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#01
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Author:
Times Recommended: 0
#02
Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism
Author: Sarah Wynn-Williams
Times Recommended: 1
#1 New York Times Bestseller A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK. NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY TIME , THE NEW YORKER , NPR , AP , THE ECONOMIST , SLATE , THE GLOBE AND MAIL , SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, AND MORE! “ Careless People is darkly funny and genuinely shocking...Not only does [Sarah Wynn-Williams] have the storytelling chops to unspool a gripping narrative; she also delivers the goods." -Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times “When one of the world’s most powerful media companies tries to snuff out a book ― amid other alarming attacks on free speech in America like this ― it’s time to pull out all the stops.” –Ron Charles , The Washington Post An explosive memoir charting one woman’s career at the heart of one of the most influential companies on the planet, Careless People gives you a front-row seat to Facebook, the decisions that have shaped world events in recent decades, and the people who made them. From trips on private jets and encounters with world leaders to shocking accounts of misogyny and double standards behind the scenes, this searing memoir exposes both the personal and the political fallout when unfettered power and a rotten company culture take hold. In a gripping and often absurd narrative where a few people carelessly hold the world in their hands, this eye-opening memoir reveals what really goes on among the global elite. Sarah Wynn-Williams tells the wrenching but fun story of Facebook, mapping its rise from stumbling encounters with juntas to Mark Zuckerberg’s reaction when he learned of Facebook’s role in Trump’s election. She experiences the challenges and humiliations of working motherhood within a pressure cooker of a workplace, all while Sheryl Sandberg urges her and others to “lean in.” Careless People is a deeply personal account of why and how things have gone so horribly wrong in the past decade―told in a sharp, candid, and utterly disarming voice. A deep, unflinching look at the role that social media has assumed in our lives, Careless People reveals the truth about the leaders of Facebook: how the more power they grasp, the less responsible they become and the consequences this has for all of us.
#03
Jules, Penny & The Rooster
Authors: Daniel Pinkwater , Elizabeth Story
Times Recommended: 1
Internationally bestselling author Daniel Pinkwater (The Big Orange Splot) brings his zany wit and wisdom to the magical adventures of a clever girl and her brave dog. Told with warmth and wit, this is a delightful exploration of growing up, the power of family, and how sometimes the best things in life happen when you least expect them. “Now what could be more fun than that?,’ they ask in Jules, Penny & The Rooster , and the only possible answer is the entirety of Pinkwater’s book itself―girl adepts, telepathic dogs, largehearted aunts, dancing fauns, magic museums, characters named Hamantaschen, and all.” ― Mark London Williams, author of the Danger Boy series and Max Random and the Zombie 500 Jules McShultz was promised a dog. Supposedly, she’d get one once her family moved from the city to the suburbs. But then her parents decided it still wasn’t the right time. So, Jules does what any intelligent girl would do. Instead of sulking, she enters an essay contest and wins first prize: A purebred Collie. And no one―not even Jules’ parents―can resist Penny, who is clearly Jules’s perfect new canine pal. Jules and Penny are ready to spend the summer exploring the woods by the house. But the woods are not at all what they seem to be. Magic and adventure await them just on the other side of an old stone wall.
#04
Little Bosses Everywhere: How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America
Author: Bridget Read
Times Recommended: 1
A “gripping” ( The Washington Post ) work of history and reportage that unveils the stranger-than-fiction world of multilevel marketing: a massive money-making scam and radical political conspiracy that has remade American society. “Reads like a thriller . . . masterfully illuminates the tricks and sleights of hand that in multilevel marketing are simply the rules of doing business.”— The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice) A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: THE WASHINGTON POST , NPR, PUBLISHERS WEEKLY Companies like Amway, Mary Kay, and Herbalife advertise the world’s greatest opportunity: the chance to be your own boss via an enigmatic business model called multilevel marketing, or MLM. They offer a world of pink Cadillacs, white-columned mansions, tropical vacations, and—most precious of all—financial freedom. If, that is, you’re willing to shell out for expensive products and recruit everyone you know to buy them, and if they recruit everyone they know, too, thus creating the “multiple levels” of MLM. Overwhelming evidence suggests that most people lose money in multilevel marketing, and that many MLM companies are pyramid schemes. Yet the industry’s origins, tied to right-wing ideologues like Ronald Reagan, have escaped public scrutiny. MLM has slithered in the wake of every economic crisis of the last century, from the Depression to the pandemic, ensnaring laid-off workers, stay-at-home moms, and teachers—anyone who has been left behind by rising inequality. In Little Bosses Everywhere , journalist Bridget Read tells the gripping story of multilevel marketing in full for the first time, winding from sunny postwar California, where a failed salesman started a vitamin business, through the devoutly religious suburbs of Michigan, where the industry built its political influence, to stadium-size conventions where today’s top sellers preach to die-hard recruits. MLM has enriched powerful people, like the DeVos and Van Andel families, Warren Buffett, and President Donald Trump, all while eroding public institutions and the social safety net, then profiting from the chaos. Along the way, Read delves into the stories of those devastated by the majority-female industry: a veteran in Florida searching for healing; a young mom in Texas struggling to feed her children; a waitress scraping by in Brooklyn. A wild trip down an endless rabbit hole of greed and exploitation, Little Bosses Everywhere exposes multilevel marketing as American capitalism’s stealthiest PR campaign, a cunning grift that has shaped nearly everything about how we live, and whose ultimate target is democracy itself.
#05
Manipulation: What It Is, Why It's Bad, What to Do About It
Author: Cass R. Sunstein
Times Recommended: 1
New technologies are offering companies, politicians, and others unprecedented opportunity to manipulate us. Sometimes we are given the illusion of power - of freedom - through choice, yet the game is rigged, pushing us in specific directions that lead to less wealth, worse health, and weaker democracy. In, Manipulation, nudge theory pioneer and New York Times bestselling author, Cass Sunstein, offers a new definition of manipulation for the digital age, explains why it is wrong; and shows what we can do about it. He reveals how manipulation compromises freedom and personal agency, while threatening to reduce our well-being; he explains the difference between manipulation and unobjectionable forms of influence, including 'nudges'; and he lifts the lid on online manipulation and manipulation by artificial intelligence, algorithms, and generative AI, as well as threats posed by deepfakes, social media, and 'dark patterns,' which can trick people into giving up time and money. Drawing on decades of groundbreaking research in behavioral science, this landmark book outlines steps we can take to counteract manipulation in our daily lives and offers guidance to protect consumers, investors, and workers.
#06
Small Is Beautiful [Paperback] [Jan 01, 1993] E F Schumacher
Author: E.F. Schumacher
Times Recommended: 1
Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered is a collection of essays by British economist E. F. Schumacher. The phrase "Small Is Beautiful" came from a phrase by his teacher Leopold Kohr
#07
The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000
Author: Paul Kennedy
Times Recommended: 2
About national and international power in the "modern" or Post Renaissance period. Explains how the various powers have risen and fallen over the 5 centuries since the formation of the "new monarchies" in W. Europe.
#08
BoyMom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity
Author: Ruth Whippman
Times Recommended: 1
Combining painfully honest memoir, cultural analysis, and reporting, BoyMom is a humorous and heartbreaking deep dive into the complexities of raising boys in our fraught political moment. “Rapist, school-shooter, incel, man-child, interrupter, mansplainer, boob-starer, birthday forgetter, frat boy, dude-bro, homophobe, self-important stoner, emotional-labor abstainer, non-wiper of kitchen counters. Trying to raise good sons suddenly felt like a hopeless task.” As the culture wars rage, and masculinity has been politicized from all sides, feminist writer and mother of three boys Ruth Whippman finds herself conflicted and scared. While the right pushes a dangerous vision of fantasy manhood, her feminist peers often dismiss boys as little more than entitled predators-in-waiting. Meanwhile her home life feels like a daily confrontation with the triumph of nature over nurture. With young men in the grip of a loneliness epidemic and dying by suicide at a rate of nearly four times their female peers, Whippman asks: How do we raise our sons to have a healthy sense of self without turning them into privileged assholes? How can we find a feminism that holds boys to a higher standard but still treats them with empathy? And what do we do when our boys won’t cooperate with our plans? Whippman digs into the impossibly contradictory pressures boys now face; and the harmful blind spots of male socialization that are leaving boys isolated, emotionally repressed, and adrift. Feminist gonzo-style, she spends months interviewing incels, reports on a conference for boys accused of sexual assault; crashes at a residential therapy center for young men in Utah, talks to a wide range of psychologists and other experts, and gets boys of all backgrounds to open up about sex, consent, porn, body image, mental health, cancel culture, screens, friendship and loneliness. Along the way, she finds her simple certainties about male privilege seriously challenged. With wit, honesty, and a refusal to settle for easy answers, BoyMom charts a new path to give boys a healthier, more expansive, and fulfilling story about their own lives.
