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.
34 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Lying
Sam Harris argues that even kind white lies cost more than they save, and that simply telling the truth makes life simpler and relationships deeper.
My Big TOE
A NASA physicist's theory of everything: consciousness is the foundation of reality, the physical world is a virtual training ground, and the point of it all is to grow from fear toward love.
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.
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.
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.
The Brothers Karamazov
Dostoevsky's final masterpiece: a murder in a provincial Russian family becomes a battle over God, freedom, suffering and love.
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.
The Gulag Archipelago
A former prisoner's vast, secretly written account of the Soviet labor camps, tracing how a system born under Lenin swallowed millions and how ideology made it possible.
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.