en-US Tue, 29 Apr 2025 20:50:30 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 1713426
Why does recalling the Ten Commandments reduce our tendency to lie, even when we couldn't possibly be caught?

Why do we splurge on a lavish meal but cut coupons to save twenty-five cents on a can of soup?

Why do we go back for second helpings at the unlimited buffet, even when our stomachs are already full?

And how did we ever start spending $4.15 on a cup of coffee when, just a few years ago, we used to pay less than a dollar?

When it comes to making decisions in our lives, we think we're in control. We think we're making smart, rational choices. But are we?

In a series of illuminating, often surprising experiments, MIT behavioral economist Dan Ariely refutes the common assumption that we behave in fundamentally rational ways. Blending everyday experience with groundbreaking research, Ariely explains how expectations, emotions, social norms, and other invisible, seemingly illogical forces skew our reasoning abilities.

Not only do we make astonishingly simple mistakes every day, but we make the same "types" of mistakes, Ariely discovers. We consistently overpay, underestimate, and procrastinate. We fail to understand the profound effects of our emotions on what we want, and we overvalue what we already own. Yet these misguided behaviors are neither random nor senseless. They're systematic and predictable--making us "predictably" irrational.

From drinking coffee to losing weight, from buying a car to choosing a romantic partner, Ariely explains how to break through these systematic patterns of thought to make better decisions. "Predictably Irrational" will change the way we interact with the world--one small decision at a time.]]> 247 Dan Ariely Ari 0 to-read 4.12 2008
author: Dan Ariely
name: Ari
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2008
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]]> 51014619
Immigration and inequality, globalization and technological disruption, slowing growth and accelerating climate change--these are sources of great anxiety across the world, from New Delhi and Dakar to Paris and Washington, DC. The resources to address these challenges are there--what we lack are ideas that will help us jump the wall of disagreement and distrust that divides us. If we succeed, history will remember our era with gratitude; if we fail, the potential losses are incalculable.

In this revolutionary book, renowned MIT economists Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo take on this challenge, building on cutting-edge research in economics explained with lucidity and grace. Original, provocative, and urgent, Good Economics for Hard Times makes a persuasive case for an intelligent interventionism and a society built on compassion and respect and show how economics, when done right, can help us solve the thorniest social and political problems of the day. It is an extraordinary achievement, one that shines a light to help us appreciate and understand our precariously balanced world.]]> 417 Abhijit V. Banerjee Ari 0 to-read 4.23 2019
author: Abhijit V. Banerjee
name: Ari
average rating: 4.23
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]]> 214986252 A deeply reported investigation into the battle over identity in China, chronicling the state oppression of those who fail to conform to Xi Jinping's definition of who is "Chinese," from an award-winning NPR correspondent.

In the hot summer months of 2021, China celebrated the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party. Authorities held propaganda and education campaigns across the country defining the ideal Chinese ethnically Han Chinese, Mandarin speaking, solidly atheist, and devoted to the socialist project of strengthening China against western powers.��

No one can understand modern China—including its response to the pandemic—without understanding who actually lives there, and the ways that the Chinese State tries to control its people. Let Only Red Flowers Bloom collects the stories of more than two dozen people who together represent a more holistic picture of Chinese identity. The Uyghurs who have seen millions of their fellow citizens detained in camps; mainland human rights lawyer Ren Quanniu, who lost his law license in a bureaucratic dispute after representing a Hong Kong activist; a teacher from Inner Mongolia, forced to escape persecution because of his support of his mother tongue. These are just a few narratives that journalist Emily Feng reports on, revealing human stories about resistance against a hegemonic state and introducing readers to the people who know about Chinese identity the best.��

Illuminating a country that has for too long been secretive of the real lives its citizens are living, Feng reveals what it’s really like to be anything other than party-supporting Han Chinese in China, and the myriad ways they’re trying to survive in the face of an oppressive regime.]]> 304 Emily Feng 0593594223 Ari 0 currently-reading 4.27
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]]> 8016836 A beautiful new translation of beloved Chinese author Lao She's masterpiece of social realism, about the misadventures of a poor Beijing rickshaw driver

First published in China in 1937, Rickshaw Boy is the story of Xiangzi, an honest and serious country boy who works as a rickshaw puller in Beijing. A man of simple needs whose greatest ambition is to one day own his own rickshaw, Xiangzi is nonetheless thwarted, time and again, in his attempts to improve his lot in life.

One of the most important and popular works of twentieth-century Chinese literature, Rickshaw Boy is an unflinchingly honest, darkly comic look at a life on the margins of society and a searing indictment of the philosophy of individualism.]]> 300 Lao She 0061436925 Ari 0 currently-reading 3.84 1936
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average rating: 3.84
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]]> 60468244 From veteran Amazon reporter for The Wall Street Journal, and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in investigative reporting, Dana Mattioli's The Everything War is the shocking, explosive, and untold exposé of Amazon's endless strategic greed, from destroying Main Street to remaking corporate power, in pursuit of total domination��, by any means necessary. There is simply no way to understand what befell the global economy, and America's cultural and economic landscape, without seeing what Amazon has wrought.

���ձ�> 416 Dana Mattioli 0316269778 Ari 0 dnf 4.08 2024
author: Dana Mattioli
name: Ari
average rating: 4.08
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]]> 150778691 464 Steven Hahn 0393635929 Ari 0 to-read 4.08 2024
author: Steven Hahn
name: Ari
average rating: 4.08
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]]> 182761575
In the summer of 1941, Hitler ruled Europe from the Atlantic to the Black Sea. Britain was struggling to combat his powerful propaganda machine, crowing victory and smearing his enemies as liars and manipulators over his frequent radio speeches, blasted out on loudspeakers and into homes. British claims that Hitler was dangerous had little impact against this wave of disinformation.

Except for the broadcasts of someone called Der Chef, a German who questioned Nazi doctrine. He had access to high-ranking German military secrets and spoke of internal rebellion. His listeners included German soldiers and citizens, as well as politicians in Washington DC who were debating getting into the war. And--most importantly--Der Chef was a fiction. He was a character created by the British propagandist Thomas Sefton Delmer, a unique weapon in the war.

Then, as author Peter Pomerantsev seeks to tell Delmer's story, he is called into a wartime propaganda effort of his the US response to the invasion of Ukraine. In flashes forward to the present day, Pomerantsev weaves in what he's learning from Delmer as he seeks to fight against Vladimir Putin's tyranny and lies.��This book��is the story of Delmer and his modern investigator, as they each embark on their own quest to manipulate the passions of supporters and enemies, and to turn the tide of an information war, an extraordinary history that is informing the present before our eyes.]]> 304 Peter Pomerantsev 1541774728 Ari 4 4.12 2024
author: Peter Pomerantsev
name: Ari
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2024
rating: 4
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]]> 214175211 Stow away with Rick Steves for a glimpse into the unforgettable moments, misadventures, and memories of his 1978 journey on the legendary Hippie Trail.