#09
On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World
Author: Danya Ruttenberg
Times Recommended: 1
Winner NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARDS in Contemporary Jewish Life & Practice Myra H. Kraft Memorial Award A crucial new lens on repentance, atonement, forgiveness, and repair from harm—from personal transgressions to our culture's most painful and unresolved issues. American culture focuses on letting go of grudges and redemption narratives instead of the perpetrator’s obligations or recompense for harmed parties. As survivor communities have pointed out, these emphases have too often only caused more harm. But Danya Ruttenberg knew there was a better model, rooted in the work of the medieval philosopher Maimonides. For Maimonides, upon whose work Ruttenberg elaborates, forgiveness is much less important than the repair work to which the person who caused harm is obligated. The word traditionally translated as repentance really means something more like return, and in this book, returning is a restoration, as much as is possible, to the victim, and, for the perpetrator of harm, a coming back, in humility and intentionality, to behaving as the person we might like to believe we are. Maimonides laid out five steps: naming and owning harm; starting to change/transformation; restitution and accepting consequences; apology; and making different choices. Applying this lens to both our personal relationships and some of the most significant and painful issues of our day, including systemic racism and the legacy of enslavement, sexual violence and harassment in the wake of #MeToo, and Native American land rights, On Repentance and Repair helps us envision a way forward. Rooted in traditional Jewish concepts while doggedly accessible and available to people from any, or no, religious background, On Repentance and Repair is a book for anyone who cares about creating a country and culture that is more whole than the one in which we live, and for anyone who has been hurt or who is struggling to take responsibility for their mistakes.
#10
Talk to Your Boys: 16 Conversations to Help Tweens and Teens Grow into Confident, Caring Young Men
Authors: Joanna Schroeder , Christopher Pepper
Times Recommended: 1
USA TODAY BEST-SELLER. An urgent and practical book that helps parents and their boys navigate important topics like sex, drugs, bullying, power, consent, and more in a way that helps them grow their emotional intelligence, while also building connection and a closeness that can last a lifetime. Talk to your Boys is a practical guide to communicating with your tween and teen boy with the goal of raising young men who care about themselves and others. The book focuses on 16 essential and wide‑ranging conversations on mental health and masculinity, sex and consent, money and power, violence and guns, and more. Packed with helpful advice, conversation starters, tips and scripts, Talk to Your Boys is designed to help families get better at having these crucial, but sometimes awkward, discussions with the larger goal to raise emotionally intelligent men who aren't hemmed in by outdated ideas of masculinity. Co‑authors Joanna Schroeder, a parenting journalist, and Christopher Pepper, an award‑winning educator, have a real understanding of how challenging it is to navigate the ever‑changing worlds of teenagers with compassion and wisdom—especially when one has multiple children at different stages of development. Their practical advice is woven together with interviews with the leading experts in psychology, gender issues, and child development along with the voices and perspectives from dozens of teen boys from different backgrounds.
#11
The Politics of Ritual
Author: Molly Farneth
Times Recommended: 1
An illuminating look at the transformative role that rituals play in our political lives The Politics of Ritual is a major new account of the political power of rituals. In this incisive and wide-ranging book, Molly Farneth argues that rituals are social practices in which people create, maintain, and transform themselves and their societies. Far from mere scripts or mechanical routines, rituals are dynamic activities bound up in processes of continuity and change. Emphasizing the significance of rituals in democratic engagement, Farneth shows how people adapt their rituals to redraw the boundaries of their communities, reallocate goods and power within them, and cultivate the habits of citizenship. Transforming our understanding of rituals and their vital role in the political conflicts and social movements of our time, The Politics of Ritual examines a broad range of rituals enacted to just and democratic ends, including border Eucharists, candlelight vigils, and rituals of mourning. This timely book makes a persuasive case for an innovative democratic ritual life that can enable people to create and sustain communities that are more just, inclusive, and participatory than those in which they find themselves.
#12
Context Collapse: A Poem Containing a History of Poetry
Author: Ryan Ruby
Times Recommended: 1
Literary critic Ryan Ruby uncovers the secret history of poetry in a mock-academic verse essay filled with wit and wisdom. One of Publishers Weekly 's Best Books of 2024 Prophet. Entertainer. Courtier. Criminal. Revolutionary. Critic. Scholar. Nobody. Epic in sweep, Context Collapse is the secret history of the poet—from Bronze Age Greece and Renaissance Italy to the cafés of Grub Street and the Latin Quarter, from the creative writing departments of the American Midwest to the boardrooms of Silicon Valley. Cheekily introducing academic discourse, media studies, cybersemiotics, literary sociology, and heterodox economics into his blank verse study of poetry, Ruby traces the always delicate dance between poets, their publishers, and their audiences, and shows how, time and time again, the social, technological, and aesthetic experiments that appear in poetic language have prefigured radical changes to the ways of life of millions of people. It is precisely to poets to whom we ought to turn to catch a glimpse, as Shelley once put it, of the “gigantic shadows futurity casts on the present.”
#13
Diary of a Madman, and other stories
Authors: Lu Xun , William A. Lyell
Times Recommended: 1
"Here at last is an accurate and enjoyable rendering of Lu Xun's fiction in an American English idiom that masterfully captures the sardonic wit, melancholy pathos, and ironic vision of China's first truly modern writer." -Michael S. Duke, University of British Columbia The inventor of the modern Chinese short story, Lu Xun is universally regarded as twentieth century China’s greatest writer. This long awaited volume presents new translations of all Lu Xun’s stories, including his first, “Remembrances of the Past,” written in classical Chinese. These new renderings faithfully convey both the brilliant style and the pungent expression for which Lu Xun is famous. Also included are a substantial introduction by the translator and sufficient annotation to make the stories fully accessible, enabling readers approaching Lu Xun for the first time to appreciate why these stories occupy a permanent place not only in Chinese literature but in world literature as well.
#14
Southern Tour, The: Deng Xiaoping and the Fight for China's Future (Asian Arguments)
Authors: Jonathan Chatwin , Paul French
Times Recommended: 1
A History Today Book of the Year 2024 On a freezing January afternoon in 1992, Deng Xiaoping, China's former paramount leader and now a revered elder statesman, set off on a month long trip around China's south in defence of the reforms he had set in motion to open up China's economy and transform the country into the political and economic powerhouse we know today. In this book Jonathan Chatwin pursues the story of Deng's legendary "Southern Tour" and examines its legacies in the country today. Chatwin recounts the crucial debates and disagreements that characterised Chinese politics in the aftermath of the brutal crackdown of the Tiananmen protests of 1989, and the decisive influence of Deng's journey in establishing an economic blueprint for the 1990s and beyond. He explores a nation which has been transformed by large-scale urbanisation - exemplified by the mega-cities of southern China that Deng visited and endorsed - but whose leadership is now conflicted by the pursuit of wealth that Deng legitimized. Drawing on historical and contemporary eyewitness accounts, and the author's own 3000 mile journey in Deng's footsteps, The Southern Tour brings to life the story of China's transformation into a 21st-century superpower.
