with brutal imagery. The pervasiveness of images of torture, horror, and war has all but demolished the twentieth-century hope that such imagery might shock us into a less alienated state, or aid in the creation of a just social order

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How to Do Nothing

When the technologies we use every day collapse our experiences into 24/7 availability, platforms for personal branding, and products to be monetized, nothing can be quite so radical as… doing nothing. Here, Jenny Odell sends up a flare from the heart of Silicon Valley, delivering an action plan to resist capitalist narratives of productivity and techno-determinism, and to become more meaningfully connected in the process.

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An Indigenous Peoples’ History Of The United States

An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States is a book written by the historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and published by Beacon Press. It is the third of a series of five ReVisioning books which reconstruct and reinterpret U.S. history from marginalized peoples’ perspectives.

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The New Jim Crow

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness is a book by Michelle Alexander, a civil rights litigator and legal scholar. The book discusses race-related issues specific to African-American males and mass incarceration in the United States, but Alexander noted that the discrimination faced by African-American males is prevalent among other minorities and socio-economically disadvantaged populations.

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266

Sapiens: A Brief History Of Humankind

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind is a book by Yuval Noah Harari, first published in Hebrew in Israel in 2011 based on a series of lectures Harari taught at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and in English in 2014. The book, focusing on Homo sapiens, surveys the history of humankind, starting from the Stone Age, and going up to the twenty-first century.

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When Breath Becomes Air

When Breath Becomes Air is a non-fiction autobiographical book written by American neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi. It is a memoir about his life and illness, battling stage IV metastatic lung cancer. It was posthumously published by Random House on January 12, 2016.

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Moneyball: The Art Of Winning An Unfair Game

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game is a book by Michael Lewis, published in 2003, about the Oakland Athletics baseball team and its general manager Billy Beane. Its focus is the team’s analytical, evidence-based, sabermetric approach to assembling a competitive baseball team despite Oakland’s small budget. A film based on Lewis’ book, starring Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill, was released in 2011.

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Evicted: Poverty And Profit In The American City

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City is a 2016 non-fiction book by the American author Matthew Desmond. Set in the poorest areas of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the book follows eight families struggling to pay rent to their landlords during the financial crisis of 2007–2008. It highlights the issues of extreme poverty, affordable housing, and economic exploitation in the United States.

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This Changes Everything: Capitalism Vs. The Climate By Naomi Klein

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate is Naomi Klein’s fourth book; it was published in 2014 by Simon & Schuster. In it, Klein argues that the climate crisis cannot be addressed in the current era of neoliberal market fundamentalism, which encourages profligate consumption and has resulted in mega-mergers and trade agreements hostile to the health of the environment.

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271

Dreamland

In fascinating detail, Sam Quinones chronicles how, over the past 15 years, enterprising sugar cane farmers in a small county on the west coast of Mexico created a unique distribution system that brought black tar heroin—the cheapest, most addictive form of the opiate, 2 to 3 times purer than its white powder cousin—to the veins of people across the United States.

The Warmth Of Other Suns

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (2010) is a historical study of the Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. This work tells the story of the Great Migration, the movement of Black Americans out of the Southern United States to the Midwest, Northeast and West from approximately 1915 to 1970.

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These Truths: A History Of The United States

These Truths: A History of the United States is a book of American history by historian Jill Lepore. It traces histories of American politics, law, society, and technology from the Age of Discovery through the present day. These Truths was published by W. W. Norton in September 2018.

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Behind The Beautiful Forevers

Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity is a non-fiction book written by the Pulitzer Prize-winner Katherine Boo in 2012. It won the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize among many others. It has also been adapted into a play by David Hare in 2014, shown on National Theatre Live in 2015.

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Nickel And Dimed

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America is a book written by Barbara Ehrenreich. Written from her perspective as an undercover journalist, it sets out to investigate the impact of the 1996 welfare reform act on the working poor in the United States. The events related in the book took place between spring 1998 and summer 2000.

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Blurred Lines

A new sexual revolution is sweeping the country, and college students are on the front lines. Few places in America have felt the influence of more intensely. Indeed, college campuses were in many ways the harbingers of . Grigoriadis captures the nature of this cultural reckoning without shying away from its complexity.