In the 1970s, the ultimate trip for any backpacker was the storied “Hippie Trail�� from Istanbul to Kathmandu. A 23-year-old Rick Steves made the trek, and like a travel writer in training, he documented everything along the way. From taking wild bus rides through Turkey to enduring monsoons in India, the experience ignited his love of travel and forever broadened his perspective on the world.
��
On the Hippie Trail��contains Rick's journals from 1978��the last year the trip was possible��and full-color travel photos from this trek of a lifetime��through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Nepal, plus��a brand-new preface and afterword reflecting on the historic context of the moment and how the journey changed his life.

You know Rick Steves. Now discover the adventure that made him the travel writer he is today.]]> 256 Rick Steves 1641716436 Ari 4 3.88 2025
author: Rick Steves
name: Ari
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2025
rating: 4
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]]> 211934965 All systems fail. All societies crumble. All worlds end.

In the authoritarian Federation, there is a plot to assassinate and replace the President, a man who has downloaded his mind to a succession of new bodies to maintain his grip on power. Meanwhile, on the fringes of a Western Europe that has renounced human governance in favor of ostensibly more efficient, objective, and peaceful AI Prime Ministers, an experimental artificial mind is malfunctioning, threatening to set off a chain of events that may spell the end of the Western world.

As the Federation and the West both start to crumble, Lilia, the brilliant scientist whose invention may be central to bringing down the seemingly immortal President, goes on the run, trying to break out from a near-impenetrable web of Federation surveillance. Her fate is bound up with a worldwide group of others fighting against the global status quo: Palmer, the man Lilia left behind in London, desperate to solve the mystery of her disappearance; Zoya, a veteran activist imprisoned in the taiga, whose book has inspired a revolutionary movement; Nikolai, the President’s personal physician, who has been forced into more and more harrowing decisions as he navigates the Federation’s palace politics; and Nurlan, the hapless parliamentary staffer whose attempt to save his Republic goes terribly awry. And then there is Krotov, head of the Federation’s security services, whose plots, agents, and assassins are everywhere.

Following the success of his debut novel, The Mountain in the Sea, Ray Nayler launches readers into a thrilling near-future world of geopolitical espionage. A cybernetic novel of political intrigue, Where the Axe is Buried combines the story of a near-impossible revolutionary operation with a blistering indictment of the many forms of authoritarianism that suffocate human freedom.]]> 336 Ray Nayler 0374615365 Ari 0 to-read 4.11 2025
author: Ray Nayler
name: Ari
average rating: 4.11
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]]> 214490421 A bold, urgent appeal from the acclaimed columnist and political commentator, addressing one of the most important issues of our time

In Peter Beinart’s view, one story has long dominated Jewish communal that of persecution and victimhood. It is a story that erases much of the nuance of sacred Jewish tradition and history, and also warps our understanding of modern history. After Gaza, where Jewish texts, history and language have been deployed to justify mass slaughter and starvation, he argues, Jews must tell a new story. After this war, whose horror will echo for generations, they must do nothing less than offer a new answer to the What does it mean to be a Jew?

Beinart imagines an alternate story that would draw on other nations�� efforts at moral reconstruction and a different reading of Jewish history. A story in which Jews have the right to equality, not supremacy, and in which Jewish and Palestinian safety is not mutually exclusive but intertwined. One in which we inhabit a world that recognizes the infinite value of all human life, beginning in the Gaza Strip.

Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza is a provocative and fearless argument that will expand and inform one of the defining conversations of our time. It is a book that only Peter Beinart could a passionate yet measured work that brings together his personal experience, his commanding grasp of history, his keen understanding of political and moral nuance, and a clear vision for the future.]]> 192 Peter Beinart 0593803892 Ari 0 to-read 4.45 2025
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]]> 213870084 From award-winning novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad comes a powerful reckoning with what it means to live in the heart of an Empire which doesn’t consider you fully human.

On Oct 25th, after just three weeks of the bombardment of Gaza, Omar El Akkad put out a tweet: “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.�� This tweet was viewed over 10 million times.��

One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This chronicles the deep fracture which has occurred for Black, brown, indigenous Americans, as well as the upcoming generation, many of whom had clung to a thread of faith in western ideals, in the idea that their countries, or the countries of their adoption, actually attempted to live up to the values they espouse.��

This book is a reckoning with what it means to live in the west, and what it means to live in a world run by a small group of countries—America, the UK, France and Germany.�� It will be The Fire Next Time for a generation that understands we’re undergoing a shift in the so-called ‘rules-based order,�� a generation that understands the west can no longer be trusted to police and guide the world, or its own cities and campuses. It draws on intimate details of Omar’s own story as an emigrant who grew up believing in the western project, who was catapulted into journalism by the rupture of 9/11.��

This book is his heartsick breakup letter with the west. It is a breakup we are watching all over the U.S., on college campuses, on city streets, and the consequences of this rupture will be felt by all of us. His book is for all the people who want something better than what the west has served up. This is the book for our time.]]> 208 Omar El Akkad 0593804147 Ari 0 to-read 4.69 2025
author: Omar El Akkad
name: Ari
average rating: 4.69
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]]> 212294434 A groundbreaking book that reveals the hidden architecture of our conversations and how even small improvements can have a profound impact on our relationships in work and life—from a celebrated Harvard Business School professor and leading expert��on the psychology of conversation.

We know we struggle with difficult conversations, but we’re often not very good at the easy ones, either. Though we do it all the time, Harvard professor Alison Wood Brooks argues that conversation is one of the most complex, demanding, and delicate of all human tasks, rife with the possibility of misinterpreting and misunderstanding. And yet conversations can also be a source of great joy, each one offering an opportunity to express who we are and learn who others are—to feel connected, loved, and alive.

In Talk, Brooks shows why conversing a little more effectively can make a big difference in the quality of our close personal relationships as well as our professional success. Drawing on the new science of conversation, Brooks distills lessons that show how we can better understand, learn from, and delight each other. The key is her TALK

T Choose topics and manage them well
A Ask more questions
L Use humor to keep conversations fizzy
K Prioritize their partners conversational needs

Through experiments ranging across the conversational spectrum—from speed daters who ask too few questions (or too many), to future business leaders averse to topic forethought, to traffic stops that reveal the essence of kind language—Brooks takes us inside the world of conversation, giving us the confidence and the advice to approach any interaction with more creativity and compassion.

Addressing our face-to-face conversations as well as those we have by phone, email, text, and social media, Talk is a thoughtful guide for anyone seeking to better establish and sustain their relationships. From managing our emotions and sparking creativity to navigating conflict and being more inclusive, the right conversation skills just might be the key to leading a more purposeful life.]]> 336 Alison Wood Brooks 0593443497 Ari 0 to-read 3.98
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]]> 199032056 603 Sergey Radchenko Ari 0 to-read 4.53 2024
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name: Ari
average rating: 4.53
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]]> 205436018 Han Kang’s most revelatory book since The Vegetarian, We Do Not Part tells the story of a friendship between two women while powerfully reckoning with a hidden chapter in Korean history.

