The Power Elite
1956 · 442 pages
Three sets of men run America, the sociologist Mills argued: corporate chiefs, politicians, and generals drawn from the same schools and clubs. The New Left took its name and its target from him.
★ 6.8
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.
Between Past and Future
1961 · 298 pages
Tradition stopped telling anyone what authority or freedom means, and Arendt refuses to invent a substitute. She reopens each concept instead, arguing that education fails when adults stop taking responsibility for the world.
★ 6.8
Crowds and Power
1960 · 495 pages
Canetti anatomizes the crowd as a natural force, then locates power in the survivor who stands alive among the dead. Every command, he argues, leaves a sting in whoever obeys it.
★ 6.5
Palace of Dreams
1981 · 208 pages
Clerks in an Ottoman ministry collect the dreams of every subject and sift them for the one that foretells the empire's fate. Albania's dictatorship banned it within months, after twenty thousand copies sold.
★ 6.3
Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth
A Novel
2021 · 512 pages
Nigeria's political and religious elite trade in body parts stolen from a hospital, a business one surgeon uncovers. Soyinka returned to the novel after nearly fifty years to write this unforgiving satire.
★ 4.8