All The Single Ladies

In 2009, award-winning journalist Rebecca Traister started All the Single Ladies about the twenty-first century phenomenon of the American single woman. It was the year the proportion of American women who were married dropped below fifty percent; and the median age of first marriages, which had remained between twenty and twenty-two years old for nearly a century (1890–1980), had risen dramatically to twenty-seven.

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The Other Slavery

A landmark history — the sweeping story of the enslavement of tens of thousands of Indians across America, from the time of the conquistadors up to the early 20th century Since the time of Columbus, Indian slavery was illegal in much of the American continent. Yet, as Andrés Reséndez illuminates in his myth-shattering The Other Slavery, it was practiced for centuries as an open secret.

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Devil In The Grove

Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America is a 2012 non-fiction book by the American author Gilbert King. It is a history of the attorney Thurgood Marshall’s defense of four young black men in Lake County, Florida, who were accused in 1949 of raping a white woman.

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Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race

Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race is a 2017 debut book by British writer Reni Eddo-Lodge that was published by Bloomsbury Publishing. Marlon James wrote that it was “essential” and “begging to be written”.

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The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make A Big Difference

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference is the debut book by Malcolm Gladwell, first published by Little, Brown in 2000. Gladwell defines a tipping point as “the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point.” The book seeks to explain and describe the “mysterious” sociological changes that mark everyday life.

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Quiet

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking is a 2012 non-fiction book written by Susan Cain. Cain argues that modern Western culture misunderstands and undervalues the traits and capabilities of introverted people, leading to “a colossal waste of talent, energy, and happiness”.

The Age Of Surveillance Capitalism

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power is a 2019 non-fiction book by Professor Shoshana Zuboff which looks at the development of digital companies like Google and Amazon, and suggests that their business models represent a new form of capitalist accumulation that she calls “surveillance capitalism”.

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Freakonomics

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything is the debut non-fiction book by University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt and New York Times journalist Stephen J. Dubner. Published on April 12, 2005, by William Morrow, the book has been described as melding pop culture with economics. By late 2009, the book had sold over 4 million copies worldwide.

SPQR

SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome is a 2015 book by English classicist Mary Beard that was published in the United Kingdom by Profile Books and elsewhere by Liveright & Company. SPQR appeared on the hardcover, non-fiction bestseller list in December 2015.

The Uninhabitable Earth

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming is a 2019 book by David Wallace-Wells about the consequences of global warming. It was inspired by his New York magazine article “The Uninhabitable Earth” (2017). The book fleshes out Wallace-Wells’ original magazine piece in more detail, dovetailing into discussions surrounding various possibilities for Earth’s future across a spectrum of predicted future temperature ranges.

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The Silk Roads

The Silk Roads: A New History of the World is a 2015 non-fiction book written by Peter Frankopan, a historian at the University of Oxford. An illustrated abridged edition was illustrated by Neil Packer. Author Peter Frankopan is a historian at Worcester College, Oxford and director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research.

Why We Sleep

Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams is a popular science book about sleep by the neuroscientist and sleep researcher, Matthew Walker. Walker is a professor of neuroscience and psychology and the director of the Center for Human Sleep Science at the University of California, Berkeley.

How Language Works

In this fascinating survey of everything from how sounds become speech to how names work, David Crystal answers every question you might ever have had about the nuts and bolts of language in his usual highly illuminating way.

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Political Order And Political Decay

Writing in The Wall Street Journal, David Gress called Francis Fukuyama’s Origins of Political Order “magisterial in its learning and admirably immodest in its ambition.” In The New York Times Book Review, Michael Lind described the book as “a major achievement by one of the leading public intellectuals of our time.”

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Prisoners Of Geography

All leaders of nations are constrained by geography. Their choices are limited by mountains, rivers, seas, and concrete. To understand world events, news organizations and other authorities often focus on people, ideas, and political movements, but without geography, we never have the full picture.

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This Is Not Propaganda

This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality is a 2019 book by Peter Pomerantsev about disinformation and propaganda, particularly in Russia.

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Humans Of New York: Stories

In the summer of 2010, photographer Brandon Stanton began an ambitious project -to single-handedly create a photographic census of New York City. The photos he took and the accompanying interviews became the blog Humans of New York. In the first three years, his audience steadily grew from a few hundred to over one million. In 2013, his book Humans of New York, based on that blog, was published and immediately catapulted to the top of the NY Times Bestseller List.

