
The Road
Pushing a shopping cart south through a burned gray America, a man and his boy hide from people who eat other people. The talk between them is the tenderest thing McCarthy ever wrote.

Pushing a shopping cart south through a burned gray America, a man and his boy hide from people who eat other people. The talk between them is the tenderest thing McCarthy ever wrote.

Pollan traces four meals backward: a drive-through, Whole Foods, Joel Salatin's farm, and a pig he shoots himself. Carbon isotopes reveal Americans are built of corn. He made provenance a mass preoccupation.

The book that made 9/11 comprehensible. Wright traces al-Qaeda to an Egyptian educator radicalized in small-town Colorado, closing on the FBI's bin Laden hunter, dead in the towers he was guarding.

Biafra secedes from Nigeria in 1967, and Adichie follows a houseboy, a radical professor, and twin sisters from talk of independence into blockade, famine, and flight. Her grandfathers both died in it.