One winter morning, Kyungha receives an urgent message from her friend Inseon to visit her at a hospital in Seoul. Inseon has injured herself in an accident, and she begs Kyungha to return to Jeju Island, where she lives, to save her beloved pet—a white bird called Ama. A snowstorm hits the island when Kyungha arrives. She must reach Inseon’s house at all costs, but the icy wind and squalls slow her down as night begins to fall. She wonders if she will arrive in time to save the animal—or even survive the terrible cold that envelops her with every step. Lost in a world of snow, she doesn’t yet suspect the vertiginous plunge into the darkness that awaits her at her friend’s house.

Blurring the boundaries between dream and reality, We Do Not Part powerfully illuminates a forgotten chapter in Korean history, buried for decades—bringing to light the lost voices of the past to save them from oblivion. Both a hymn to an enduring friendship and an argument for remembering, it is the story of profound love in the face of unspeakable violence—and a celebration of life, however fragile it might be.]]> 256 Han Kang 0593595459 Ari 0 to-read 3.87 2021
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]]> 215361877
Anthony Fennell, an Irish journalist and playwright, is assigned to cover the underwater cables that carry the world’s information. The sum of human existence—words, images, transactions, memes, voices, viruses—travels through the tiny fiber-optic tubes. But sometimes the tubes break, at an unfathomable depth.

Fennell’s journey brings him to the west coast of Africa, where he uncovers a story about the raw human labor behind the dazzling veneer of the technological world. He meets a fellow Irishman, John Conway, the chief of mission on a cable repair ship. The mysterious Conway is a skilled engineer and a freediver capable of reaching extraordinary depths. He is also in love with a South African actress, Zanele, who must leave to go on her own literary adventure to London.

When the ship is sent up the coast to repair a series of major underwater breaks, both men learn that the very cables they seek to fix carry the news that may cause their lives to unravel. At sea, they are forced to confront the most elemental questions of life, love, absence, belonging, and the perils of our severed connections. Can we, in our fractured world, reweave ourselves out of the thin, broken threads of our pasts? Can the ruptured things awaken us from our despair?

Resoundingly simple and turbulent at the same time, Twist is a meditation on the nature of narrative and truth from one of the great storytellers of our times.]]> 256 Colum McCann 0593241738 Ari 0 to-read 3.75 2025
author: Colum McCann
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average rating: 3.75
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]]> 217587065 A radiant novel of longing that blooms between two boys over the course of one summer—about family, desire, and what we inherit—from celebrated author Tash Aw.

When his grandfather dies, a boy named Jay travels south with his family to the property he left them, a once flourishing farm that has fallen into disrepair. The trees are diseased, the fields parched from months of drought.

Still, Jay’s father, Jack, sends him out to work the land, or whatever land is left. Over the course of these hot, dense days, Jay finds himself drawn to Chuan, the local son of the farm’s manager, different from him in every way except for one.

Out in the fields, and on the streets into town, the charge between the boys intensifies. Inside the house, the other family members confront their own regrets, and begin to drift apart. Like the land around them, they are powerless to resist the global forces that threaten to render their lives obsolete.

At once sweeping and intimate, The South is a story of what happens when private and public lives collide. It is the first in a quartet of novels that form Tash Aw’s masterful portrait of a family navigating a period of great change—a reimagined epic for our times.]]> 304 Tash Aw 0008637601 Ari 0 to-read 3.99 2025
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]]> 218695937 A novel about one woman’s fight for freedom, set in a near future where even dreams are under surveillance.

Sara has just landed at LAX, returning home from a conference abroad, when agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside and inform her that she will soon commit a crime. Using data from her dreams, the RAA’s algorithm has determined that she is at imminent risk of harming the person she loves most: her husband. For his safety, she must be kept under observation for twenty-one days.

The agents transfer Sara to a retention center, where she is held with other dreamers, all of them women trying to prove their innocence from different crimes. With every deviation from the strict and ever-shifting rules of the facility, their stay is extended. Months pass and Sara seems no closer to release. Then one day, a new resident arrives, disrupting the order of the facility and leading Sara on a collision course with the very companies that have deprived her of her freedom.

Eerie, urgent, and ceaselessly clear-eyed, The Dream Hotel artfully explores the seductive nature of technology, which puts us in shackles even as it makes our lives easier. Lalami asks how much of ourselves must remain private if we are to remain free, and whether even the most invasive forms of surveillance can ever capture who we really are.]]> 336 Laila Lalami 0593317602 Ari 0 to-read 3.65 2025
author: Laila Lalami
name: Ari
average rating: 3.65
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]]> 219551344 Who works for the government and what do they do? A timely and absorbing civics lessons from an all-star team of writers and storytellers.

The government is a vast, complex system that Americans pay for, rebel against, rely upon, dismiss, and celebrate. It’s also our shared resource for addressing the biggest problems of society. And it’s made up of people, mostly unrecognized and uncelebrated, doing work that can be deeply consequential and beneficial to everyone.

��������Michael Lewis invited his favorite writers to find someone doing an interesting job for the government and write about them. The stories they found are unexpected, riveting, and inspiring, including a former coal miner devoted to making mine roofs less likely to collapse, saving thousands of lives; an IRS agent straight out of a crime thriller; and the manager who made the National Cemetery Administration the best-run organization, public or private, in the entire country. Each essay shines a spotlight on the essential behind-the-scenes work of exemplary federal employees.

��������Whether they’re digitizing archives, chasing down cybercriminals, or discovering new planets, these workers are committed to their work and universally reluctant to take credit. The vivid profiles in On Duty blow up the stereotype of the irrelevant bureaucrat. They show how the essential business of government makes our lives possible, and how much it matters.]]> 272 Michael Lewis Ari 0 to-read 4.22 2025
author: Michael Lewis
name: Ari
average rating: 4.22
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]]> 199372835 ��A brilliant, original investigation into the radical shift of power as invisible rulers create bespoke realities revolutionizing politics, culture, and society. Anyone who wishes to destroy legitimate political and social power has a new weapon. It is the anarchist's dream, a force so shockingly effective that its destructive power seems limitless. Scientific proof is powerless in front of it; democratic validity is bulldozed by it; leaders are humiliated by it. What we used to call influence has become something violently toxic. Renée DiResta gives us a powerful original framing to explain how it now shapes public opinion through a��virtual rumor mill of niche propagandists. While they position themselves as trustworthy “Davids��, their reach, influence, and economics make them classic Goliaths, invisible rulers who create bespoke realities that control the destinies of millions of people, their work driven by a simple “if you make it trend, you make it true.�� By revealing the machinery and the dynamics of the interplay between influencers, algorithms, and online crowds, DiResta vividly illustrates the way belief in the fundamental legitimacy of institutions that make society work is deliberately undermined. ��This alternate system for shaping public opinion, unexamined until now, is rewriting the relationship between the people and their government in profoundly disturbing ways. From taking on and defeating California’s anti-vaxxers a decade ago to uncovering the ways that China and Russia target the American public and our elections, - and now herself a target of Congressmen Jim Jordan and hyper-partisans of the lunatic fringe �� DiResta has not merely been an observer of the machinery promulgating the Big Lie and the unyielding culture wars. As analyst, investigator, and participant, she provides unprecedented insight into the way influencers shape the opinion and behavior of massive crowds, with the power to drive those crowds into battle �� while bearing no responsibility for the consequences.]]> 425 Renee DiResta 1541703391 Ari 0 currently-reading 4.10
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]]> 216818681
Over the fifty years that Lorne Michaels has been at the helm of Saturday Night Live, he has become a revered, inimitable, and bewildering presence in the entertainment world. He’s a tastemaker, a mogul, a withholding father figure, a genius spotter of talent, a shrewd businessman, a name-dropper, a raconteur, the inspiration for Dr. Evil, the winner of more than a hundred Emmys—and, essentially, a mystery. Generations of writers and performers have spent their lives trying to figure him out, by turns demonizing and lionizing him. He’s “Obi-Wan Kenobi�� (Tracy Morgan), the “great and powerful Oz�� (Kate McKinnon), or “some kind of very distant, strange comedy god�� (Bob Odenkirk).

