Books
The big ideas from popular books, without giving the whole thing away. Get the GIST, then decide if you want the REST.
FiltersMemoir & BiographyScience & PhilosophyClear
Pick as many as you like: any of them matches within a group.
12 summaries
A Fighter's Heart
A Harvard-educated wanderer trains and fights his way through the world's toughest gyms to discover why people choose to fight, and what the fight teaches them.
American Prometheus
The Pulitzer-winning life of J. Robert Oppenheimer: the brilliant, contradictory physicist who led the building of the atomic bomb and was later destroyed by the Cold War security state he served.
Can’t Hurt Me
A retired Navy SEAL and ultramarathon runner tells how he turned an abused, overweight, aimless young man into one of the toughest people alive, and hands over the mental tools he used.
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.
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
A Nobel physicist's mischievous, curious, sometimes profound life stories, from cracking safes at Los Alamos to drumming samba in Brazil, ending with a famous warning against fooling yourself.
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 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.
The Tyranny of Merit
Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel argues that our faith in meritocracy has made winners arrogant, made everyone else feel humiliated, and fuelled the populist backlash, and that humility and respect for work are the way back.
Tuesdays with Morrie
A busy sports columnist reunites with his dying college professor for weekly Tuesday visits, and their conversations become a final class on how to live.
What Do You Care What Other People Think?
Richard Feynman's last book of memories moves from a childhood of questions and a doomed love story to his investigation of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.
What Is Life?
A quantum physicist asks how atoms can add up to a living thing, and his answers, an aperiodic crystal carrying a code-script and life feeding on negative entropy, help launch molecular biology.