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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45 summaries, page 2 of 2
Book Summary | 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.
Book Summary | The 12 Week Year: Get More Done in 12 Weeks than Others Do in 12 Months
Stop planning by the calendar year: treat every twelve weeks as a year of its own and let a near deadline, a weekly plan and an honest score do the work.
Book Summary | The 33 Strategies of War
Robert Greene turns three thousand years of military thinking into 33 strategies for everyday conflict, starting with the war inside your own head.
Book Summary | The 4-Hour Chef
Tim Ferriss uses cooking as a training ground for meta-learning, a system for picking up any skill far faster than the conventional route allows.
Book Summary | The 5AM Club
Robin Sharma's fable of a burned-out entrepreneur, a stuck artist and an eccentric billionaire makes the case that owning your first hour can transform your whole life.
Book Summary | The Alter Ego Effect
Performance coach Todd Herman shows how a deliberately built 'secret identity' can bring your best self out in the moments that matter most.
Book Summary | The Brothers Karamazov
Dostoevsky's final masterpiece: a murder in a provincial Russian family becomes a battle over God, freedom, suffering and love.
Book Summary | The Descent of Man
Darwin finally turns his theory on ourselves, arguing that humans share ancestry, mind and even morality with other animals, and that mate choice helped shape us.
Book Summary | The Hidden Life of Trees
German forester Peter Wohlleben argues that a forest is a cooperative community in which trees communicate, share food and raise their young, and that we should manage it that way.
Book Summary | The High 5 Habit
Mel Robbins argues that high-fiving your own reflection every morning can quiet self-criticism and teach you to back yourself the way you back everyone else.
Book Summary | The Hitchhiker's Guide to Python
The Python community's opinionated field guide to setting up, writing, reading and shipping great code.
Book Summary | The Idiot
A gentle prince returns to Russia and tests whether pure goodness can survive money, pride and obsessive love.
Book Summary | The Let Them Theory
Mel Robbins argues that two words, Let Them, free you from managing other people, and two more, Let Me, put your energy back into the only thing you control: yourself.
Book Summary | The Odyssey
The cunning king of Ithaca fights monsters, gods and his own pride for ten years to get home, while his wife and son hold off a house full of suitors.
Book Summary | The Secret
Rhonda Byrne's blockbuster guide to the law of attraction, which teaches that your thoughts and feelings draw matching experiences into your life, and offers ask, believe, receive as the way to use it.
Book Summary | The Tyranny of Merit
Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel argues that our faith in meritocracy has made winners arrogant, made everyone else feel humiliated, and fuelled the populist backlash, and that humility and respect for work are the way back.
Book Summary | The War of Art
Steven Pressfield names the inner enemy that keeps us from our real work, Resistance, and shows how to beat it by turning pro and showing up every day.
Book Summary | To Kill a Mockingbird
In Depression-era Alabama, a tomboy named Scout watches her father, the lawyer Atticus Finch, defend a Black man falsely accused of rape while a hidden neighbor watches over her.
Book Summary | What Is Life?
A quantum physicist asks how atoms can add up to a living thing, and his answers, an aperiodic crystal carrying a code-script and life feeding on negative entropy, help launch molecular biology.
Book Summary | Wherever You Go, There You Are
Jon Kabat-Zinn's gentle classic on mindfulness: how to stop living on autopilot and pay attention to the only moment you have, on the cushion and at the kitchen sink.
Book Summary | You Can Win
Shiv Khera's step-by-step case that success is learned: begin with attitude, then build self-esteem, people skills, habits, goals and values on top of it.