Lorne will introduce you to him, in full, for the first time. With unprecedented access to Michaels and the entire SNL apparatus, Susan Morrison takes readers behind the curtain for the lively, up-and-down, definitive story of how Michaels created and maintained the institution that changed comedy forever.

Drawn from hundreds of interviews—with Michaels, his friends, and SNL’s iconic stars and writers, from Will Ferrell to Tina Fey to John Mulaney to Chris Rock to Dan Aykroyd��Lorne is a deeply reported, wildly entertaining account of a man singularly obsessed with the show that would define his life—and have a profound impact on American culture.]]> 656 Susan Morrison 0812988876 Ari 0 to-read 4.20 2025
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name: Ari
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]]> 201730880 'A brilliant, scholarly, sharp and witty account of our weird eternal obsession with the end times... So enjoyable, that I didn't want it to end - the world, or the book.�� �� Adam Rutherford, author of A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived

'Everything Must Go will make you happy to be alive and reading �� until the lights go out . . . Brilliant' �� The Spectator

A riveting and brilliantly original exploration of our fantasies of the end of the world, from Mary Shelley's The Last Man to Marvel's Age of Ultron, by the Baillie Gifford and Orwell prize-shortlisted writer and co-host of the podcast 'Origin Story'.

For two millennia, Christians have looked forward to the end, haunted by the apocalyptic visions of the Biblical books of Daniel and Revelation. But for two centuries or more, these dark fantasies have given way to secular stories of how the world, our planet, or our species (or all of the above) might come to an end.

Dorian Lynskey's fascinating book explores the endings that we have read, listened to or watched over the last two dozen decades, whether they be by the death and destruction of a nuclear holocaust or collision with a meteor or comet, devastating epidemic or takeover by robots or computers.

The result is nothing less than a cultural history of the modern world, weaving together politics, history, science, high and popular culture in a book that is uniquely original, grippingly readable and deeply illuminating about both us and our times.

'I was blown away by this book... Lynskey is one of the best non-fiction writers around.' �� Sathnam Sanghera, author of Empireland

'Impossibly epic, brain-expanding, life-affirming and profound. You’ll never see humanity the same way again.' �� Ian Dunt, author of How Westminster Works . . . and Why It Doesn't]]> 509 Dorian Lynskey 1529095964 Ari 0 to-read 4.04 2025
author: Dorian Lynskey
name: Ari
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]]> 214175076 A provocative exploration about the architecture of power, the forces that stifle us from getting things done, and how we can restore confidence in democratically elected government—“the best book to date on the biggest political issue that nobody is talking about�� (Matthew Yglesias)

America was once a country that did big things—we built the world’s greatest rail network, a vast electrical grid, interstate highways, abundant housing, the Social Security system, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and more. But today, even while facing a host of pressing challenges—a housing shortage, a climate crisis, a dilapidated infrastructure—we feel stuck, unable to move the needle. Why?

America is today the victim of a vetocracy that allows nearly anyone to stifle progress. While conservatives deserve some blame, progressives have overlooked an unlikely culprit: their own fears of “The Establishment.�� A half-century ago, progressivism’s designs on getting stuff done were eclipsed by a desire to box in government. Reformers put speaking truth to power ahead of exercising that power for good. The ensuing gridlock has pummeled faith in public institutions of all sorts, stifled the movement’s ability to deliver on its promises, and, most perversely, opened the door for MAGA-style populism.

A century ago, Americans were similarly frustrated—and progressivism pointed the way out. The same can happen again. Marc J. Dunkelman vividly illustrates what progressives must do if they are going to break through today’s paralysis and restore, once again, confidence in democratically elected government. To get there, reformers will need to acknowledge where they’ve gone wrong. Progressivism’s success moving forward hinges on the movement’s willingness to rediscover its roots.]]> 416 Marc J. Dunkelman 154170021X Ari 0 to-read 4.01
author: Marc J. Dunkelman
name: Ari
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]]> 223436601 An explosive memoir charting one woman’s career at the heart of one of the most influential companies on the planet, Careless People gives you a front-row seat to Facebook, the decisions that have shaped world events in recent decades, and the people who made them.

From trips on private jets and encounters with world leaders to shocking accounts of misogyny and double standards behind the scenes, this searing memoir exposes both the personal and the political fallout when unfettered power and a rotten company culture take hold. In a gripping and often absurd narrative where a few people carelessly hold the world in their hands, this eye-opening memoir reveals what really goes on among the global elite.

Sarah Wynn-Williams tells the wrenching but fun story of Facebook, mapping its rise from stumbling encounters with juntas to Mark Zuckerberg’s reaction when he learned of Facebook’s role in Trump’s election. She experiences the challenges and humiliations of working motherhood within a pressure cooker of a workplace, all while Sheryl Sandberg urges her and others to “lean in.��

Careless People is a deeply personal account of why and how things have gone so horribly wrong in the past decade—told in a sharp, candid, and utterly disarming voice. A deep, unflinching look at the role that social media has assumed in our lives, Careless People reveals the truth about the leaders of Facebook: how the more power they grasp, the less responsible they become and the consequences this has for all of us.]]> 382 Sarah Wynn-Williams 1250391237 Ari 0 to-read 4.29 2025
author: Sarah Wynn-Williams
name: Ari
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/16
shelves: to-read
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]]> 62929342 Real Americans begins on the precipice of Y2K in New York City, when twenty-two-year-old Lily Chen, an unpaid intern at a slick media company, meets Matthew. Matthew is everything Lily is not: easygoing and effortlessly attractive, a native East Coaster and, most notably, heir to a vast pharmaceutical empire. Lily couldn't be more different: flat-broke, raised in Tampa, the only child of scientists who fled Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Despite all this, Lily and Matthew fall in love.

In 2021, fifteen-year-old Nick Chen has never felt like he belonged on the isolated Washington island where he lives with his single mother, Lily. He can't shake the sense she's hiding something. When Nick sets out to find his biological father, the journey threatens to raise more questions than answers.

In immersive, moving prose, Rachel Khong weaves a profound tale of class and striving, race and visibility, and family and inheritance—a story of trust, forgiveness, and finally coming home.

