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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23 summaries
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.
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.
Iron Flame
Violet Sorrengail returns to her dragon-rider war college for a second year, carrying a secret the leadership would kill to keep.
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.
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.
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.
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 Hitchhiker's Guide to Python
The Python community's opinionated field guide to setting up, writing, reading and shipping great code.
The Immortality Key
A lawyer turned amateur classicist argues that the ancient Greek Mysteries, and perhaps the earliest Christian Eucharist, were powered by psychedelic sacraments that let initiates 'die before dying.'
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
An American correspondent who watched Nazi Germany up close draws on its own captured archives to tell how a vagabond agitator came to rule a continent, and how his empire destroyed itself.
The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder
A British warship wrecks off Patagonia in 1741, its starving crew splits into warring camps, and the survivors come home with rival stories that put an empire's honour on trial.
Theft of Swords
Two mismatched rogues take a too-good-to-be-true job to steal a sword, get framed for a king's murder, and stumble into a conspiracy and an ancient war that could reshape their world.
War Is a Racket
One of America's most decorated Marines argues that war is a business run for the few at the expense of the many, and offers three blunt ways to shut it down.
We Will Rise
The true story of how Evansville, Indiana lost nearly its entire college basketball team in a 1977 plane crash and how the city and its Aces rebuilt, all the way to the 1982 NCAA tournament.