My Brilliant Friend
2011 · 336 pages
No novelist has written female friendship with this much competition. Elena and Lila grow up in a violent Naples neighborhood in the 1950s, and only one is allowed to stay in school.
★ 6.7
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2011
Showing 5 books from 2011
Debt
The First 5000 Years
2011 · 542 pages
Graeber demolishes the story every economics textbook opens with: barter did not become money. Credit came thousands of years before coins, and every debt is a moral claim that finally rests on violence.
★ 6.3
1493
Uncovering the New World Columbus Created
2011 · 690 pages
Columbus rejoined two halves of a planet that had evolved apart. Mann shows Andean silver destabilizing Ming China and malaria deciding who could be worked to death in Virginia's tobacco fields.
★ 5.8
Arguably
2011 · 816 pages
No English-language essayist of his generation wrote with more range or less caution. These 107 pieces run from Orwell and Jefferson to Iraq and Afghanistan, and Hitchens had himself waterboarded before writing one.
★ 5.6
Catherine the Great
Portrait of a Woman
2011 · 672 pages
A minor German princess arrives in Russia at fourteen, deposes her husband eighteen years later, and rules for thirty-four. Massie writes her from the inside, drawing on her own candid memoirs.
★ 5.5