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The Element

From one of the world’s leading thinkers and speakers on creativity and self-fulfillment, a breakthrough book about talent, passion, and achievement The element is the point at which natural talent meets personal passion. When people arrive at the element, they feel most themselves and most inspired and achieve at their highest levels.

Eating Animals

Eating Animals is the third book by the American novelist Jonathan Safran Foer, published in 2009. A New York Times best-seller, Eating Animals provides a dense discussion of what it means to eat animals in an industrialized world. It was written in close collaboration with Farm Forward, a nonprofit organization that implements innovative strategies to promote conscientious food choices, reduce farmed animal suffering, and advance sustainable agriculture.

Is That A Fish In Your Ear?

s That a Fish in Your Ear? offers readers new insight into the mystery of how we come to know what someone else means—whether we wish to understand Astérix cartoons or a foreign head of state. Using translation as his lens, David Bellos shows how much we can learn about ourselves by exploring the ways we use translation, from the historical roots of written language to the stylistic choices of Ingmar Bergman, from the United Nations General Assembly to the significance of James Cameron’s Avatar.

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Late Bloomers

Late bloomers, on the other hand, are undervalued in popular culture by educators and employers, and even unwittingly by parents. Yet the fact is, a lot of us – most of us – do not explode out of the gates in life. We have to discover our passions and talents and gifts.

How To Write An Autobiographical Novel

How to Write an Autobiographical Novel is the author’s manifesto on the entangling of life, literature, and politics, and how the lessons learned from a life spent reading and writing fiction have changed him. In these essays, he grows from student to teacher, reader to writer, and reckons with his identities as a son, a gay man, a Korean American, an artist, an activist, a lover, and a friend.

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The God Delusion

In The God Delusion, Dawkins contends that a supernatural creator, God, almost certainly does not exist, and that belief in a personal god qualifies as a delusion, which he defines as a persistent false belief held in the face of strong contradictory evidence. He is sympathetic to Robert Pirsig’s statement in Lila (1991) that “when one person suffers from a delusion it is called insanity.

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Afropean

Afropean is an on-the-ground documentary of areas where Europeans of African descent are juggling their multiple allegiances and forging new identities. Here is an alternative map of the continent, taking the reader to places like Cova Da Moura, the Cape Verdean shantytown on the outskirts of Lisbon with its own underground economy, and Rinkeby, the area of Stockholm that is eighty per cent Muslim.

A Secret Gift

An inspiring account of America at its worst-and Americans at their best-woven from the stories of Depression-era families who were helped by gifts from the author’s generous and secretive grandfather.

The Glass Castle

The Glass Castle is the 2005 memoir by the American author Jeannette Walls. In it, Walls recounts her deeply dysfunctional yet vibrant upbringing, emphasizing her resilience and her father’s attempts toward redemption. Despite her family dynamic’s profound flaws, the unconditional love held by her family allowed Walls to develop and maintain a fierce determination to create her own successful life, separate from them.

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Know My Name: A Memoir

In September 2019, Chanel Miller revealed herself as being “Emily Doe” in the People v. Turner case and released her book with the title, Know My Name: A Memoir, on September 24, 2019. She first began work on the book in 2017. The book was an attempt by Miller to reappropriate her narrative identity and describe the trauma she went through, after being referred to in the press as “unconscious intoxicated woman”.

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1491: New Revelations Of The Americas Before Columbus

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus is a 2005 non-fiction book by American author and science writer Charles C. Mann about the pre-Columbian Americas. It was the 2006 winner of the National Academies Communication Award for best creative work that helps the public understanding of topics in science, engineering or medicine.

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Bloodlands

Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin is a book by Yale historian Timothy D. Snyder that was first published by Basic Books on October 28, 2010. In this book, Snyder examines the political, cultural and ideological context tied to a specific region of Central and Eastern Europe, where Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union and Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany committed mass killings of an estimated 14 million noncombatants between 1933 and 1945, the majority outside the death camps of the Holocaust.

The Passage Of Power

The Passage of Power follows Lyndon Johnson through both the most frustrating and the most triumphant periods of his career—1958 to1964. It is a time that would see him trade the extraordinary power he had created for himself as Senate Majority Leader for what became the wretched powerlessness of a Vice President in an administration that disdained and distrusted him.

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Secondhand Time

Bringing together dozens of voices in her distinctive documentary style, Secondhand Time is a monument to the collapse of the USSR, charting the decline of Soviet culture and speculating on what will rise from the ashes of Communism.

