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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17 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.
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.
Butcher & Blackbird
Two rival serial killers who prey only on other serial killers start an annual hunting contest, and somewhere between the crime scenes they fall in love.
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.
It Ends With Us
A young Boston florist falls for a brilliant surgeon, then finds herself inside the pattern she grew up watching, just as her first love walks back into her life.
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.
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.
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.