Exuberant and explosive, Real Americans is a social novel par excellence that asks: Are we destined, or made, and if so, who gets to do the making? Can our genetic past be overcome?

From the award-winning author of Goodbye, Vitamin: How far would you go to shape your own destiny? An exhilarating novel of American identity that spans three generations in one family, and asks: What makes us who we are? And how inevitable are our futures? ]]> 399 Rachel Khong 0593537254 Ari 4 3.94 2024
author: Rachel Khong
name: Ari
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/03
date added: 2025/03/03
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]]> 60904343 322 Gary J. Smith 1771623179 Ari 4 4.17
author: Gary J. Smith
name: Ari
average rating: 4.17
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/25
date added: 2025/02/25
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]]> 62121752
The diary opens on March 2, 2014, as the first wave of pro-Russian protest washes over eastern Ukraine in the wake of Euromaidan, the Revolution of Dignity, and it closes on August 18, 2014, the day a convoy of civilian Ukrainian refugees is deliberately slaughtered by Russian forces. Early on, Stiazhkina is captured by pro-Russian forces while she browses for books but is freed when one of her captors turns out to be a former student. Vignettes from her personal life intermingle with current events, and she examines ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. We walk with local dogs and their owners; we meet a formidable apartment building manager who shames occupiers and dismantles their artillery from the roof of her building; we follow a family evacuated to Kyiv whose young son builds checkpoints out of Legos. Olena Stiazhkina’s Ukraine, War, A Donetsk Diary is a fierce love letter to her country, her city, and her people.]]> 296 Olena Stiazhkina 0674291697 Ari 0 to-read 4.17
author: Olena Stiazhkina
name: Ari
average rating: 4.17
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/24
shelves: to-read
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]]> 28696594
From the clipper ships that ventured to Canton hauling cargos of American ginseng to swap Chinese tea, to the US warships facing off against China's growing navy in the South China Sea, from the Yankee missionaries who brought Christianity and education to China, to the Chinese who built the American West, the United States and China have always been dramatically intertwined. For more than two centuries, American and Chinese statesmen, merchants, missionaries, and adventurers, men and women, have profoundly influenced the fate of these nations. While we tend to think of America's ties with China as starting in 1972 with the visit of President Richard Nixon to China, the patterns—rapturous enchantment followed by angry disillusionment—were set in motion hundreds of years earlier.

Drawing on personal letters, diaries, memoirs, government documents, and contemporary news reports, John Pomfret reconstructs the surprising, tragic, and marvelous ways Americans and Chinese have engaged with one another through the centuries. A fascinating and thrilling account, The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom is also an indispensable book for understanding the most important—and often the most perplexing—relationship between any two countries in the world.
--us.macmillan.com]]> 704 John Pomfret 0805092501 Ari 0 to-read 4.27 2016
author: John Pomfret
name: Ari
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/18
shelves: to-read
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]]> 212933
When using the words "Manichean" or "Manichaeism" one rarely thinks Mani, painter, doctor and Eastern philosopher of the third century, called "the Buddha of Light" by the Chinese and "the apostle of Jesus" by the Egyptians . His tolerant and humanist philosophy wanted to reconcile the religions of his time. It earned him persecution, torment and hatred...]]> 272 Amin Maalouf 1566562481 Ari 0 to-read 3.93 1991
author: Amin Maalouf
name: Ari
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1991
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/14
shelves: to-read
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]]> 212935 Amin Maalouf's novel, The Rock of Tanios, begins with a recollection of the rock on which Tanios was last seen sitting and weaves together the strands of the fascinating legend of his disappearance. Tanios was the illegitimate son of a powerful Sheik whose every action brought chaos into his village. When Tanios's adopted father caused the death of a powerful political rival, he and his son together fled their homeland. In hiding, they became entangled with international spies and politicians; Tanios soon took on the roll of intermediary between dueling European and Middle Eastern powers.]]> 288 Amin Maalouf 0349106622 Ari 0 to-read 4.01 1993
author: Amin Maalouf
name: Ari
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1993
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 212936 400 Amin Maalouf 155970702X Ari 0 currently-reading 3.84 2000
author: Amin Maalouf
name: Ari
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2000
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/14
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 64533 293 Amin Maalouf 0805208984 Ari 0 to-read 4.21 1983
author: Amin Maalouf
name: Ari
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1983
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/14
shelves: to-read
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]]> 9938498
A mild-mannered professor from Chicago, Dodd brings along his wife, son, and flamboyant daughter, Martha. At first Martha is entranced by the parties and pomp, and the handsome young men of the Third Reich with their infectious enthusiasm for restoring Germany to a position of world prominence. Enamored of the New Germany, she has one affair after another, including with the surprisingly honorable first chief of the Gestapo, Rudolf Diels. But as evidence of Jewish persecution mounts, confirmed by chilling first-person testimony, her father telegraphs his concerns to a largely indifferent State Department back home. Dodd watches with alarm as Jews are attacked, the press is censored, and drafts of frightening new laws begin to circulate. As that first year unfolds and the shadows deepen, the Dodds experience days full of excitement, intrigue, romance and ultimately, horror, when a climactic spasm of violence and murder reveals Hitler's true character and ruthless ambition.

Suffused with the tense atmosphere of the period, and with unforgettable portraits of the bizarre Goring and the expectedly charming—yet wholly sinister—Goebbels, In the Garden of Beasts lends a stunning, eyewitness perspective on events as they unfold in real time, revealing an era of surprising nuance and complexity. The result is a dazzling, addictively readable work that speaks volumes about why the world did not recognize the grave threat posed by Hitler until Berlin, and Europe, were awash in blood and terror.]]> 448 Erik Larson 0307408841 Ari 5 3.87 2011
author: Erik Larson
name: Ari
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2011
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/04
date added: 2025/02/10
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Absolutely essential book to understand what it looks like as a society just gradually descends into fascism. Everything is fine, it's just a blip, it'll be fine after this. Until it's not.
]]> 53056522 From the author of the New York Times bestseller So You Want to Talk About Race, a history of white male America and a scathing indictment of what it has cost us socially, economically, and politically

After the election of Donald Trump, and the escalation of white male rage and increased hostility toward immigrants that came with him, New York Times-bestselling author Ijeoma Oluo found herself in conversation with Americans around the country, pondering one central question: How did we get here?

In this ambitious survey of the last century of American history, Oluo answers that question by pinpointing white men's deliberate efforts to subvert women, people of color, and the disenfranchised. Through research, interviews, and the powerful, personal writing for which she is celebrated, Oluo investigates the backstory of America's growth, from immigrant migration to our national ethos around ingenuity, from the shaping of economic policy to the protection of sociopolitical movements that fortify male power. In the end, she shows how white men have long maintained a stranglehold on leadership and sorely undermined the pursuit of happiness for all.]]> 278 Ijeoma Oluo 1580059511 Ari 0 to-read 4.40 2020
author: Ijeoma Oluo
name: Ari
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/04
shelves: to-read
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]]> 45691924 Friend is a tale of marital intrigue, abuse, and divorce in North Korea. A woman in her thirties comes to a courthouse petitioning for a divorce. As the judge who hears her statement begins to investigate the case, the story unfolds into a broader consideration of love and marriage. The novel delves into its protagonists' past, describing how the couple first fell in love and then how their marriage deteriorated over the years. It chronicles the toll their acrimony takes on their son and their careers alongside the story of the judge's own marital troubles.