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Dark Money

Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (2016) is a non-fiction book written by the American investigative journalist Jane Mayer, about a network of extremely wealthy conservative Republicans, foremost among them Charles and David Koch, who have together funded an array of organizations that work in tandem to influence academic institutions, think tanks, the courts, statehouses, Congress, and the American presidency for their own benefit.

Prairie Fires

Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder is a 2017 biography of Little House on the Prairie author Laura Ingalls Wilder, by Caroline Fraser. It was awarded the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize.

Frederick Douglass: Prophet Of Freedom

Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom is a 2018 biography of African-American abolitionist Frederick Douglass, written by historian David W. Blight. It was published in 2018 by Simon & Schuster and won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for History. In April 2019, it was reported that a feature film adaptation of the book is being produced by Barack Obama and Michelle Obama in partnership with Netflix.

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311

Say Nothing: A True History Of Memory And Murder In Northern Ireland

Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland is a 2018 book by Patrick Radden Keefe. The books focuses on The Troubles in Northern Ireland, beginning with the 1972 abduction and murder of Jean McConville. Keefe began researching and writing the book after reading the obituary for Dolours Price in 2013.

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312

The Beast

The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail is the first book by Salvadoran journalist Óscar Martínez. The book was originally published in Spanish in 2010 as The Migrants that Don’t Matter. It was translated into English in 2013 by Daniela Maria Ugaz and John B. Washington.

The House Of Government

The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution is a 2017 study of the history of the Russian Revolution, the formation of the Soviet Union, and its early history from the days of the New Economic Policy into the early days of Stalinist Rule by the Russian-born American historian Yuri Slezkine. The book consists of “three strains”:

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314

Ghosts Of The Tsunami

Ghosts Of The Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan’s Disaster Zone is a 2017 nonfiction book written by Richard Lloyd Parry, an English reporter who lived in Japan and reported about events there for years before the 2011 Japanese tsunami, in particular, the fatal decision-making leading to the drowning of the 74 students and 10 teachers of Okawa Elementary School.

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315

Birthday Letters

Birthday Letters, published in 1998, is a collection of poetry by English poet and children’s writer Ted Hughes. Released only months before Hughes’s death, the collection won multiple prestigious literary awards. This collection of eighty-eight poems is widely considered to be Hughes’s most explicit response to the suicide of his estranged wife Sylvia Plath in 1963, and to their widely discussed, politicized and “explosive” marriage.

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316

Awakenings

Awakenings is a 1973 non-fiction book by Oliver Sacks. It recounts the life histories of those who had been victims of the 1920s encephalitis lethargica epidemic. Sacks chronicles his efforts in the late 1960s to help these patients at the Beth Abraham Hospital (now Beth Abraham Center for Rehabilitation and Nursing) in the Bronx, New York.

The Female Eunuch

The Female Eunuch is a 1970 book by Germaine Greer that became an international bestseller and an important text in the feminist movement. Greer’s thesis is that the “traditional” suburban, consumerist, nuclear family represses women sexually, and that this devitalises them, rendering them eunuchs.

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318

Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom

Written in 1968 and revised in 1972, Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom was the first book to celebrate the language and the primal essence of rock ‘n’ roll. But it was much more than that. It was a cogent history of an unruly era, from the rise of Bill Haley to the death of Jimi Hendrix.

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319

Against Interpretation

Against Interpretation is a collection of essays by Susan Sontag published in 1966. It includes some of Sontag’s best-known works, including “On Style,” and the eponymous essay “Against Interpretation.” In the latter, Sontag argues that the new approach to criticism and aesthetics neglects the sensuous impact and novelty of art, instead fitting works into predetermined intellectual interpretations.

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320

A Grief Observed

A Grief Observed is a collection of C. S. Lewis’s reflections on the experience of bereavement following the death of his wife, Joy Davidman, in 1960. The book was first published in 1961 under the pseudonym N.W. Clerk, as Lewis wished to avoid identification as the author. Though republished in 1963, after his death, under his own name, the text still refers to his wife as “H”

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321

The Nude: A Study Of Ideal Art

From the art of the Greeks to that of Renoir and Moore, this work surveys the ever-changing fashions in what has constituted the ideal nude as a basis of humanist form.

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322

The Hedgehog And The Fox

The Hedgehog and the Fox is an essay by philosopher Isaiah Berlin—one of his most popular essays with the general public—which was published as a book in 1953. However, Berlin said, “I never meant it very seriously. I meant it as a kind of enjoyable intellectual game, but it was taken seriously. Every classification throws light on something”.

