Books
The big ideas from popular books, without giving the whole thing away. Get the GIST, then decide if you want the REST.
FiltersScience & PhilosophyHistorical FictionClear
Pick as many as you like: any of them matches within a group.
11 summaries
Before We Were Yours
Five river children are stolen for a corrupt Memphis adoption home in 1939, and decades later a senator's daughter uncovers the trail.
Frozen River
In the winter of 1789 a Maine midwife examines a body pulled from the ice and sets out to win justice for a woman the town's judge would rather silence.
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.
Only Time Will Tell
A docker's son with a golden voice climbs out of Bristol's shipyards, while the secret of who his father really was waits to catch up with him.
The Book Thief
In Nazi Germany, a foster girl who cannot read begins stealing books, and Death himself stops to tell her story.
The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek
A blue-skinned packhorse librarian carries books through the Kentucky hills of 1936, loved by her readers and feared by nearly everyone else.
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.
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.