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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20 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.
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.
Dark Age
Ten years after the revolution, Darrow's army is besieged on Mercury, the Republic's Senate is torn apart and Mars is overrun in the saga's darkest book.
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.
Golden Son
Darrow, a Red miner remade as a Gold, turns his enemies on each other and carries his secret rebellion from Mars into a war across the solar system.
Iron Gold
Ten years after the revolution, its hero, its victims and its exiles discover what freedom really costs.
Light Bringer
A beaten Darrow crosses the Solar System to find allies while his rival Lysander reaches for a crown.
Morning Star
Broken by a year in the dark, a slave-born revolutionary rises again to lead a solar-system-wide war against the tyrants who rule it in the finale of the Red Rising trilogy.
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.
Red Rising
A teenage miner on Mars is remade as one of the ruling Golds to bring down the empire that hanged his wife.
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 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.