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323

A Book Of Mediterranean Food

A Book of Mediterranean Food was an influential cookery book written by Elizabeth David in 1950, her first, and published by John Lehmann. After years of rationing and wartime austerity, the book brought light and colour back to English cooking, with simple fresh ingredients, from David’s experience of Mediterranean cooking while living in France, Italy and Greece.

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324

The Great Tradition

The Great Tradition is a book of literary criticism written by F R Leavis, published in 1948 by Chatto & Windus. In his work, Leavis names Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad as the great English novelists. In all these eight, including Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Edgar Allan Poe, we have successors of Shakespeare.

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325

The Last Days Of Hitler

In September 1945, the fate of Hitler was a complete mystery. He had simply disappeared, missing for four months. The author, a British counter-intelligence officer, was given the task of solving this mystery. His brilliant piece of detective work not only proved that Hitler had killed himself in Berlin, but also produced one of the most fascinating history books ever written.

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326

The Open Society And Its Enemies

The Open Society and Its Enemies is a work on political philosophy by the philosopher Karl Popper, in which the author presents a “defence of the open society against its enemies”, and offers a critique of theories of teleological historicism, according to which history unfolds inexorably according to universal laws.

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327

Enemies Of Promise

Enemies of Promise is a critical and autobiographical work written by Cyril Connolly first published in 1938. It comprises three parts, the first dedicated to Connolly’s observations about English literature and the English literary world of his time, the second a list of adverse elements that affect the ability to be a good writer and the last an account of Connolly’s early life.

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328

The Road To Oxiana

The Road to Oxiana is a travelogue by the explorer Robert Byron, first published in 1937. It documents Byron’s travels around Persia and Afghanistan, and is considered one of the most influential travel books of the 1930s. The word “Oxiana” in the title refers to the ancient name for the region along Afghanistan’s northern border.

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329

The Waste Land

The Waste Land is a poem by T. S. Eliot, widely regarded as one of the most important poems of the 20th century and a central work of modernist poetry. Published in 1922, the 434-line poem first appeared in the United Kingdom in the October issue of Eliot’s The Criterion and in the United States in the November issue of The Dial.

Ten Days That Shook The World

Ten Days That Shook the World (1919) is a book by the American journalist and socialist John Reed. Here, Reed presented a firsthand account of the 1917 Russian October Revolution. Reed followed many of the most prominent Bolsheviks closely during his time in Russia.

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331

The Economic Consequences Of The Peace

The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919) is a book written and published by the British economist John Maynard Keynes. After the First World War, Keynes attended the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 as a delegate of the British Treasury. In his book, he argued for a much more generous peace.

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332

De Profundis

De Profundis (Latin: “from the depths”) is a letter written by Oscar Wilde during his imprisonment in Reading Gaol, to “Bosie” (Lord Alfred Douglas). In its first half, Wilde recounts their previous relationship and extravagant lifestyle which eventually led to Wilde’s conviction and imprisonment for gross indecency.

Brief Lives

Brief Lives is a collection of short biographies written by John Aubrey (1626–1697) in the last decades of the 17th century. Aubrey initially began collecting biographical material to assist the Oxford scholar Anthony Wood, who was working on his own collection of biographies.

Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant

The Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant is an autobiography by Ulysses S. Grant, the 18th President of the United States, focused mainly on his military career during the Mexican–American War and the American Civil War, and completed as he was dying of throat cancer in 1885. The two-volume set was published by Mark Twain shortly after Grant’s death.

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335

Travels With A Donkey In The Cévennes

Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879) is one of Robert Louis Stevenson’s earliest published works and is considered a pioneering classic of outdoor literature. Stevenson was in his late 20s and still dependent on his parents for support.

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336

Culture And Anarchy

Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism is a series of periodical essays by Matthew Arnold, first published in Cornhill Magazine 1867–68 and collected as a book in 1869. The preface was added in 1869. Arnold’s famous piece of writing on culture established his High Victorian cultural agenda which remained dominant in debate from the 1860s until the 1950s.

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337

On Liberty

On Liberty is a philosophical essay by the English philosopher John Stuart Mill. Published in 1859, it applies Mill’s ethical system of utilitarianism to society and state. Mill suggests standards for the relationship between authority and liberty. He emphasizes the importance of individuality, which he considers prerequisite to the higher pleasures—the summum bonum of utilitarianism.

