Business Adventures
1969 · 464 pages
Twelve New Yorker reports on how companies behave: Ford burning millions on the Edsel, a grocer trying to corner his own stock. Bill Gates calls it the best business book he has read.
★ 4.3
The Books canon
Sourced and shelved.
Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Hackers
1984 · 659 pages
Levy found the hacker ethic among MIT students who monopolized the university's computers all night: all information should be free, mistrust authority, judge a person by the code. Silicon Valley still recites it.
★ 4.7
Killings
1984 · 320 pages
One killing per chapter, in towns no reporter usually visits, including a Kentucky landowner who shot a documentary filmmaker for trespassing. Trillin cares how these Americans lived, not how they died.
★ 4.7
The Honored Society
1964 · 265 pages
Lewis walked postwar Sicily and found monks running extortion from the confessional and Mafia bosses installed as mayors by American liberators, whose invasion, he argues, restored what Mussolini had nearly destroyed.
★ 4.7
Age of Ambition
2014 · 403 pages
Osnos spent eight years watching China chase fortune faster than its politics allowed, and tells it through a soldier who swam the strait to defect and a blind lawyer who escaped house arrest.
★ 4.8
Wiseguy
Life in a Mafia Family
1985 · 304 pages
Henry Hill spent twenty-five years as a Lucchese associate, from stolen cigarettes to the Lufthansa robbery, and Pileggi lets him tell it himself. Scorsese lifted whole scenes of Goodfellas straight from it.
★ 4.9
The Journalist and the Murderer
1990 · 163 pages
Every journalist knows what he does is morally indefensible, Malcolm opens, then proves it through a convicted murderer suing the writer who befriended him and delivered him to readers as a sociopath.
★ 5.3
Secondhand Time
The Last of the Soviets
2013 · 496 pages
Kitchen by kitchen, Alexievich recorded Soviet citizens describing what the collapse did to them. They talk about lost savings and lost faith, and a bewildering grief for the country that jailed their parents.
★ 5.5
The Right Stuff
1979 · 448 pages
Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier with two cracked ribs hidden from the flight surgeon. Wolfe named the code such men flew by, and America still tells the space race in his words.
★ 5.9
The Boys of Summer
1972 · 474 pages
Two decades after covering the Brooklyn Dodgers for a newspaper, Kahn found the same men in middle age, one paralyzed. What began as a baseball book becomes an elegy for everyone's youth.
★ 6.4
All the President's Men
1974 · 361 pages
Woodward and Bernstein worked doorsteps, phone books, and a source who met Woodward in a parking garage, tracing campaign money into the White House. Journalism has measured itself against this reporting ever since.
★ 6.8
The Soul of a New Machine
1981 · 320 pages
Working nights in a Massachusetts basement, a crew of young engineers races to build a new computer in a year, and Kidder catches every argument. Nobody had made engineering a literary subject.
★ 6.8
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
1941 · 432 pages
Sent to Alabama in 1936 to report on cotton tenancy, Agee returned with an act of devotion: three sharecropping families recorded down to the nails in their shoes, alongside Walker Evans's photographs.
★ 7.0