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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44 summaries, page 1 of 2
Book Summary | 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.
Book Summary | 1984
In a state that watches everything and rewrites the past daily, one clerk risks his life to think for himself and to love.
Book Summary | Altered Traits
A science journalist and a neuroscientist sort the hype from the hard evidence to show how meditation can lastingly change who we are.
Book Summary | 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.
Book Summary | 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.
Book Summary | Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art
A journalist plugs his own nose for ten days to show why breathing slowly and through the nose may be one of the most overlooked foundations of health.
Book Summary | Burnout
Twin sisters explain why stress stays stuck in the body, why women burn out in a rigged game, and the simple, shared ways to recover.
Book Summary | Come As You Are
Sex educator Emily Nagoski uses the science of accelerators, brakes and context to show women that their sexuality is not broken, only theirs.
Book Summary | Count Down
A leading reproductive epidemiologist explains why sperm counts in the West have halved in forty years, what everyday chemicals have to do with it, and what you can change at home.
Book Summary | 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.
Book Summary | Dissolving Illusions
Suzanne Humphries and Roman Bystrianyk argue that sanitation and nutrition, not vaccines, ended the great infectious diseases, a claim mainstream science rejects.
Book Summary | Dopamine Nation
Stanford psychiatrist Anna Lembke explains why chasing pleasure leaves us in pain, and how abstinence, self-binding and honesty restore balance.
Book Summary | Emotional Agility
A Harvard psychologist shows how to face hard feelings, step back from them and act on your values through small, deliberate changes.
Book Summary | 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.
Book Summary | Goodnight Insomnia
Gregg D. Jacobs's six-week, drug-free CBT program retrains thoughts and habits to end chronic insomnia.
Book Summary | 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.
Book Summary | How to Change Your Mind
A skeptical journalist explores the science, history and first-hand experience of psychedelics, and what they reveal about the mind, the ego and healing.
Book Summary | Iron Gold
Ten years after the revolution, its hero, its victims and its exiles discover what freedom really costs.
Book Summary | 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.
Book Summary | Jaws: The Story of a Hidden Epidemic
An orthodontist and an evolutionary biologist argue that modern life is shrinking our jaws, crowding our teeth and narrowing our airways, and that parents can do something about it early.
Book Summary | Light Bringer
A beaten Darrow crosses the Solar System to find allies while his rival Lysander reaches for a crown.
Book Summary | Man's Search for Meaning
A Viennese psychiatrist's account of surviving the Nazi camps, and the idea he carried out of them: people can bear almost anything if they have a reason to.
Book Summary | 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.
Book Summary | 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.