The Wonderful Adventures Of Mrs. Seacole In Many Land

Mary Seacole was born a free black woman in Jamaica of the early 19th century. In her long and varied life, she was to travel in Central America, Russia and Europe, find work as a inn-keeper and as a doctress during the Crimean War, and become a famed heroine, the author of her own biography, in Britain. As this autobiography shows, Mary Seacole had a sharp instinct for hypocrisy as well as a ripe taste for sarcasm.

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339

King James Bible: The Authorised Version

The King James Version (KJV), also known as the King James Bible (KJB), is an English translation of the Christian Bible for the Church of England, commissioned in 1604 and completed as well as published seven years later in 1611 under the sponsorship of James VI and I.

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340

Civilization And Its Discontents

Civilization and Its Discontents is a book by Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. It was written in 1929 and first published in German in 1930 as Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (“The Uneasiness in Civilization”). Exploring what Freud sees as the important clash between the desire for individuality and the expectations of society, the book is considered one of Freud’s most important and widely read works.

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341

Lessons Of History

The Lessons of History is a 1968 book by historians Will Durant and Ariel Durant. The book provides a summary of periods and trends in history they had noted upon completion of the 10th volume of their momentous eleven-volume The Story of Civilization.

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342

The Denial Of Death

he Denial of Death is a 1973 work of psychology and philosophy by the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, in which the author builds on the works of Søren Kierkegaard, Sigmund Freud, Norman O. Brown and Otto Rank. It was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1974, two months after the author’s death. It is the main work responsible for the development of terror management theory.

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343

Man’s Search For Meaning

Man’s Search for Meaning is a 1946 book by Viktor Frankl chronicling his experiences as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps during World War II, and describing his psychotherapeutic method, which involved identifying a purpose in life to feel positive about, and then immersively imagining that outcome. According to Frankl, the way a prisoner imagined the future affected his longevity.

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344

The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany is a book by the journalist William L. Shirer, in which the author chronicles the rise and fall of Nazi Germany from the birth of Adolf Hitler in 1889 to the end of World War II in Europe in 1945. It was first published in 1960, by Simon & Schuster in the United States.

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345

The Swerve: How The World Became Modern

The Swerve: How the World Became Modern is a book by Stephen Greenblatt and winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction and 2011 National Book Award for Nonfiction. Greenblatt tells the story of how Poggio Bracciolini, a 15th-century papal emissary and obsessive book hunter, saved the last copy of the Roman poet Lucretius’s De rerum On the Nature of Things from near-terminal neglect in a German monastery, thus reintroducing important ideas that sparked the modern age.

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346

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments is a 1997 collection of nonfiction writing by David Foster Wallace. In the title essay, originally published in Harper’s as “Shipping Out”, Wallace describes the excesses of his one-week trip in the Caribbean aboard the cruise ship MV Zenith, which he rechristens the Nadir.

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347

Making It

There are many different ways in which a product can be manufactured, but most designers probably know only a handful of techniques in any detail. Using contemporary design as a vehicle to describe production processes, this book covers a broad range of almost 90 production methods with descriptive text, specially commissioned diagrams, product shots, and photographs of the manufacturing process.

Empire Of Pain

Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty is a 2021 book by Patrick Radden Keefe. The book examines the history of the Sackler family, many of whom were founders of Purdue Pharma, and their role in the opioid epidemic. The book followed Keefe’s 2017 article on the Sackler family in the The New Yorker, titled The Family That Built an Empire of Pain.

Everybody

The body is a source of pleasure and of pain, at once hopelessly vulnerable and radiant with power. In her ambitious, brilliant sixth book, Olivia Laing charts an electrifying course through the long struggle for bodily freedom, using the life of the renegade psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich to explore gay rights and sexual liberation, feminism, and the civil rights movement.

The Sleeping Beauties

Suzanne O’Sullivan’s THE SLEEPING BEAUTIES, an exploration of different aspects of psychosomatic disorders, mass hysteria, culture bound syndromes (a set of symptoms that exist only within a particular society), using as its starting point a particular case of more than 400 migrant children in Sweden who have fallen into a “waking coma”, to Dan Frank at Pantheon, in a pre-empt.

