The End of History and the Last Man
1992 · 432 pages
Liberal democracy won, Fukuyama argued as the Soviet Union fell: no rival idea of how to organize a society remains. Then he asks what becomes of men with nothing left to struggle over.
★ 4.8
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.
The Cold War
A New History
2005 · 333 pages
Gaddis lays the war's origins at Stalin's door, shows how nuclear terror kept the peace it threatened, and treats the outcome as a moral verdict. Forty-five years of standoff in one commanding volume.
★ 5.8
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 Age of Extremes
1914-1991
1994 · 672 pages
The twentieth century runs from 1914 to 1991 in Hobsbawm's account, moving through catastrophe, a golden age of postwar boom, then landslide. No later history of the century has displaced it.
★ 6.5
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
1974 · 400 pages
Pulled out of retirement, George Smiley hunts a Soviet mole at the top of British intelligence, working from old files and older grudges. Le Carré makes treason a matter of friendship and marriage.
★ 6.8
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
1963 · 240 pages
Alec Leamas takes one last assignment in East Germany, posing as a burnt-out defector, never told what his own service wants. Graham Greene called it the best spy story he had read.
★ 6.8
The Captive Mind
1953 · 272 pages
Milosz, a Polish poet who served the new regime and then defected, explains how intelligent people talked themselves into Stalinism. Ketman, he calls it: believing one thing and professing another.
★ 7.0
The Golden Notebook
1962 · 672 pages
Anna Wulf keeps four notebooks: Africa, the Communist Party, fiction drawn from her love affair, and a private diary. Lessing made a woman's inner life the whole subject of a serious novel.
★ 7.0
Postwar
2005 · 933 pages
Judt carries Europe from the rubble of 1945 to 2005, east and west in one story, showing a continent that rebuilt itself by forgetting the war and then defined itself by remembering it.
★ 7.6