#15
Dollars and Dominion: US Bankers and the Making of a Superpower (America in the World)
Author: Professor Mary Bridges
Times Recommended: 1
How the creation of a new banking infrastructure in the early twentieth century established the United States as a global financial power The dominance of US multinational businesses today can seem at first like an inevitable byproduct of the nation’s superpower status. In Dollars and Dominion , Mary Bridges tells a different origin story. She explores the ramshackle beginnings of US financial power overseas, showing that US bankers in the early twentieth century depended on the US government, European know-how, and last-minute improvisation to sustain their work abroad. Bridges focuses on an underappreciated piece of the nation’s financial infrastructure—the overseas branch bank—as a brick-and-mortar foundation for expanding US commercial influence. Bridges explores how bankers sorted their new communities into “us”—potential clients—and “them”—local populations, who often existed on the periphery of the banking world. She argues that US bankers mapped their new communities by creating foreign credit information—and by using a financial asset newly enabled by the Federal Reserve System, the bankers’ acceptance, in the process. In doing so, they constructed a new architecture of US trade finance that relied on long-standing inequalities and hierarchies of privilege. Thus, racialized, class-based, and gendered ideas became baked into the financial infrastructure. Contrary to conventional wisdom, there was nothing inevitable or natural about the rise of US finance capitalism. Bridges shows that US foreign banking was a bootstrapped project that began as a side hustle of Gilded Age tycoons and sustained itself by relying on the power of the US state, copying the example of British foreign bankers, and building alliances with local elites. In this way, US bankers constructed a flexible and durable new infrastructure to support the nation’s growing global power.
#16
Nonesuch: A Novel
Author: Francis Spufford
Times Recommended: 1
A spellbinding tale about an ambitious young woman who must thwart an occult plot by time-traveling fascists during the chaos of the London Blitz—from “one of our most powerful writers of wayward historical fiction” ( The Washington Post ). Following the acclaim of his previous novels Golden Hill and Cahokia Jazz , Francis Spufford delivers a masterpiece of literary fantasy, hailed by Joe Hill as “a book that scoops up all the wonder and hope and pleasure of the Narnia novels, and pours it into a story for grown-ups.” It’s the summer of 1939, and the air in London is thick with the tension of impending war. Iris Hawkins, a fiery young financial secretary, has a chance encounter with Geoff, a genius engineer from the new technology of television. What was supposed to be one night of abandon draws her instead into a nightmare of otherworldly pursuit—into a reality where time bends, spirits can be summoned, and history hangs by a thread. Soon there are Nazi planes droning overhead. In a time when death falls randomly from above each night, when the streets are darker than the wildest forest and all the men are away in uniform, the defense of the city is in the hands of its women. But Iris has more to contend with than just the terrors of the Blitz. Over the rooftops of burning London, in the twisted passages between past and present, through the vast night sky and across the tiny screens of early television, a fascist fanatic is travelling with a gun in her hand, and only Iris can stop her from altering the course of history forever. Both a thrilling page-turner and a profound exploration of ambition, love, and the fight against tyranny, Nonesuch is a story that is as enchanting as it is urgent. Packed with twists, tension, and wonder, it is a triumph of storytelling.
#17
The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game
Author: C. Thi Nguyen
Times Recommended: 1
“Mind-expanding . . . The Score is so exuberant and readable that the depth and seriousness of its insights almost sneak up on you.” —Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times “Brilliant and wildly original . . . The Score is socially attentive, historically literate and imbued with sensual glee.” —Becca Rothfeld, The Washington Post “I give this excellent book five stars.” — Stuart Jeffries, Financial Times A philosophy of games to help us win back control over what we value The philosopher C. Thi Nguyen—one of the leading experts on the philosophy of games and the philosophy of data—takes us deep into the heart of games, and into the depths of bureaucracy, to see how scoring systems shape our desires. Games are the most important art form of our era. They embody the spirit of free play. They show us the subtle beauty of action everywhere in life in video games, sports, and boardgames—but also cooking, gardening, fly-fishing, and running. They remind us that it isn’t always about outcomes, but about how glorious it feels to be doing the thing. And the scoring systems help get us there, by giving us new goals to try on. Scoring systems are also at the center of our corporations and bureaucracies—in the form of metrics and rankings. They tell us exactly how to measure our success. They encourage us to outsource our values to an external authority. And they push on us to value simple, countable things. Metrics don’t capture what really matters; they only capture what’s easy to measure. The price of that clarity is our independence. The Score asks us is this the game you really want to be playing?
#18
Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America - Updated Edition (Politics and Society in Modern America)
Author: Mae M. Ngai
Times Recommended: 1
This book traces the origins of the "illegal alien" in American law and society, explaining why and how illegal migration became the central problem in U.S. immigration policy―a process that profoundly shaped ideas and practices about citizenship, race, and state authority in the twentieth century. Mae Ngai offers a close reading of the legal regime of restriction that commenced in the 1920s―its statutory architecture, judicial genealogies, administrative enforcement, differential treatment of European and non-European migrants, and long-term effects. She shows that immigration restriction, particularly national-origin and numerical quotas, remapped America both by creating new categories of racial difference and by emphasizing as never before the nation's contiguous land borders and their patrol.
#19
Meditations for Mortals
Author: Oliver Burkeman
Times Recommended: 1
A National Bestseller Addressing the fundamental questions about how to live, Meditations for Mortals offers a powerful new way to take action on what counts: a guiding philosophy of life Oliver Burkeman calls “imperfectionism.” It helps us tackle challenges as they crop up in our daily lives: our finite time, the lure of distraction, the impossibility of doing anything perfectly, the feeling that the world is spinning out of control. How can we embrace our nonnegotiable limitations? Or make good decisions when there’s always too much to do? How do we shed the illusion that life will really begin as soon as we can “get on top of everything”? Reflecting on quotations drawn from philosophy, religion, literature, psychology, and self-help, Burkeman explores a combination of practical tools and daily shifts in perspective. The result is a life-enhancing and surprising challenge to much familiar advice―and a profound yet entertaining crash course in living more fully. To be either read as a four-week “retreat of the mind” or devoured in one or two sittings, Meditations for Mortals will be a source of solace and inspiration, and an aid to a saner, freer, and more enchantment-filled life. In anxiety-inducing times, it is rich in truths we have never needed more.
#20
Solito: A Read with Jenna Pick: A Memoir
Author: Javier Zamora
Times Recommended: 1
New York Times Bestseller • Read With Jenna Book Club Pick as seen on Today • Winner of the Los Angeles Times Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiography • Winner of the American Library Association Alex Award • A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Century A young poet tells the inspiring story of his migration from El Salvador to the United States at the age of nine in this “gripping memoir” (NPR) of bravery, hope, and finding family. Finalist for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction • One of the New York Public Library’s Ten Best Books of the Year Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence and the PEN/Open Book Award “ I read Solito with my heart in my throat and did not burst into tears until the last sentence. What a person, what a writer, what a book. ” —Emma Straub “A riveting tale of perseverance and the lengths humans will go to help each other in times of struggle.”—Dave Eggers ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, NPR, The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Vulture, She Reads, Kirkus Reviews Trip. My parents started using that word about a year ago—“one day, you’ll take a trip to be with us. Like an adventure.” Javier Zamora’s adventure is a three-thousand-mile journey from his small town in El Salvador, through Guatemala and Mexico, and across the U.S. border. He will leave behind his beloved aunt and grandparents to reunite with a mother who left four years ago and a father he barely remembers. Traveling alone amid a group of strangers and a “coyote” hired to lead them to safety, Javier expects his trip to last two short weeks. At nine years old, all Javier can imagine is rushing into his parents’ arms, snuggling in bed between them, and living under the same roof again. He cannot foresee the perilous boat trips, relentless desert treks, pointed guns, arrests and deceptions that await him; nor can he know that those two weeks will expand into two life-altering months alongside fellow migrants who will come to encircle him like an unexpected family. A memoir as gripping as it is moving, Solito provides an immediate and intimate account not only of a treacherous and near-impossible journey, but also of the miraculous kindness and love delivered at the most unexpected moments. Solito is Javier Zamora’s story, but it’s also the story of millions of others who had no choice but to leave home.
