Barbarian Days
2015 · 464 pages
Finnegan chased waves from a Honolulu schoolyard to Fiji and Cape Town, then reported wars for the New Yorker. He writes surfing with a physicist's exactness and counts what the obsession cost.
★ 6.7
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2015
Showing 6 books from 2015
SPQR
A History of Ancient Rome
2015 · 608 pages
Beard covers a thousand years of Rome, opening on Catiline's conspiracy and closing the day Caracalla made every free inhabitant a citizen, and she cares as much about slaves as emperors.
★ 6.7
Stalin
New Biography of a Dictator
2015 · 424 pages
Each chapter opens with Stalin on his dacha floor in 1953, unattended for hours. From the archives Khlevniuk builds the rest: a micromanager who read everything and signed the death lists himself.
★ 5.7
The Silk Roads
A New History of the World
2015 · 672 pages
Europe was a latecomer and a backwater, Frankopan argues: across two millennia wealth, faith and plague traveled the roads between Persia and China, and he sees the world's center moving back.
★ 5.7
The Fishermen
2015 · 304 pages
Four brothers fish a forbidden Nigerian river, and a madman tells the eldest he will die at a fisherman's hand. Obioma takes the family apart with the inevitability of Greek tragedy.
★ 5.0
A Manual for Cleaning Women
Selected Stories
2015 · 432 pages
Berlin cleaned houses, worked emergency rooms, raised four sons, and drank. Forty-three stories out of that life, Alaska to Mexico City, written so plainly and fast you miss how much is inside them.
★ 4.8