Kitchen Confidential
2000 · 312 pages
Bourdain cooked for two decades, then told everything: the drugs, the immigrant crews who hold restaurants up, why you never order fish on Monday. He made the line cook a figure Americans envied.
★ 4.7
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.
Workers
An Archaeology of the Industrial Age
1993 · 400 pages
Fifty thousand men climb out of a Brazilian gold pit on wooden ladders, caked in mud. Salgado spent six years across twenty-six countries photographing manual labor as the machines took it away.
★ 4.9
Tally's Corner
A Study of Negro Streetcorner Men
1967 · 179 pages
Twelve months on a Washington corner with Black men without steady work. They fail as husbands and fathers, Liebow shows, not from any inherited culture but because the jobs cannot support a family.
★ 5.2
Working
1974 · 589 pages
Terkel put a tape recorder before a gravedigger, a receptionist, a steelworker, and asked what the day costs them. Work is violence to the spirit as well as the body, he writes.
★ 6.5
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
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
1905 · 392 pages
Calvinists could not know whether they were saved, so they worked without rest and spent nothing. Capitalism grew out of that anxiety, Weber argues, then shed the faith and kept the iron cage.
★ 7.1