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351

Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man

In Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man, Acho takes on all the questions, large and small, insensitive and taboo, many white Americans are afraid to ask—yet which all Americans need the answers to, now more than ever. With the same open-hearted generosity that has made his video series a phenomenon, Acho explains the vital core of such fraught concepts as white privilege, cultural appropriation, and “reverse racism.”

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352

Dear Reader

For as long as she can remember, Cathy Rentzenbrink has lost and found herself in stories. Growing up she was rarely seen without her nose in a book and read in secret long after lights out. When tragedy struck, books kept her afloat. Eventually they lit the way to a new path, first as a bookseller and then as a writer. No matter what the future holds, reading will always help.

This Is Going To Hurt

This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor is a nonfiction book by the British comedy writer Adam Kay, published in 2017 by Picador. It is a collection of diary entries written by Kay during his medical training from 2004 to 2010. Kay’s book discusses political issues in the health care system of the National Health Service in the United Kingdom and societal conflicts between the general population and neglected doctors.

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354

Wayfinding

In this compelling narrative, O’Connor seeks out neuroscientists, anthropologists, and master navigators to understand how navigation ultimately gave us our humanity. Biologists have been trying to solve the mystery of how organisms have the ability to migrate and orient with such precision—especially since our own adventurous ancestors spread across the world without maps or instruments.

Seven And A Half Lessons About The Brain

From the author of How Emotions Are Made, a myth-busting primer on the brain in the tradition of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics and Astrophysics for People in a Hurry.

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356

Queer Intentions

Combining intrepid journalism with her own personal experience, Amelia Abraham searches for the answers to these urgent challenges, as well as the broader question of what it means to be queer in 2019. With curiosity, good humour and disarming openness, Amelia takes the reader on a thought-provoking and entertaining journey.

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357

It's Not About The Burqa

In 2016, Mariam Khan read that David Cameron had linked the radicalization of Muslim men to the ‘traditional submissiveness’ of Muslim women. Mariam felt pretty sure she didn’t know a single Muslim woman who would describe herself that way.

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358

A World On The Wing

In the past two decades, our understanding of the navigational and physiological feats that enable birds to cross immense oceans, fly above the highest mountains, or remain in unbroken flight for months at a stretch has exploded. What we’ve learned of these key migrations—how billions of birds circumnavigate the globe, flying tens of thousands of miles between hemispheres on an annual basis—is nothing short of extraordinary.

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359

Stronger

A survivor of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, who helped to set off one of the biggest manhunts in the country’s history, discusses his experiences that day and his ongoing mission to walk again after losing both legs. When he woke up on Tuesday, April 16th, 2013 in the Boston Medical Center, groggy from a series of lifesaving surgeries and missing his legs, the first thing he did was try to speak.

Brown Baby

Nikesh Shukla explores themes of racism, feminism, parenting and our shifting ideas of home. This heartbreaking, compelling, intensely relatable memoir is a love letter to the author’s late mother – who passed away just before his eldest daughter was born – and to his two young daughters.

More Myself

More Myself: A Journey is a book by American recording artist Alicia Keys, written with the assistance of writer Michelle Burford. The book is the first release on Oprah Winfrey’s imprint An Oprah Book. The book appeared at number three on The New York Times Best Seller list for Hardcover Nonfiction and at number four for Combined Print & E-Book Nonfiction.

The Book Collectors

Award-winning journalist Delphine Minoui recounts the true story of a band of young rebels in a besieged Syrian town, who find hope and connection making an underground library from the rubble of war.

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363

The Happiest Man on Earth

Eddie Jaku always considered himself a German first, a Jew second. He was proud of his country. But all of that changed in November 1938, when he was beaten, arrested and taken to a concentration camp.

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364

No Friend But The Mountains

No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison is an autobiographical account of Behrouz Boochani’s perilous journey to Christmas Island and his subsequent incarceration in an Australian government immigration detention facility on Manus Island.

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365

A World Beneath The Sands

A thrilling history of the West’s scramble for the riches of ancient Egypt by the foremost Egyptologist of our time. From the decipherment of hieroglyphics in 1822 to the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb by Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon a hundred years later, the uncovering of Egypt’s ancient past took place in an atmosphere of grand adventure and international rivalry.

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366

Thebes

In Thebes: The Forgotten City of Ancient Greece, acclaimed classicist and historian Paul Cartledge brings the city vividly to life and argues that it is central to our understanding of the ancient Greeks’ achievements—whether politically or culturally—and thus to the wider politico-cultural traditions of western Europe, the Americas, and indeed the world.