#21
Last Branch Standing: A Potentially Surprising, Occasionally Witty Journey Inside Today's Supreme Court
Author: Sarah Isgur
Times Recommended: 1
A myth-busting glimpse into the inner workings of the Supreme Court, revealing what we get wrong about the Roberts Court, what the justices' clerks gossip about, and how to fix a court in crisis—from the popular ABC news pundit and top legal podcaster "Isgur has all your answers in these smart, snappy, clear-eyed pages.” —Stacy Schiff, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams Most people get the Supreme Court all wrong. A smattering of high-profile decisions have popularized a simplistic idea of the Court and its justices. Yes, six of them were appointed by Republicans, and only three by Democrats. So, how does that 6-3 conservative majority explain why in the 2024-25 term, conservative Brett Kavanaugh was more likely to agree with liberal Elena Kagan than conservative Neil Gorsuch? Or why the court threw shade at Florida’s attempt to ban drag shows? To truly understand the Court, argues Sarah Isgur, you have to look beyond partisan politics—the “X-Axis.” The wisest court watchers apply another measuring stick, the “Y-Axis," where the nine justices span from order-loving institutionalists to true chaos agents. Once you appreciate these overlapping and even competing impulses, the Court begins to look a lot more like a 3-3-3 split than 6-3. The ultimate insider , Isgur takes readers on a deep dive inside the Supreme Court: how cases land at the Court’s doorstep, which justices attend clerk happy hours (and which ones even bother showing up to the office), why conservatives already have buyer’s remorse about Amy Coney Barrett, and how the whole judicial system is kind of a constitutional anomaly. She’ll even help you decide whether you should throw your hat in the ring and go to law school! Blending irreverent humor and incisive commentary, Isgur goes underneath the robes—and shows us what we need to do to preserve the rule of law amid dicey times in this little self-governing experiment we’ve been running for the last 250 years.
#22
Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents That Forged the Republic
Author: Lindsay M. Chervinsky
Times Recommended: 1
An authoritative account of the second president of the United States that shows how John Adams's leadership and legacy defined the office for those who followed and ensured the survival of the American republic. The United States of 1797 faced enormous challenges, provoked by enemies foreign and domestic. The father of the new nation, George Washington, left his vice president, John Adams, with relatively little guidance and impossible expectations to meet. Adams was confronted with intense partisan divides, debates over citizenship, fears of political violence, potential for foreign conflict with France and Britain, and a nation unsure that the presidency could even work without Washington at the helm. Making the Presidency is an authoritative exploration of the second US presidency, a period critical to the survival of the American republic. Through meticulous research and engaging prose, Lindsay Chervinsky illustrates the unique challenges faced by Adams and shows how he shaped the office for his successors. One of the most qualified presidents in American history, he had been a legislator, political theorist, diplomat, minister, and vice president--but he had never held an executive position. Instead, the quixotic and stubborn Adams would rely on his ideas about executive power, the Constitution, politics, and the state of the world to navigate the hurdles of the position. He defended the presidency from his own often obstructionist cabinet, protected the nation from foreign attacks, and forged trust and dedication to election integrity and the peaceful transfer of power between parties, even though it cost him his political future. Offering a portrait of one of the most fascinating and influential periods in US history, Making the Presidency is a must-read for anyone interested in the evolution of the presidency and the creation of political norms and customs at the heart of the American republic.
#23
Jesus and the Disinherited
Authors: Howard Thurman , Kelly Brown Douglas
Times Recommended: 1
Famously known as the text that Martin Luther King Jr. sought inspiration from in the days leading up to the Montgomery bus boycott, Howard Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited helped shape the civil rights movement and changed our nation’s history forever. In this classic theological treatise, the acclaimed theologian and religious leader Howard Thurman (1900-1981) demonstrates how the gospel may be read as a manual of resistance for the poor and disenfranchised. Jesus is a partner in the pain of the oppressed and the example of His life offers a solution to ending the descent into moral nihilism. Hatred does not empower--it decays. Only through self-love and love of one another can God's justice prevail.
#24
Lonesome Dove: A Novel
Authors: Larry McMurtry , Taylor Sheridan
Times Recommended: 3
The 40th anniversary edition of the Pulitzer Prize–winning classic of the American West, with a new foreword by Yellowstone cocreator Taylor Sheridan. An epic of the frontier, Lonesome Dove is the grandest novel ever written about the last defiant wilderness . Journey to the dusty little town of Lonesome Dove , where retired Texas Rangers Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call undertake a perilous cattle drive to the untamed plains of Montana. Along the way, they face danger, adventure, and an unforgettable cast of characters. Richly authentic and beautifully written, Lonesome Dove is a story of love, loss, and the unyielding spirit of the American West.
#25
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This: National Book Award
Author: Omar El Akkad
Times Recommended: 3
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • PALESTINE BOOK AWARD WINNER • LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR CRITICISM • From award-winning novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad comes a powerful reckoning with what it means to live in a West that betrays its fundamental values. "[A] bracing memoir and manifesto." — The New York Times "I can’t think of a more important piece of writing to read right now. I found hope here, and help, to face what the world is now, all that it isn’t anymore. Please read this. I promise you won’t regret it." —Tommy Orange, bestselling author of Wandering Stars and There There On October 25, 2023, after just three weeks of the bombardment of Gaza, Omar El Akkad put out a tweet: “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.” This tweet has been viewed more than 10 million times. As an immigrant who came to the West, El Akkad believed that it promised freedom. A place of justice for all. But in the past twenty years, reporting on the War on Terror, Ferguson, climate change, Black Lives Matter protests, and more, and watching the unmitigated slaughter in Gaza, El Akkad has come to the conclusion that much of what the West promises is a lie. That there will always be entire groups of human beings it has never intended to treat as fully human—not just Arabs or Muslims or immigrants, but whoever falls outside the boundaries of privilege. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is a chronicle of that painful realization, a moral grappling with what it means, as a citizen of the U.S., as a father, to carve out some sense of possibility in a time of carnage. This is El Akkad’s nonfiction debut, his most raw and vulnerable work to date, a heartsick breakup letter with the West. It is a brilliant articulation of the same breakup we are watching all over the United States, in family rooms, on college campuses, on city streets; the consequences of this rupture are just beginning. This book is for all the people who want something better than what the West has served up. This is the book for our time.
#26
The Hill: A Novel
Author: Harriet Clark
Times Recommended: 1
After her mother is sentenced to life in a hilltop prison, Suzanna vows to return to the hill forever. An unexpectedly funny and deeply moving novel about the many ways we punish and return to each other. Suzanna Klein was a baby when her mother got up early one morning to rob a bank with a group of fellow radicals. Now, every Saturday, Suzanna lines up at the prison gates among the other children, each dressed as if for celebration. Inside there is a nursery and a cemetery; there are watchful guards and distractable nuns; there are women counting down to release and women like Suzanna’s mother, who will never be released. At home, Suzanna is raised by her grandmother, who is entirely unforgiving of her daughter’s crime and refuses to visit the prison. Surrounding Suzanna are her grandmother’s friends, who know one another from their years in the Communist Party and still spend extended cocktail hours debating the Hitler-Stalin pact. Though these women once insisted on changing the world, they are torn between teaching Suzanna how the world works and shielding her from it. Suzanna vows to return to the prison forever but her mother wants her to be free. Harriet Clark’s The Hill is an incandescent novel of a child growing up between worlds, the last of three generations whose fates have been tied to punishment. It is the tale of a family broken apart by the desire for change, told with irreverent wisdom and visionary force. The Hill brings new music to American fiction.
#27
Tomorrow Is Yesterday: Life, Death, and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel/Palestine
Authors: Hussein Agha , Robert Malley
Times Recommended: 3
A Best Book of 2025 The New Yorker • Foreign Affairs • NPR • Foreign Policy • Responsible Statecraft Two insiders explain why the Israeli – Palestinian peace process failed, and anticipate what lies ahead. On October 7, 2023, Hamas fighters killed more than eleven hundred Israelis and took more than two hundred hostages, prompting an Israeli response that has in turn taken tens of thousands of lives and devastated the Gaza Strip. Why did this happen, and can anything be done to grant peace and justice to Israelis and Palestinians alike? In Tomorrow Is Yesterday , veteran negotiators Hussein Agha and Robert Malley offer a personal and bracing perspective on how the hopes of the Oslo Peace Process became the horrors of the present. Drawing on their experience advising the Palestinian leadership (Arafat and Abbas) and US presidents (Clinton, Obama, and Biden) and their participation in secret talks over decades, Agha and Malley offer candid portraits of leading figures and an interpretation of the conflict that exposes the delusions of all sides. They stress that the two-state solution became a global goal only when it was no longer viable; that U.S. officials preferred technical schemes to a frank reckoning with the past; that Hamas’s onslaught and Israel’s war of destruction were not historical exceptions but historical reenactments; and that the gaps separating Israelis and Palestinians have less to do with territorial allocation than with history and emotions.
