Books
The big ideas from popular books, without giving the whole thing away. Get the GIST, then decide if you want the REST.
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32 summaries, page 1 of 2
10x Is Easier Than 2x
A coach and a psychologist argue that a tenfold goal is simpler than doubling, because it forces you to drop the 80 percent of your work that cannot come along.
1900: The Last President
An 1896 pamphlet by a New York lawyer imagines a populist outsider winning the White House and the republic coming apart, a Gilded Age warning that the internet rediscovered as prophecy.
1984
In a state that watches everything and rewrites the past daily, one clerk risks his life to think for himself and to love.
A World Without Email
Cal Newport argues that the inbox has become a broken way of organising work, and lays out four principles for doing knowledge work without the constant chatter.
Animal Farm
Farm animals overthrow their drunken master to build a society of equals, then watch the pigs who lead them slowly become the tyrants they replaced.
Bargaining with the Devil
Harvard negotiation professor Robert Mnookin uses Churchill, Mandela, IBM and bitter family fights to show when to make a deal with an enemy and when to refuse.
Baron Trump’s Marvelous Underground Journey
An 1893 children's fantasy sends a big-brained boy baron and his brilliant dog down a Russian well into a hollow earth of transparent people, a blind city of silver and a kingdom of ice.
Blue Ocean Strategy
INSEAD professors W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne argue that the smartest companies stop fighting rivals in crowded markets and create new, uncontested ones instead.
Dark Age
Ten years after the revolution, Darrow's army is besieged on Mercury, the Republic's Senate is torn apart and Mars is overrun in the saga's darkest book.
Die With Zero
Bill Perkins argues that money is only worth the experiences it buys, so the goal is to spend it, and give it, while you are alive and able to enjoy it.
Golden Son
Darrow, a Red miner remade as a Gold, turns his enemies on each other and carries his secret rebellion from Mars into a war across the solar system.
Hamlet
A grieving prince is told by his father's ghost to avenge a murder, and cannot be sure what to believe or how to act.
Iron Gold
Ten years after the revolution, its hero, its victims and its exiles discover what freedom really costs.
Jane Eyre
A poor, plain, fiercely principled orphan grows up through cruelty and privation, becomes a governess at a house full of secrets, and falls in love with its brooding master on her own terms.
Light Bringer
A beaten Darrow crosses the Solar System to find allies while his rival Lysander reaches for a crown.
Morning Star
Broken by a year in the dark, a slave-born revolutionary rises again to lead a solar-system-wide war against the tyrants who rule it in the finale of the Red Rising trilogy.
Never Split the Difference
The FBI's former top kidnapping negotiator shows how listening, labeling emotions and asking the right questions win better deals than compromise.
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Seven generations of the Buendía family rise and unravel in Macondo, a jungle town where ghosts, plagues of insomnia and civil wars are all equally ordinary.
Out of the Silent Planet
A Cambridge philologist is kidnapped and flown to Mars, where he finds a world without sin that looks back at fallen Earth with pity.
Perelandra
C.S. Lewis sends Elwin Ransom to an unfallen Venus, where a new Eve faces a tempter and the fate of a world rests on one reluctant man.
Red Rising
A teenage miner on Mars is remade as one of the ruling Golds to bring down the empire that hanged his wife.
Sacred Economics
Charles Eisenstein argues that our debt-and-interest money system manufactures scarcity and separation, and sketches a gift-based, ecological economy to replace it.
Start With Why
Simon Sinek argues that the leaders and companies who earn real loyalty all communicate the same way: purpose first, product last.
That Hideous Strength
C.S. Lewis closes his Space Trilogy on Earth, where a sinister scientific institute, a fraying young marriage and a sleeping Merlin collide in a battle for England's soul.