A best-seller in North Korea, where Paek continues to live and write, Friend illuminates a side of life in the DPRK that Western readers have never before encountered. Far from being a propagandistic screed in praise of the Great Leader, Friend describes the lives of people who struggle with everyday problems such as marital woes and workplace conflicts. Instead of socialist-realist stock figures, Paek depicts complex characters who wrestle with universal questions of individual identity, the split between public and private selves, the unpredictability of existence, and the never-ending labor of maintaining a relationship. This groundbreaking translation of one of North Korea's most popular writers offers English-language readers a page-turner full of psychological tension as well as a revealing portrait of a society that is typically seen as closed to the outside world.]]> 240 Paek Nam-Nyong 0231195605 Ari 0 to-read 3.44 1988
author: Paek Nam-Nyong
name: Ari
average rating: 3.44
book published: 1988
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/24
shelves: to-read
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]]> 199531821 256 Colette Shade 0063333945 Ari 0 to-read 3.59 2025
author: Colette Shade
name: Ari
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/23
shelves: to-read
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]]> 199797594 A fresh and vivid new voice brings a contemporary edge to the classic espionage novel.

At 26, Princeton grad Michael Wang is trapped. Working at General Motors, he’s straining against the bamboo ceiling, quietly and doggedly at work on a piece of innovative self-driving car technology that he hopes will catapult him out of obscurity. In life he’s dogged by resentment—of the Ivy Leaguers who never accepted him, of a mother and a vanished father who let the very particular gravity of life in America crush them, and of a country that’s eager to perceive him as quiet, complacent and less-than.

But all that changes when one night, on a freelance coding platform, he meets the beautiful and enigmatic Vivian. She’s been admiring Michael’s work from afar, and represents a Beijing-based startup that’s eager to poach him, liberate his ideas from the stifling confines of GM, and help him find success in the wilder, less regulated business environs of China.

For Michael—lonely, ill-used, and unappreciated—it’s no choice at all. But when Vivian vanishes shortly after his arrival in China and the true nature of his new position is made brutally clear, Michael finds himself out of his depth and enmeshed in a dangerous web of industrial espionage and counterintelligence. Caught between two countries that view him as a pawn, where do his loyalties lie?

The Expat brilliantly explores the myth of meritocracy, high-tech immigration, US-China conflicts, identity, and disaffection to ask the question: in the pursuit of self-actualization, who will we betray and how far will we go?]]> 240 Hansen Shi 1639366776 Ari 2 3.58 2024
author: Hansen Shi
name: Ari
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2025/01/14
date added: 2025/01/15
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]]> 199898189 From the New York Times bestselling author of Midnight in Chernobyl comes the definitive, dramatic, minute-by-minute story of the Challenger disaster based on fascinating new archival research and in-depth reporting—a riveting history that reads like a thriller. On January 28, 1986, just seventy-three seconds into flight, the space shuttle Challenger broke apart over the Atlantic Ocean, killing all seven people on board. Millions of Americans witnessed the tragic deaths of a crew including New Hampshire schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe. Like the assassination of JFK, the Challenger disaster is a defining moment in 20th century history—one that forever changed the way America thought of itself and its optimistic view of the future. Yet the full story of what happened, and why, has never been told. Until now. Based on extensive archival research and meticulous, original reporting, An American Tragedy follows a handful of central protagonists—including each of the seven members of the doomed crew—through the years leading up to the accident, a detailed account of the tragedy itself, and into the investigation that followed. It’s a compelling tale of optimism and promise undermined by political cynicism and cost-cutting in the interests of burnishing national prestige; of hubris and heroism; and of an investigation driven by leakers and whistleblowers determined to bring the truth to light. Throughout, there are the ominous warning signs of a tragedy to come, recognized but then ignored, and later hidden from the public. Higginbotham reveals the history of the shuttle program, the lives of men and women whose stories have been overshadowed by the disaster as well as the designers, engineers and test pilots who struggled against the odds to get the first shuttle into space. A masterful blend of riveting human drama and fascinating and absorbing science, Challenger brings to life a turning point in history—and the result is an even more complex and astonishing story than we remember.]]> 570 Adam Higginbotham 1982176636 Ari 5 4.60 2024
author: Adam Higginbotham
name: Ari
average rating: 4.60
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/05
date added: 2025/01/05
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]]> 61190770
Loretta Thurwar and Hamara "Hurricane Staxxx" Stacker are the stars of Chain-Gang All-Stars, the cornerstone of CAPE, or Criminal Action Penal Entertainment, a highly-popular, highly-controversial, profit-raising program in America's increasingly dominant private prison industry. It's the return of the gladiators and prisoners are competing for the ultimate prize: their freedom.

In CAPE, prisoners travel as Links in Chain-Gangs, competing in death-matches for packed arenas with righteous protestors at the gates. Thurwar and Staxxx, both teammates and lovers, are the fan favorites. And if all goes well, Thurwar will be free in just a few matches, a fact she carries as heavily as her lethal hammer. As she prepares to leave her fellow Links, she considers how she might help preserve their humanity, in defiance of these so-called games, but CAPE's corporate owners will stop at nothing to protect their status quo and the obstacles they lay in Thurwar's path have devastating consequences.

Moving from the Links in the field to the protestors to the CAPE employees and beyond, Chain-Gang All-Stars is a kaleidoscopic, excoriating look at the American prison system's unholy alliance of systemic racism, unchecked capitalism, and mass incarceration, and a clear-eyed reckoning with what freedom in this country really means.]]> 367 Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah 0593317335 Ari 0 to-read 4.13 2023
author: Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
name: Ari
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/01
shelves: to-read
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]]> 203579108
Eliot Stein has traveled the globe in search of remarkable people who are preserving some of our rarest cultural rites. In Custodians of Wonder: Ancient Customs, Profound Traditions, and the Last People Keeping Them Alive, Stein introduces readers to a man saving the secret ingredient in Japan's 700-year-old original soy sauce recipe. In Italy, he learns how to make the world's rarest pasta from one of the only women alive who knows how to make it. And in India, he discovers a family rumored to make a mysterious metal mirror believed to reveal your truest self. From shadowing Scandinavia's last night watchman to meeting a 27th-generation West African griot to seeking out Cuba's last official cigar factory “readers�� more than a century after they spearheaded the fight for Cuban independence, Stein uncovers an almost lost world.

