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.
42 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.
Altered Traits
A science journalist and a neuroscientist sort the hype from the hard evidence to show how meditation can lastingly change who we are.
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.
Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art
A journalist plugs his own nose for ten days to show why breathing slowly and through the nose may be one of the most overlooked foundations of health.
Burnout
Twin sisters explain why stress stays stuck in the body, why women burn out in a rigged game, and the simple, shared ways to recover.
Come As You Are
Sex educator Emily Nagoski uses the science of accelerators, brakes and context to show women that their sexuality is not broken, only theirs.
Count Down
A leading reproductive epidemiologist explains why sperm counts in the West have halved in forty years, what everyday chemicals have to do with it, and what you can change at home.
Dopamine Nation
Stanford psychiatrist Anna Lembke explains why chasing pleasure leaves us in pain, and how abstinence, self-binding and honesty restore balance.
Emotional Agility
A Harvard psychologist shows how to face hard feelings, step back from them and act on your values through small, deliberate changes.
Goodnight Insomnia
Gregg D. Jacobs's six-week, drug-free CBT program retrains thoughts and habits to end chronic insomnia.
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.
How to Change Your Mind
A skeptical journalist explores the science, history and first-hand experience of psychedelics, and what they reveal about the mind, the ego and healing.
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.
Jaws: The Story of a Hidden Epidemic
An orthodontist and an evolutionary biologist argue that modern life is shrinking our jaws, crowding our teeth and narrowing our airways, and that parents can do something about it early.
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.
Man's Search for Meaning
A Viennese psychiatrist's account of surviving the Nazi camps, and the idea he carried out of them: people can bear almost anything if they have a reason to.
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.
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.
Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body
Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman's 47-protocol field manual for sleep, exercise, stress, food, light, focus and personal growth, built on one rule: behavior first, molecules second.
Tell Your Children
A former New York Times reporter argues that marijuana causes psychosis and violence and that legalization has outrun the science, a case many experts dispute.