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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Pick as many as you like: any of them matches within a group.
36 summaries, page 1 of 2
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.
21 Lessons for the 21st Century
Yuval Noah Harari turns from humanity's past and far future to the present, asking how AI, nationalism, fake news and the loss of old stories will test us right now.
A Court of Thorns and Roses
A mortal huntress kills a wolf that was really a faerie and is taken across the wall to a masked lord's enchanted, cursed court.
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.
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.
Best Evidence
David Lifton's fifteen-year investigation argues that President Kennedy's body was secretly altered between Dallas and Bethesda to hide shots fired from the front.
Blitzed
A novelist turned historian argues that methamphetamine, opiates and cocaine ran through Nazi Germany, from the blitzkrieg to Hitler's own veins.
Chaos
A journalist's twenty-year obsession takes apart the official story of the Manson murders and follows the threads to Hollywood secrets, a protected parolee, and the CIA's mind-control experiments.
Collapse
Jared Diamond compares societies that fell apart with ones that endured to show that environmental ruin is often decisive, but never destiny: societies choose.
Empire of the Summer Moon
How the Comanches built a horseback empire on the southern plains, and how Quanah Parker, son of a captive white mother, led them through its violent fall.
Fallen
Sent to a grim Georgia reform school after a fire she cannot explain, seventeen-year-old Luce is drawn to a cold, beautiful boy she is certain she has met before.
Fingerprints of the Gods
Graham Hancock's bestselling detective story argues that a lost Ice Age civilization left its traces in ancient maps, flood myths and the monuments of Egypt and the Americas.
Fourth Wing
A fragile would-be scribe is forced into a murderous war college for dragon riders, where her wits, two dragons and her family's sworn enemy become her only way to survive.
Glass Sword
On the run from the king who betrayed her, the Lightning Girl races to find others like herself, and fears what the fight is turning her into.
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 Flame
Violet Sorrengail returns to her dragon-rider war college for a second year, carrying a secret the leadership would kill to keep.
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.
Nuclear War: A Scenario
A minute-by-minute, fact-based account of how one missile launch could unravel into global nuclear war in 72 minutes.
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.
Onyx Storm
Violet Sorrengail leaves the war college behind for a dragon-back quest across unknown isles, racing to save her kingdom's defences and the man she loves from the darkness inside him.
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.
Rise of Empire
Thief Royce and swordsman Hadrian are pulled into a war for the soul of Elan as a puppet empress, a church-run empire and a rebel army compete for power.