Climbing through Peru’s southern highlands, he encounters the last Inca bridge master who rebuilds a grass-woven bridge from the fabled Inca Road System. He befriends a British beekeeper who maintains a touching custom of "telling the bees" important news of the day and crunches through a German forest to find the official mailman of the only tree in the world with its own address �� to which countless people all over the world have written in hopes of finding love. These are just some of the last people on Earth still in touch with quickly vanishing rites. Let Eliot Stein introduce you to all of them.]]> 336 Eliot Stein 1250281091 Ari 0 to-read 4.22 2024
author: Eliot Stein
name: Ari
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/26
shelves: to-read
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]]> 48890489 384 Jonathan Kaufman 0735224412 Ari 0 to-read 4.21 2020
author: Jonathan Kaufman
name: Ari
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/26
shelves: to-read
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]]> 196540459 The New India is the unforgettable account of the struggle between modern forces and ancient ideas to shape the young country's destiny. It reveals a picture of a nation on the precipice of dramatic change.

Based on six years of detailed research and on-the-ground reporting, the book builds - authoritatively, vividly, indelibly - to become the story of post-colonial India. Using hundreds of interviews, and letters, diary entries, Partition-era police reports, and an astonishing range of sources, Bhatia shows how history plays a recurring role in the in politics, in the minds of citizens, in notions of justice and corruption.

Bhatia examines the connections between the Delhi riots of 2020 and the emergence of nineteenth-century revolutionary secret societies, the rise of Hindu nationalism, whose early advocates drew lessons from Hitler and Mussolini, the political use of misinformation and religious targeting, and the Hindu fundamentalist ideology that sparked the creation of the world's largest biometric project. As Bhatia shows, the evolution of this citizen database, in the hands of the BJP, now threatens to deny vast numbers of India's 200 million Muslims their Indian citizenship. Electorates in democracies used to choose their government. Now, in India, the government is choosing its electorate.

India has rarely been seen as in The New India, a monumental work of narrative reportage that illuminates the ways in which a supremacist ideology remade the country over decades, resulting in the prodigious rise of Narendra Modi, and forcing many to ask what they truly understood about their neighbours and themselves.]]> 448 Rahul Bhatia 1408717905 Ari 0 to-read 3.44
author: Rahul Bhatia
name: Ari
average rating: 3.44
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/26
shelves: to-read
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]]> 29246020 New York Times bestselling Unwind dystology.

In a world where disease has been eliminated, the only way to die is to be randomly killed (“gleaned��) by professional reapers (“scythes��). Citra and Rowan are teenagers who have been selected to be scythe’s apprentices, and—despite wanting nothing to do with the vocation—they must learn the art of killing and come to understand the necessity of what they do.

Only one of them will be chosen as a scythe’s apprentice. And when it becomes clear that the winning apprentice’s first task will be to glean the loser, Citra and Rowan are pitted against one another in a fight for their lives.]]> 448 Neal Shusterman Ari 2 4.40 2016
author: Neal Shusterman
name: Ari
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2016
rating: 2
read at: 2024/12/18
date added: 2024/12/18
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]]> 58950736 From a New York Times investigative reporter and Pulitzer Prize finalist, “an essential book for our times�� (Ezra Klein), tracking the high-stakes inside story of how Big Tech’s breakneck race to drive engagement—and profits—at all costs fractured the world

We all have a vague sense that social media is bad for our minds, for our children, and for our democracies. But the truth is that its reach and impact run far deeper than we have understood. Building on years of international reporting, Max Fisher tells the gripping and galling inside story of how Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social networks, in their pursuit of unfettered profits, preyed on psychological frailties to create the algorithms that drive everyday users to extreme opinions and, increasingly, extreme actions. As Fisher demonstrates, the companies�� founding tenets, combined with a blinkered focus maximizing engagement, have led to a destabilized world for everyone.

Traversing the planet, Fisher tracks the ubiquity of hate speech and its spillover into violence, ills that first festered in far-off locales to their dark culmination in America during the pandemic, the 2020 election, and the Capitol Insurrection. Through it all, the social-media giants refused to intervene in any meaningful way, claiming to champion free speech when in fact what they most prized were limitless profits. The result, as Fisher shows, is a cultural shift toward a world in which people are polarized not by beliefs based on facts, but by misinformation, outrage, and fear.

His narrative is about more than the villains, however. Fisher also weaves together the stories of the heroic outsiders and Silicon Valley defectors who raised the alarm and revealed what was happening behind the closed doors of Big Tech. Both panoramic and intimate, The Chaos Machine is the definitive account of the meteoric rise and troubled legacy of the tech titans, as well as a rousing and hopeful call to arrest the havoc wreaked on our minds and our world before it’s too late.]]> 400 Max Fisher 031670332X Ari 5 4.28 2022
author: Max Fisher
name: Ari
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/06
date added: 2024/12/07
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]]> 210963085 The former��head��of the Pentagon program responsible for the investigation of UFOs��now known as unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP)��reveals long-hidden truths with profound implications for not only national security but our understanding of the universe.

Luis “Lue�� Elizondo is a former senior intelligence official and special agent who was recruited into a strange and highly sensitive US government program to investigate UAP incursions into sensitive military installations and air space. To accomplish his mission, Elizondo had to rely on decades of experience gained working some of America’s most sensitive and classified programs.��Even then, he was not prepared for what he would learn, and the truth about the government’s long shadowy involvement in UAP investigations, and the lengths officials would take to keep them a secret.

The stakes could not be higher. Imminent is a first-hand, revelatory account inside the Pentagon’s most closely guarded secret and a call to action to confront humanity’s greatest existential questions.]]> 275 Luis Elizondo 0063235560 Ari 3 3.87 2024
author: Luis Elizondo
name: Ari
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/22
date added: 2024/12/07
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]]> 200113497
In late February 2022, a series of missiles and rocket strikes began falling upon Ukraine, as the Russian military barreled over the border and fanned out across the country. First they took Chernobyl, then Kherson, then Mariupol. Time stood still as the world waited for Ukraine to flatten underneath the boot of its neighbor.

Meanwhile, on the front lines in the capital city, Kyiv Independent reporter Illia Ponomarenko was seeing a different story on after months―years―of waiting for this long-feared attack, Ukraine was fed up and ready to fight back. The Russians bogged down hard in combat east and west of Kyiv. They got exhausted. They screwed up logistics. They sustained heavy losses. Their unbelievably overconfident blitz was failing.

The Battle of Kyiv is Illia Ponomarenko’s heart-wrenching memoir of the war on his homeland, offering a fiery diatribe against Russian hypocrisy and a moving look at what is being lost. But it’s also a story of pride and even elation as Ukrainian forces come together, find their mojo, and oust the invaders from Kyiv. The most powerful and personal chronicle of the war to date, The Battle of Kyiv is an exceptional literary achievement, chronicling a stunning feat of resistance and a courageous people set on a miraculous victory.]]> 288 Illia Ponomarenko 1639733876 Ari 0 to-read 4.24 2024
author: Illia Ponomarenko
name: Ari
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/04
shelves: to-read
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]]> 195820877
A leading national security expert, who publicly predicted Vladimir Putin's intention to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine months before it took place, lays out the case for why China's Xi Jinping is preparing to conquer Taiwan in the coming years and the dire stakes for America and the whole world if he is not deterred.

