Book summaries in our own words: the essence in one line, a retelling and key ideas. Linked to life topics and interview moments.
The memoir of a woman raised on an isolated survivalist Mormon family farm without school, official documents, or doctors — an account of how education becomes not just knowledge but a way of separating from one's own…
A physicist takes time apart piece by piece and argues that the single, forward-flowing time we experience most likely does not exist at the level of fundamental reality at all.
An attempt by the founder of the world's largest hedge fund to turn his own painful failures into an explicit, written-down set of decision-making rules — and to build a company where even its founder is bound by them.
A manifesto arguing that sustained, undistracted concentration is becoming a rare and increasingly valuable skill in an economy of constant notifications — and that it, not multitasking, is what produces work that…
A neurosurgeon's account of learning, at thirty-six, that he had terminal lung cancer — an attempt to work out, from the inside, what gives a life meaning once time stops being an unlimited resource.
A memoir by Pixar's co-founder on how to build an organization where creative failure is neither hidden nor punished but treated as part of the road to good films, and why candor inside a team matters more than any…
A candid account of running a company on the edge of collapse, written by someone who lived through it, offering no glossy success formulas but a clear-eyed look at making decisions when there is no correct answer.
A psychiatrist with forty years of trauma treatment behind him shows that overwhelming experience imprints itself not only on memory but on the body, which is why talk alone is often not enough to heal it.
After her father's sudden death, the author sets out to train a wild goshawk — a book about how grief can, and cannot, be tamed through a relationship with a wild animal.
About systems and people that don't merely withstand the blows of chance but grow stronger from them, and about why robustness and antifragility are fundamentally different qualities that get confused all the time.
A history of humankind read as a history of shared fictions that got millions of strangers to cooperate as one.
A practical methodology treating the launch of a new venture not as the execution of a finished plan but as a series of testable hypotheses about what people actually want.
The Nobel laureate's summary book on how two systems of thought—fast and intuitive versus slow and deliberate—shape human judgment, and why neither can be trusted blindly.
the opening volume of the Neapolitan novels, about the friendship of two girls from a poor district — a rivalry, envy, and mutual pull that turns out to outlast every man and circumstance in their lives.
A 'biography' of cancer told as the case history of an entire civilization — humanity's centuries-long attempt to understand an enemy that turns out to be made of its own cells.
A psychotherapist with half a century of clinical practice examines how the fear of death quietly steers ordinary life, and maps out ways of living alongside that fear rather than suppressing it.
A philosophical and sociological inquiry into the craftsman's relationship to his work — how the desire to do something well for its own sake shapes a person's character, and why the modern world of work keeps getting…
A psychiatrist tells the stories of patients and scientists who proved in practice that the adult brain can physically rewire itself in response to experience, rather than remaining fixed past a certain age.
A trader-turned-philosopher's manifesto arguing that the fate of companies, markets and civilizations is set not by average trends but by rare events nobody could picture in advance — and about the habit of declaring…
A chronicle of the year following her husband's sudden death — a writer's attempt to describe how grief actually works from the inside, against every cultural cliché about how mourning is supposed to look.
A collection of essays by a programmer and investor arguing that good programming has more in common with a painter's craft than with engineering from a blueprint, and that understanding this changes both how products…
A research report on what separated companies that turned mediocre results into decades of outstanding performance from closely matched competitors that stayed merely good.
a novel about a disgraced professor who ends up on his daughter's farm in the new South Africa and has to relearn how to live without the privileges he once took for granted.
About why well-run market leaders, making genuinely sound decisions, repeatedly lose to weak, cheap newcomers — and why the cause of their downfall turns out to be precisely their attentiveness to today's best customers.