#28
The Known World: A Novel
Author: Edward P. Jones
Times Recommended: 2
Winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize Award and r ecognized as the best book of fiction in the 21st century by the New York Times, E dward P. Jones's The Known World is a debut novel of stunning emotional depth and unequaled literary power and continues to show its importance to the American literary canon. Henry Townsend, a farmer, boot maker, and former slave, through the surprising twists and unforeseen turns of life in antebellum Virginia, becomes proprietor of his own plantation—as well his own slaves. When he dies, his widow Caldonia succumbs to profound grief, and things begin to fall apart at their plantation: slaves take to escaping under the cover of night, and families who had once found love under the weight of slavery begin to betray one another. Beyond the Townsend household, the known world also unravels: low-paid white patrollers stand watch as slave “speculators” sell free black people into slavery, and rumors of slave rebellions set white families against slaves who have served them for years. An ambitious, courageous, luminously written masterwork, The Known World seamlessly weaves the lives of the freed and the enslaved—and allows all of us a deeper understanding of the enduring multidimensional world created by the institution of slavery. The Known World not only marks the return of an extraordinarily gifted writer, it heralds the publication of a remarkable contribution to the canon of American classic literature.
#29
The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War
Author: Ben Macintyre
Times Recommended: 1
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the celebrated author of Operation Mincement and The Siege comes the thrilling Americans -era tale of Oleg Gordievsky, the Russian whose secret work helped hasten the end of the Cold War. “The best true spy story I have ever read.”—JOHN LE CARRÉ Named a Best Book of the Year by The Economist • Shortlisted for the Bailie Giffords Prize in Nonfiction If anyone could be considered a Russian counterpart to the infamous British double-agent Kim Philby, it was Oleg Gordievsky. The son of two KGB agents and the product of the best Soviet institutions, the savvy, sophisticated Gordievsky grew to see his nation’s communism as both criminal and philistine. He took his first posting for Russian intelligence in 1968 and eventually became the Soviet Union’s top man in London, but from 1973 on he was secretly working for MI6. For nearly a decade, as the Cold War reached its twilight, Gordievsky helped the West turn the tables on the KGB, exposing Russian spies and helping to foil countless intelligence plots, as the Soviet leadership grew increasingly paranoid at the United States’s nuclear first-strike capabilities and brought the world closer to the brink of war. Desperate to keep the circle of trust close, MI6 never revealed Gordievsky’s name to its counterparts in the CIA, which in turn grew obsessed with figuring out the identity of Britain’s obviously top-level source. Their obsession ultimately doomed Gordievsky: the CIA officer assigned to identify him was none other than Aldrich Ames, the man who would become infamous for secretly spying for the Soviets. Unfolding the delicious three-way gamesmanship between America, Britain, and the Soviet Union, and culminating in the gripping cinematic beat-by-beat of Gordievsky’s nail-biting escape from Moscow in 1985, Ben Macintyre has crafted an electrifying account of an international hero. Like the greatest novels of John le Carré, The Spy and the Traitor brings readers deep into a world of treachery and betrayal, where the lines bleed between the personal and the professional, and one man’s hatred of communism had the power to change the future of nations.
#30
What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance
Author: Carolyn Forché
Times Recommended: 1
2019 National Book Award Finalist "Reading it will change you, perhaps forever.” — San Francisco Chronicle “Astonishing, powerful, so important at this time.” --Margaret Atwood What You Have Heard is True is a devastating, lyrical, and visionary memoir about a young woman's brave choice to engage with horror in order to help others. Written by one of the most gifted poets of her generation, this is the story of a woman's radical act of empathy, and her fateful encounter with an intriguing man who changes the course of her life. Carolyn Forché is twenty-seven when the mysterious stranger appears on her doorstep. The relative of a friend, he is a charming polymath with a mind as seemingly disordered as it is brilliant. She's heard rumors from her friend about who he might be: a lone wolf, a communist, a CIA operative, a sharpshooter, a revolutionary, a small coffee farmer, but according to her, no one seemed to know for certain. He has driven from El Salvador to invite Forché to visit and learn about his country. Captivated for reasons she doesn't fully understand, she accepts and becomes enmeshed in something beyond her comprehension. Together they meet with high-ranking military officers, impoverished farm workers, and clergy desperately trying to assist the poor and keep the peace. These encounters are a part of his plan to educate her, but also to learn for himself just how close the country is to war. As priests and farm-workers are murdered and protest marches attacked, he is determined to save his country, and Forché is swept up in his work and in the lives of his friends. Pursued by death squads and sheltering in safe houses, the two forge a rich friendship, as she attempts to make sense of what she's experiencing and establish a moral foothold amidst profound suffering. This is the powerful story of a poet's experience in a country on the verge of war, and a journey toward social conscience in a perilous time.
#31
Children of a Modest Star: Planetary Thinking for an Age of Crises
Authors: Jonathan S. Blake , Nils Gilman
Times Recommended: 1
A clear-eyed and urgent vision for a new system of political governance to manage planetary issues and their local consequences. Deadly viruses, climate-changing carbon molecules, and harmful pollutants cross the globe unimpeded by national borders. While the consequences of these flows range across scales, from the planetary to the local, the authority and resources to manage them are concentrated mainly at one level: the nation-state. This profound mismatch between the scale of planetary challenges and the institutions tasked with governing them is leading to cascading systemic failures. In the groundbreaking Children of a Modest Star , Jonathan S. Blake and Nils Gilman not only challenge dominant ways of thinking about humanity's relationship to the planet and the political forms that presently govern it, but also present a new, innovative framework that corresponds to our inherently planetary condition. Drawing on intellectual history, political philosophy, and the holistic findings of Earth system science, Blake and Gilman argue that it is essential to reimagine our governing institutions in light of the fact that we can only thrive if the multi-species ecosystems we inhabit are also flourishing. Aware of the interlocking challenges we face, it is no longer adequate merely to critique our existing systems or the modernist assumptions that helped create them. Blake and Gilman propose a bold, original architecture for global governance―what they call planetary subsidiarity―designed to enable the enduring habitability of the Earth for humans and non-humans alike. Children of a Modest Star offers a clear-eyed and urgent vision for constructing a system capable of stabilizing a planet in crisis.
#32
The Second Body
Author: Daisy Hildyard
Times Recommended: 1
Every living thing has two bodies. To be an animal is to be in possession of a physical body, a body which can eat, drink and sleep; it is also to be embedded in a worldwide network of ecosystems. When every human body has an uncanny global presence, how do we live with ourselves? In this timely and elegant essay, Daisy Hildyard captures the second body by exploring how the human is a part of animal life. She meets Richard, a butcher in Yorkshire, and sees pigs turned into boiled ham; and Gina, an environmental criminologist, who tells her about leopards and silver foxes kept as pets in luxury apartments. She speaks to Luis, a biologist, about the origins of life; and talks to Nadezhda about fungi in an effort to understand how we define animal life. Eventually, her second body comes to visit her first body when the river flooded her home last year. The Second Body is a brilliantly lucid account of the dissolving boundaries between all life on earth.
#33
Work Like a Monk: A Buddhist Guide to Embracing What Matters
Author: Shoukei Matsumoto
Times Recommended: 1
An engaging exploration of what makes work meaningful, by a popular Buddhist monk and cultural commentator In our hectic days filled with long hours, endless emails, and tedious virtual meetings, it’s hard to stay connected to the higher purpose of work – to see past the grind and embrace what we’re really trying to achieve. In this engaging and illuminating book, Japanese Buddhist monk Shoukei Matsumoto offers a fresh take on what it means to find satisfaction at work. Presented in the form of an imagined conversation between a Western businessperson and a temple priest, this far-ranging exploration covers everything from embracing simplicity and communicating with clarity to the importance of daily rituals, insights on avoiding burnout, and even what it means to be a good ancestor. Along the way, you’ll discover ancient wisdom and contemporary ideas – all thoughtfully presented in the context of modern daily life. Whether you’re a recent graduate or a seasoned professional, this meaningful guide offers a fresh perspective, and more intentional way forward.
