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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224 summaries, page 5 of 10
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.
That Hideous Strength
C.S. Lewis closes his Space Trilogy on Earth, where a sinister scientific institute, a fraying young marriage and a sleeping Merlin collide in a battle for England's soul.
The 12 Week Year: Get More Done in 12 Weeks than Others Do in 12 Months
Stop planning by the calendar year: treat every twelve weeks as a year of its own and let a near deadline, a weekly plan and an honest score do the work.
The 33 Strategies of War
Robert Greene turns three thousand years of military thinking into 33 strategies for everyday conflict, starting with the war inside your own head.
The 4-Hour Chef
Tim Ferriss uses cooking as a training ground for meta-learning, a system for picking up any skill far faster than the conventional route allows.
The 5AM Club
Robin Sharma's fable of a burned-out entrepreneur, a stuck artist and an eccentric billionaire makes the case that owning your first hour can transform your whole life.
The Alter Ego Effect
Performance coach Todd Herman shows how a deliberately built 'secret identity' can bring your best self out in the moments that matter most.
The Anxious Generation
Jonathan Haidt argues that smartphones, social media and overprotective parenting have rewired childhood since about 2010, and lays out a collective plan to give kids back a play-based childhood.
The Arrangement
A wife proposes that she and her husband each date a stranger once a week to save their marriage, and the rules they set are broken almost at once, with terrible results.
The Book of Enoch
The ancient Jewish apocalypse that tells of the fallen Watchers, the giants, Enoch's journeys through heaven and the coming judgment by the Son of Man.
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 Brothers Karamazov
Dostoevsky's final masterpiece: a murder in a provincial Russian family becomes a battle over God, freedom, suffering and love.
The Circadian Code
Salk Institute scientist Satchin Panda argues that when you eat, sleep, see light and move matters as much as what you do, and shows how to reset the body's internal clocks.
The Coddling of the American Mind
Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt argue that three bad ideas and a culture of overprotection are leaving a generation of students more fragile, more anxious and more divided.
The Coder's Path to Wealth and Independence
A farmyard revolution promises equality for every animal, then slides, one small rewritten rule at a time, into the tyranny it set out to end.
The Data Warehouse Toolkit
The founding guide to dimensional modeling, teaching how to shape business data into fact and dimension tables people can actually query, one real-world case study at a time.
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 Electric
In the late summer of 1985, a fifteen-year-old finds an abandoned cinema that screens films made by ghosts, for ghosts, in a bittersweet coming-of-age story about loss and the magic of movies.
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 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 High 5 Habit
Mel Robbins argues that high-fiving your own reflection every morning can quiet self-criticism and teach you to back yourself the way you back everyone else.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to Python
The Python community's opinionated field guide to setting up, writing, reading and shipping great code.
The Idiot
A gentle prince returns to Russia and tests whether pure goodness can survive money, pride and obsessive love.