A House Through Time

People, many of whom have already embarked upon that great adventure of genealogical research, and who have encountered their ancestors in the archives and uncovered family secrets, are now turning to the secrets contained within the four walls of their homes and in doing so finding a direct link to earlier generations.

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368

Fake Law

Most of us think the law is only relevant to criminals, if we even think of it at all. But the law touches every area of our lives: from intimate family matters to the biggest issues in our society.

The Revolt

The Revolt also published as Revolt, The Revolt: Inside Story of the Irgun and The Revolt: the Dramatic Inside Story of the Irgun, is a book about the militant Zionist organization Irgun Zvai Leumi, by one of its principal leaders, Menachem Begin. In Israel, the organization is commonly called Etzel, based on its Hebrew acronym.

Promise Me, Dad

Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose is a 2017 memoir by then-former Vice President of the United States Joe Biden, who currently serves as 46th president of the United States of America. It was first published by Flatiron Books.

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371

Losing Earth

Losing Earth: A Recent History (published as Losing Earth: The Decade We Could Have Stopped Climate Change in the UK and Commonwealth markets) is a 2019 book written by Nathaniel Rich. The book is about the existence of scientific evidence for global warming for decades while it was politically denied, and the eventual damage that will occur as a result.

Antisocial

Antisocial ranges broadly—from the first mass-printed books to the trending hashtags of the present; from secret gatherings of neo-Fascists to the White House press briefing room—and traces how the unthinkable becomes thinkable, and then how it becomes reality.

Working Backwards

Colin started at Amazon in 1998; Bill joined in 1999. In Working Backwards, these two long-serving Amazon executives reveal and codify the principles and practices that drive the success of one of the most extraordinary companies the world has ever known.

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374

Growth IQ

Trying to find the one right move that will improve your business’s performance can feel overwhelming. But, as you’ll discover in Growth IQ, there are just ten simple–but easily misunderstood–paths to growth, and every successful growth strategy can be boiled down to picking the right combination and sequence of these paths for your current context.

My Life And Rugby

Eddie Jones took over as head coach of the England Rugby team in the autumn of 2015 after England’s dramatic exit from the World Cup. Currently on an unbeaten run of nine games, he has led England to both their first Grand Slam victory since 2003 and their first ever whitewash of Australia in Australia.

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376

Lights Out

This is the definitive history of General Electric’s epic decline, as told by the two Wall Street Journal reporters who covered its fall. Since its founding in 1892, GE has been more than just a corporation. For generations, it was job security, a solidly safe investment, and an elite business education for top managers.

What Happened To You?

This book is going to change the way you see your life. Have you ever wondered “Why did I do that?” or “Why can’t I just control my behavior?” Others may judge our reactions and think, “What’s wrong with that person?”

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378

Notes from Your Therapist

These bite-size words of wisdom cover everything from setting boundaries and navigating relationships to how to take good care of yourself. As she does in her practice, through these notes Dinneen seeks to cultivate emotional well-being, recognize the struggle of being human, and offer a nurturing, compassionate perspective.

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379

Nobody Tells You

This collection of more than 100 honest accounts, from the likes of Clemmie Telford, Molly Gunn, Megan Rose Lane, Anna Mathur and many more, is accompanied by reassuring advice from experts and personal stories that prove there’s no ‘right way’ to be a parent.

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380

The Kindness Method

The Kindness Method is the key to breaking unwanted habits—for good! Combining her own therapeutic style, personal experiences, and techniques learned from working in the field of substance abuse, Shahroo Izadi shares simple steps that strengthen your willpower like a muscle, allowing you to sustain your motivation and make lasting change in your life.

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381

Ties That Bind, Ties That Break

Ties That Bind, Ties That Break is a young adult novel by Lensey Namioka, published in 1999. The novel tells the story of a girl who defied tradition in China in the early 1900s and later moved to the United States. It received the Washington State Book Award in 2000. A sequel, An Ocean Apart, A World Away, follows the story of Ailin’s friend, Xueyan.

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382

The Phantom of the Opera

The Phantom of the Opera is a novel by French author Gaston Leroux. It was first published as a serial in Le Gaulois from 23 September 1909 to 8 January 1910, and was released in volume form in late March 1910 by Pierre Lafitte.

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