#34
A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck
Author: Sophie Elmhirst
Times Recommended: 1
THE RUNAWAY NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER & ONE OF BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2025 A NEW YORK TIMES TOP 10 BOOK OF 2025 ALSO NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2025 BY NPR, VOGUE, TIME MAGAZINE, THE NEW YORKER , AND MORE “This is nonfiction that reads like fiction – the best kind. Elmhirst’s retelling is a triumph, second only to the seemingly impossible feat of Maurice and Maralyn themselves. You won’t be able to put it down.” – USA Today “Remarkable… I found myself, alternately, holding my breath as I read at top speed, wandering rooms in search of someone to read aloud to, and placing the book facedown, arrested by quiet statements that left me reeling with their depth.” – The New York Times “Such an emotionally vivid portrait of a couple in isolation that I was shocked it wasn’t fiction. How could a writer get so deeply into the minds of two real people in such extraordinary circumstances? … So brilliantly depicted.” – Elle “A beautiful meditation on endurance, codependence, and the power of love. A dazzling book.” – Patrick Radden Keefe “An enthralling, engrossing story of survival and the resilience of the human spirit.” —Bill Bryson An instant New York Times bestseller, this is the electrifying true story of a young couple shipwrecked at sea: a mind-blowing tale of obsession, survival, and partnership stretched to its limits. Maurice and Maralyn make an odd couple. He’s a loner, awkward and obsessive; she’s charismatic and ambitious. But they share a horror of wasting their lives. And they dream – as we all dream – of running away from it all. What if they quit their jobs, sold their house, bought a boat, and sailed away? Most of us begin and end with the daydream. But in June 1972, Maurice and Maralyn set sail. For nearly a year all went well, until deep in the Pacific, a breaching whale knocked a hole in their boat and it sank beneath the waves. What ensues is a jaw-dropping fight to survive in the wild ocean, with little hope of rescue. Alone together for months in a tiny rubber raft, starving and exhausted, Maurice and Maralyn have to find not only ways to stay alive but ways to get along, as their inner demons emerge and their marriage is put to the greatest of tests. Although they could run away from the world, they can’t run away from themselves. Taut, propulsive, and dazzling, A Marriage at Sea pairs an adrenaline-fueled high seas adventure with a gutting love story that asks why we love difficult people, and who we become under the most extreme conditions imaginable.
#35
Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future
Author: Dan Wang
Times Recommended: 1
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Shortlisted for the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award One of The New Yorker 's Best Books of the Year • One of NPR's "Books We Love" of 2025 • A Financial Times Best Book of the Year • An August 2025 Next Big Idea Club Must-Read Book • One of Bookbub's Best Nonfiction of 2025 A riveting, firsthand investigation of China’s seismic progress, its human costs, and what it means for America. For close to a decade, technology analyst Dan Wang―“a gifted observer of contemporary China” (Ross Douthat)―has been living through the country’s astonishing, messy progress. China’s towering bridges, gleaming railways, and sprawling factories have improved economic outcomes in record time. But rapid change has also sent ripples of pain throughout the society. This reality―political repression and astonishing growth ―is not a paradox, but rather a feature of China’s engineering mindset. In Breakneck , Wang blends political, economic, and philosophical analysis with reportage to reveal a provocative new framework for understanding China―one that helps us see America more clearly, too. While China is an engineering state, relentlessly pursuing megaprojects, the United States has stalled. America has transformed into a lawyerly society, reflexively blocking everything, good and bad Blending razor-sharp analysis with immersive storytelling, Wang offers a gripping portrait of a nation in flux. Breakneck traverses metropolises like Shanghai, Chongqing, and Shenzhen, where the engineering state has created not only dazzling infrastructure but also a sense of optimism. The book also exposes the downsides of social engineering, including the surveillance of ethnic minorities, political suppression, and the traumas of the one-child policy and zero-Covid. In an era of animosity and mistrust, Wang unmasks the shocking similarities between the United States and China. Breakneck reveals how each country points toward a better path for the other: Chinese citizens would be better off if their government could learn to value individual liberties, while Americans would be better off if their government could learn to embrace engineering―and to produce better outcomes for the many, not just the few.
#36
North Woods: A Novel
Author: Daniel Mason
Times Recommended: 2
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW TOP TEN BOOK OF THE YEAR A WASHINGTON POST TOP TEN BOOK OF THE YEAR • FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD AND THE MARK TWAIN AMERICAN VOICE IN LITERATURE AWARD A sweeping novel about a single house in the woods of New England, told through the lives of those who inhabit it across the centuries—“a time-spanning, genre-blurring work of storytelling magic” ( The Washington Post ) from the Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of The Piano Tuner and The Winter Soldier . “With the expansiveness and immersive feeling of two-time Booker Prize nominee David Mitchell’s fiction ( Cloud Atlas ), the wicked creepiness of Edgar Allan Poe, and Mason’s bone-deep knowledge of and appreciation for the natural world that’s on par with that of Thoreau, North Woods fires on all cylinders.”— San Francisco Chronicle New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Time, The Boston Globe, NPR, Chicago Public Library, The Star Tribune, The Economist, The Christian Science Monitor, Real Simple, Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Bookreporter When two young lovers abscond from a Puritan colony, little do they know that their humble cabin in the woods will become the home of an extraordinary succession of human and nonhuman characters alike. An English soldier, destined for glory, abandons the battlefields of the New World to devote himself to growing apples. A pair of spinster twins navigate war and famine, envy and desire. A crime reporter unearths an ancient mass grave—only to discover that the earth refuse to give up their secrets. A lovelorn painter, a sinister con man, a stalking panther, a lusty beetle: As the inhabitants confront the wonder and mystery around them, they begin to realize that the dark, raucous, beautiful past is very much alive. This magisterial and highly inventive novel from Pulitzer Prize finalist Daniel Mason brims with love and madness, humor and hope. Following the cycles of history, nature, and even language, North Woods shows the myriad, magical ways in which we’re connected to our environment, to history, and to one another. It is not just an unforgettable novel about secrets and destinies, but a way of looking at the world that asks the timeless question: How do we live on, even after we’re gone?
#37
No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior
Author: Joshua Meyrowitz
Times Recommended: 1
How have changes in media affected our everyday experience, behavior, and sense of identity? Such questions have generated endless arguments and speculations, but no thinker has addressed the issue with such force and originality as Joshua Meyrowitz in No Sense of Place . Advancing a daring and sophisticated theory, Meyrowitz shows how television and other electronic media have created new social situations that are no longer shaped by where we are or who is "with" us. While other media experts have limited the debate to message content, Meyrowitz focuses on the ways in which changes in media rearrange "who knows what about whom" and "who knows what compared to whom," making it impossible for us to behave with each other in traditional ways. No Sense of Place explains how the electronic landscape has encouraged the development of: -More adultlike children and more childlike adults; -More career-oriented women and more family-oriented men; and -Leaders who try to act more like the "person next door" and real neighbors who want to have a greater say in local, national, and international affairs. The dramatic changes fostered by electronic media, notes Meyrowitz, are neither entirely good nor entirely bad. In some ways, we are returning to older, pre-literate forms of social behavior, becoming "hunters and gatherers of an information age." In other ways, we are rushing forward into a new social world. New media have helped to liberate many people from restrictive, place-defined roles, but the resulting heightened expectations have also led to new social tensions and frustrations. Once taken-for-granted behaviors are now subject to constant debate and negotiation. The book richly explicates the quadruple pun in its title: Changes in media transform how we sense information and how we make sense of our physical and social places in the world.
