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.
2 volumes
SortEditorial Year Title
Subject·Cultural relativism✕clear
Nonfiction · Sociology

Tristes Tropiques

Claude Levi-Strauss
1955 · 424 pages

Levi-Strauss opens by declaring he hates traveling and explorers, then takes you into Brazil's interior among the Bororo and Nambikwara. Science, memoir, and philosophy run together in mourning for what contact destroyed.

★ 6.6
Nonfiction · Anthropology

Coming of Age in Samoa

Margaret Mead
1928 · 223 pages

Sixty-eight girls on the Samoan island of Ta'u convinced Mead that the turmoil of adolescence is made by culture, not biology. She turned anthropology into an argument ordinary Americans took sides in.

★ 6.4