#38
The Digital Reversal. Thread-saga of media evolution
Author: Andrey Mir
Times Recommended: 1
There are a lot of generic and unfocused “it’s the phones!” takes out there. In my opinion, Andrey Mir is the closest to offering a comprehensive, scientific characterization of society’s relationship to media. – Joseph Weisenthal, Bloomberg Andrey Mir’s The Digital Reversal , building on his recent series of books with pathbreaking analyses, is so far ahead of any other scholarly work in understanding what's going on in the media world, and hence the world per se, today, that it hurts even as it brilliantly elucidates. You want to know where we are and perhaps what to do? Read The Digital Reversal . – Paul Levinson, author of McLuhan in an Age of Social Media The future of the book is the blurb, said Marshall McLuhan. As the future arrives, this book is written in tweets—1,295 of them. Gathered in thread-chapters, they explore and explain what media evolution does to us. Cars help people get around faster. But when their use hits certain limits, their effect of speed and mobility reverses into traffic jams. And so it is with any medium: when it reaches its extremes or limits, it reverses its effect into the opposite. This is what we face now. Digital media have sped up human interaction with the world to its limit—instantaneity. No wonder everything is now reversing into its opposite, merging into one global, cataclysmic Digital Reversal. The abundance of signals reverses into noise. The abundance of facts reverses into fakes. Free access to self-expression leads to abuse by trolls and bad actors and reverses into censorship. The revolt of the public reverses into anarcho-tyranny. Text reverses into texting, and texting reverses print literacy into digital orality. Abstraction reverses into anecdotal evidence. Feelings reverse into intensities. Boosted by the overload of empathy, identity reverses into credentials. Journalism reverses into postjournalism. The overload of news reverses into news avoidance. Reading books reverses into asking the search box. Knowledge reverses into knowing. Academia flips into activism. Objective truth reverses into crowdsourced importance. Everything is media effects. In the digital era, the study of media effects is the study of reversals. Reversals are everywhere. Like verses in a saga, 1,295 tweets across 248 pages cover the development of media from orality to literacy and now in reverse—to digital orality. Also read other books by Andrey Mir — available on Amazon: - The Viral Inquisitor and Other Essays on Postjournalism and Media Ecology (2024) - Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024) - Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers: The Media After Trump: Manufacturing Anger and Polarization (2020) - Human as Media: The Emancipation of Authorship (2014)
#39
Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty
Authors: Abhijit V. Banerjee , Esther Duflo
Times Recommended: 1
In this new edition of their classic work, the winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics upend the most common assumptions about how economics works, providing a “rich and humane” ( Financial Times ) examination of how poor people actually live Why do the poor borrow to save? Why do they miss out on free lifesaving immunizations but pay for unnecessary drugs? Why do children from poor families attend school but fail to learn anything? In Poor Economics , Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, two Nobel Prize–winning MIT professors, answer these questions based on years of field research from around the world. Together, they investigate what the lives and choices of the poor tell us about how to fight global poverty, from why microfinance is useful without being the miracle some hoped it would be to why the poor don’t want health insurance. Throughout, they reveal that even as many magic bullets of yesterday have ended up as today’s failed ideas, there is a path forward through this challenge. Updated with significant new material based on insights from the last decade of research, Poor Economics is a radical and hopeful rethinking of the economics of poverty and an intimate view of the life of the poor around the world.
#40
1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History--and How It Shattered a Nation
Author: Andrew Ross Sorkin
Times Recommended: 1
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “It is one of the best narrative histories I’ve read.” — The Wall Street Journal A New York Times Notable Book of 2025 • Named a BEST BOOK OF 2025 by TIME , The Economist , Air Mail , Bloomberg , and History From the bestselling author of Too Big to Fail , “the definitive history of the 2008 banking crisis,” ( The Atlantic ) comes a riveting narrative of the most infamous stock market crash in history—one with ripple effects that still shape our society today. In 1929 , the world watched in shock as the unstoppable Wall Street bull market went into a freefall, wiping out fortunes and igniting a depression that would reshape a generation. But behind the flashing ticker tapes and panicked traders, another drama unfolded—one of visionaries and fraudsters, titans and dreamers, euphoria and ruin. With unparalleled access to historical records and newly uncovered documents, New York Times bestselling author Andrew Ross Sorkin takes readers inside the chaos of the crash, behind the scenes of a raging battle between Wall Street and Washington and the larger-than-life characters whose ambition and naïveté in an endless boom led to disaster. The dizzying highs and brutal lows of this era eerily mirror today’s world—where markets soar, political tensions mount, and the fight over financial influence plays out once again. This is not just a story about money. 1929 is a tale of power, psychology, and the seductive illusion that this time is different. It’s about disregarded alarm bells, financiers who fell from grace, and skeptics who saw the crash coming—only to be dismissed until it was too late. Hailed as a landmark book, Too Big to Fail reimagined how financial crises are told. Now, with 1929 , Sorkin delivers an immersive, electrifying account of the most pivotal market collapse of all time—with lessons that remain as urgent as ever. More than just a history, 1929 is a crucial blueprint for understanding the cycles of speculation, the forces that drive financial upheaval, and the warning signs we ignore at our peril.
#41
Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies (Good to Great, 2)
Authors: Jim Collins , Jerry I. Porras
Times Recommended: 1
Drawing upon a six-year research project at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras took eighteen truly exceptional and long-lasting companies and studied each in direct comparison to one of its top competitors. They examined the companies from their very beginnings to the present day -- as start-ups, as midsize companies, and as large corporations. Throughout, the authors asked: "What makes the truly exceptional companies different from the comparison companies and what were the common practices these enduringly great companies followed throughout their history?" Filled with hundreds of specific examples and organized into a coherent framework of practical concepts that can be applied by managers and entrepreneurs at all levels, Built to Last provides a master blueprint for building organizations that will prosper long into the 21st century and beyond.
#42
Meditations
Authors: Marcus Aurelius , Gregory Hays , Ryan Holiday
Times Recommended: 2
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Timeless insights into what it takes to lead a meaningful life—still profoundly relevant nearly two thousand years later. Now featuring a brand-new foreword from Ryan Holiday, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Obstacle Is the Way ! “ Meditations offers a glimpse into [Marcus Aurelius’s] mind, his habits, and his approach to life. . . . I think any reader would find something useful to take away from it.”—James Clear, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Atomic Habits “It is unbelievable to see how the emperor’s words have stood the test of time. . . . Read a page or two anytime you feel like the world is too much.”—Arnold Schwarzenegger, The Wall Street Journal Your ability to control your thoughts—treat it with respect. It’s all that protects your mind from false perceptions—false to your nature, and that of all rational beings. A series of spiritual exercises filled with wisdom, practical guidance, and profound understanding of human behavior, Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations remains one of the greatest works of spiritual and ethical reflection ever written. With bite-size insights and advice on everything from living in the world to coping with adversity and interacting with others, Meditations has become required reading not only for statesmen and philosophers alike, but also for generations of readers who responded to the straightforward intimacy of his style. In Gregory Hays’s translation—the first in nearly four decades—Marcus’s thoughts speak with a new immediacy. In fresh and unencumbered English, Hays vividly conveys the spareness and compression of the original Greek text. Never before have Marcus’s insights been so directly and powerfully presented. With an Introduction that outlines Marcus’s life and career, the essentials of Stoic doctrine, the style and construction of the Meditations, and the work’s ongoing influence, this edition makes it possible to fully rediscover the thoughts of one of the most enlightened and intelligent leaders of any era.
#43
2666: A Novel
Authors: Roberto Bolaño , Natasha Wimmer
Times Recommended: 1
A NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER A NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY: TOP TEN THE POSTHUMOUS MASTERWORK FROM "ONE OF THE GREATEST AND MOST INFLUENTIAL MODERN WRITERS" (JAMES WOOD, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW ) Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño's life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his highest achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness, beauty, and scope. Its throng of unforgettable characters includes academics and convicts, an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student and her widowed, mentally unstable father. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of SantaTeresa―a fictional Juárez―on the U.S.-Mexico border, where hundreds of young factory workers, in the novel as in life, have disappeared.
#44
Frankenstein: Or the Modern Prometheus
Authors: Charlotte Gordon , Charles E. Robinson , Mary Shelley
Times Recommended: 2
The world’s most famous work of horror fiction: a devastating exploration of the limits of human creativity. Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read Mary Shelley's timeless gothic novel presents the epic battle between man and monster at its greatest literary pitch. In trying to create life, the young student Victor Frankenstein unleashes forces beyond his control, setting into motion a long and tragic chain of events that brings Victor to the very brink of madness. How he tries to destroy his creation, as it destroys everything Victor loves, is a powerful story of love, friendship, scientific hubris, and horror. Based on the third edition of 1831, this Penguin Classics edition, with an introduction and notes by Maurice Hindle, contains all the revisions Mary Shelley made to her story, as well as her 1831 introduction and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s preface to the first edition. It also includes as appendices a select collation of the texts of 1818 and 1831 together with "A Fragment" by Lord Byron and Dr John Polidori’s "The Vampyre: A Tale." For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
#45
The Adventures of Pinocchio
Authors: Carlo Collodi , John Hooper , Anna Kraczyna
Times Recommended: 1
A revelatory new annotated edition of the most translated Italian book in the world--the basis for two new major motion pictures: a Netflix animated version co-directed and co-written by Guillermo del Toro and voiced by Ewan McGregor, Cate Blanchett, and Tilda Swinton, and a Disney Plus live-action version directed by Robert Zemeckis and starring Tom Hanks, Cynthia Erivo, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Lorraine Bracco, and Keegan-Michael Key A Penguin Classic Carved from a piece of wood by the old carpenter Geppetto, the puppet Pinocchio comes to life and immediately starts to misbehave. But while this beloved character has achieved literary immortality, the novel has been widely misunderstood. Pinocchio has a penchant for lying, to be sure, but it’s when he avoids going to school that he repeatedly gets into trouble. The Adventures of Pinocchio is thus not a cautionary tale about lying but an unusually timely fable for our increasingly authoritarian times--a story about the importance of education and of preventing others from pulling our strings. This effervescent new translation captures the antic spirit that makes the mischievous, egotistical, and easily distracted Pinocchio a late nineteenth-century prototype for the likes of Bart Simpson. Featuring copious annotations informed by the translators’ deep knowledge of Italy, it reveals the novel to be not only a subversively entertaining children’s book but also a sophisticated satire reflecting the author’s concern for the social inequality of his time and his belief that duty to others is at the core of our humanity. For more than seventy-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 2,000 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
#46
The Poetry of Sylvia Plath
Author: Claire Brennan
Times Recommended: 1
Sylvia Plath´s second volume of poetry, Ariel, published posthumously in 1965, shocked and provoked reviewers with its unexpected intensity and power, and the publication of her Collected Poems in 1981 confirmed her as a poet of stature and maturity. Beginning with reviews of her initial collection, The Colossus, the reader is clearly guided through the profusion of critical material that has variously described Plath as feminine and feminist, personal and political, an American modernist and an English Romantic. The guide includes critical assessments from Robert Lowell, Sandra M. Gilbert, and Jacqueline Rose, among others.
#47
Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right
Author: Laura K. Field
Times Recommended: 1
“[An] excellent new book.”—Michelle Goldberg, New York Times The story of the radical conservative intellectual movement shaping Donald Trump’s agenda—and how it threatens American freedoms, values, and democracy Donald Trump is not a big thinker, but his 2016 presidential victory presented a grand opportunity for people who are, and it set off a radicalization and reconfiguration of the American conservative intellectual world. In Furious Minds , Laura Field, who spent close to a decade in conservative academic circles, chronicles the rise of the New Right—the network of academics, public intellectuals, and influencers who provide ideological fuel to Trumpism. This movement includes figures such as Patrick Deneen, Christopher Rufo, Peter Thiel, and JD Vance. Their agenda is built to last, and it has dire long-term implications for liberal democracy. The New Right has precedents in American history, but it is distinct for its youthfulness, misogyny, and extraordinary successes—most notably the elevation of Vance to the vice presidency. The movement—which draws together associates of the right-wing Claremont Institute, National Conservatives, Postliberals, and the Hard Right—advocates nationalist economics, tight borders, isolationism, and reactionary social values. It helped to strategize January 6th and created Project 2025. But above all, the New Right is engaged in a vast culture war against modern liberal pluralism. It is determined to harness state power and use it in new, illiberal ways, from college campuses to the international scene—all driven by the fantasy of restoring a pure America. Incisive and urgent, Furious Minds tells the story of the thinkers of the New Right—and their powerful assault on American freedoms, values, and ideals.
#48
Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator
Authors: Leo Lowenthal , Norbert Guterman , Alberto Toscano , Max Horkheimer , Herbert Marcuse
Times Recommended: 1
How authoritarian and racist discourse functions A classic book that analyzes and defines media appeals specific to American pro-fascist and anti-Semite agitators of the 1940s, such as the application of psychosocial manipulation for political ends. The book details psychological deceits that idealogues or authoritarians commonly used. The techniques are grouped under the headings "Discontent", "The Opponent", "The Movement" and "The Leader". The authors demonstrate repetitive patterns commonly utilized, such as turning unfocused social discontent towards a targeted enemy. The agitator positions himself as a unifying presence: he is the ideal, the only leader capable of freeing his audience from the perceived enemy. Yet, as the authors demonstrate, he is a shallow person who creates social or racial disharmony, thereby reinforcing that his leadership is needed. The authors believed fascist tendencies in America were at an early stage in the 1940s, but warned a time might come when Americans could and would be "susceptible to ... [the] psychological manipulation" of a rabble rouser. A book once again relevant in the Trump era, as made clear by Alberto Toscano's new introduction.
#49
Taking America Back: The Conservative Movement and the Far Right
Author: David Austin Walsh
Times Recommended: 1
A provocative look at the relationship between the far right and the American conservative movement from the 1930s to the end of the Cold War Since 2016, many commentators have expressed shock at the so-called rise of the far right in America at the expense of “responsible” and “respectable” conservatism. But is the far right an aberration in conservative politics? As David Austin Walsh shows, the mainstream conservative movement and the far right have been intertwined for nearly a century, and both were born out of a “right-wing popular front” linking racists, anti-Semites, and fascists in a broad coalition opposed to socialism, communism, and New Deal liberalism. Far from being outliers in the broader conservative coalition, these extremist elements were foundational in the creation of a right‑wing political culture centered around shared political enemies, a penchant for conspiracy theories, and a desire to restore America to its “authentic” pre–New Deal values. The popular front included Merwin Hart, a New York business lobbyist active in far-right circles who became a lobbyist for the Franco regime in Spain, the original “America First” movement, the movement to prevent Jewish immigration to the United States after World War II, the John Birch Society, the American Nazi Party, the George Wallace presidential campaign of 1968, the fight over the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Pat Buchanan’s support of Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk during the Reagan Administration. And connecting this disparate coalition was William F. Buckley, Jr., the editor of National Review and America’s leading “responsible conservative.”
#50
An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s
Author: Doris Kearns Goodwin
Times Recommended: 1
The #1 New York Times bestseller from “America’s historian-in-chief” ( New York magazine). An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s by Doris Kearns Goodwin, one of America’s most beloved historians, artfully weaves together biography, memoir, and history. She takes you along on the emotional journey she and her husband, Richard (Dick) Goodwin embarked upon in the last years of his life. Dick and Doris Goodwin were married for forty-two years and married to American history even longer. In his twenties, Dick was one of the brilliant young men of John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier. In his thirties he both named and helped design Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and was a speechwriter and close advisor to Robert Kennedy. Doris Kearns was a twenty-four-year-old graduate student when selected as a White House Fellow. She worked directly for Lyndon Johnson and later assisted on his memoir. Over the years, with humor, anger, frustration, and in the end, a growing understanding, Dick and Doris had argued over the achievements and failings of the leaders they served and observed, debating the progress and unfinished promises of the country they both loved. The Goodwins’ last great adventure involved finally opening the more than three hundred boxes of letters, diaries, documents, and memorabilia that Dick had saved for more than fifty years. They soon realized they had before them an unparalleled personal time capsule of the 1960s, illuminating public and private moments of a decade when individuals were powered by the conviction they could make a difference; a time, like today, marked by struggles for racial and economic justice, a time when lines were drawn and loyalties tested. Their expedition gave Dick’s last years renewed purpose and determination. It gave Doris the opportunity to connect and reconnect with participants and witnesses of pivotal moments of the 1960s. And it gave them both an opportunity to make fresh assessments of the central figures of the time—John F. Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy, and especially Lyndon Johnson, who greatly impacted both their lives. The voyage of remembrance brought unexpected discoveries, forgiveness, and the renewal of old dreams, reviving the hope that the youth of today will carry forward this unfinished love story with America.
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by @zachbellay