In World on the Brink, security expert Dmitri Alperovitch makes the case that we are already in the midst of Cold War II, with China, and that Taiwan is the perilous strategic flashpoint of this new conflict that risks triggering a devastating war between major nuclear powers in a similar role that West Berlin nearly played during Cold War I.

Laying out the comprehensive strategy to deter war and maintain U.S. place as the world's leading superpower in the face of rising China, Alperovitch breaks down not only the significant weaknesses that can prevent China from surpassing the United States, but also the key policies that will enable America to maintain primacy even as China ramps up its efforts.

As Alperovitch explains, we must play to our strengths and address our weaknesses, using our leverage as the strongest nation on the planet to tactfully navigate the next Cold War. This sharp, timely book is the essential blueprint for doing just that.]]> 400 Dmitri Alperovitch 1541704096 Ari 4 4.23
author: Dmitri Alperovitch
name: Ari
average rating: 4.23
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/02
date added: 2024/12/02
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]]> 145624737
It’s become common to tell kids that they’re going to die from climate change. We are constantly bombarded by doomsday headlines that tell us the soil won’t be able to support crops, fish will vanish from our oceans, and that we should reconsider having children.

But in this bold, radically hopeful book, data scientist Hannah Ritchie argues that if we zoom out, a very different picture emerges. In fact, the data shows we’ve made so much progress on these problems that we could be on track to achieve true sustainability for the first time in human history.

Packed with the latest research, practical guidance and enlightening graphics, this book will make you rethink almost everything you’ve been told about the environment. From the virtues of eating locally and living in the countryside, to the evils of overpopulation, to plastic straws and palm oil , Not the End of the World will give you the tools to understand our current crisis and make lifestyle changes that actually have an impact. Hannah cuts through the noise by outlining what works, what doesn’t, and what we urgently need to focus on so we can leave a sustainable planet for future generations.������

These problems are big. But they are solvable. We are not doomed. We can build a better future for everyone. Let’s turn that opportunity into reality.

���ձ�> 352 Hannah Ritchie 031653675X Ari 0 to-read 4.20 2024
author: Hannah Ritchie
name: Ari
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/02
shelves: to-read
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]]> 176443045
Paris, 1885: Aubry Tourvel, a spoiled and stubborn nine-year-old girl, comes across a wooden puzzle ball on her walk home from school. She tosses it over the fence, only to find it in her backpack that evening. Days later, at the family dinner table, she starts to bleed to death.

When medical treatment only makes her worse, she flees to the outskirts of the city, where she realizes that it is this very act of movement that keeps her alive. So begins her lifelong journey on the run from her condition, which won’t allow her to stay anywhere for longer than a few days nor return to a place where she’s already been.

From the scorched dunes of the Calashino Sand Sea to the snow-packed peaks of the Himalayas; from a bottomless well in a Parisian courtyard, to the shelves of an infinite underground library, we follow Aubry as she learns what it takes to survive and ultimately, to truly live. But the longer Aubry wanders and the more desperate she is to share her life with others, the clearer it becomes that the world she travels through may not be quite the same as everyone else’s...

Fiercely independent and hopeful, yet full of longing, Aubry Tourvel is an unforgettable character fighting her way through a world of wonders to find a place she can call home. A spellbinding and inspiring story about discovering meaning in a life that seems otherwise impossible, A Short Walk Through a Wide World reminds us that it’s not the destination, but rather the journey—no matter how long it lasts—that makes us who we are.]]> 400 Douglas Westerbeke 1668026066 Ari 0 to-read 3.48 2024
author: Douglas Westerbeke
name: Ari
average rating: 3.48
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/01
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]]> 179455076
At once a love song to his island home and to his parents, this hypnotic melding of dream, history, literature, place and memory is about how reality is never made by realists and how our lives so often arise out of the stories of others and the stories we invent about ourselves.]]> 280 Richard Flanagan 1761343467 Ari 0 to-read 4.19 2023
author: Richard Flanagan
name: Ari
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/01
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]]> 205062721 Borders draw one map of the world; money draws another. A journalist’s riveting account exposes a parallel universe that has become a haven for the rich and powerful.
��
A globe shows the world we think we neatly delineated sovereign nations that grant or restrict their citizens�� rights. Beneath, above, and tucked inside their borders, however, another universe has been engineered into existence. It consists of thousands of extraterritorial zones that operate largely autonomously, and increasingly for the benefit of the wealthiest individuals and corporations.

Atossa Abrahamian traces the rise of this hidden globe to thirteenth-century Switzerland, where poor cantons marketed their only bodies, in the form of mercenary fighters. Over time, economists, theorists, statesmen, and consultants evolved ever more sophisticated ways of exporting and exploiting statelessness, in the form of free trade zones, flags of convenience, offshore detention centers, charter cities controlled by foreign corporations, and even into outer space. By mapping this countergeography, which decides who wins and who loses in the new global order—and helping us to see how it might be otherwise��The Hidden Globe fascinates, enrages, and inspires.]]> 333 Atossa Araxia Abrahamian 0593329872 Ari 0 to-read 3.59 2024
author: Atossa Araxia Abrahamian
name: Ari
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/01
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]]> 201187765
Over seven decades, from 1940 to 2010, the pieds-noirs Cassars live in an itinerant state—separated in the chaos of World War II, running from a complicated colonial homeland, and, after Algerian independence, without a homeland at all. This Strange Eventful History, told with historical sweep, is above all a family story: of patriarch Gaston and his wife Lucienne, whose myth of perfect love sustains them and stifles their children; of François and Denise, devoted siblings connected by their family’s strangeness; of François’s union with Barbara, a woman so culturally different they can barely comprehend one another; of Chloe, the result of that union, who believes that telling these buried stories will bring them all peace.

Inspired in part by long-ago stories from her own family’s history, Claire Messud animates her characters�� rich interior lives amid the social an]]> 448 Claire Messud 039363504X Ari 0 to-read 3.50
author: Claire Messud
name: Ari
average rating: 3.50
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]]> 205478762 The Overstory at the height of his skills. Twelve-year-old Evie Beaulieu sinks to the bottom of a swimming pool in Montreal strapped to one of the world’s first aqualungs. Ina Aroita grows up on naval bases across the Pacific with art as her only home. Two polar opposites at an elite Chicago high school bond over a three-thousand-year-old board game; Rafi Young will get lost in literature, while Todd Keane’s work will lead to a startling AI breakthrough.

They meet on the history-scarred island of Makatea in French Polynesia, whose deposits of phosphorus once helped to feed the world. Now the tiny atoll has been chosen for humanity’s next adventure: a plan to send floating, autonomous cities out onto the open sea. But first, the island’s residents must vote to greenlight the project or turn the seasteaders away.

Set in the world’s largest ocean, this awe-filled book explores that last wild place we have yet to colonize in a still-unfolding oceanic game, and interweaves beautiful writing, rich characterization, profound themes of technology and the environment, and a deep exploration of our shared humanity in a way only Richard Powers can.]]> 381 Richard Powers 1324086033 Ari 0 to-read 4.16 2024
author: Richard Powers
name: Ari
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> 42585054
China and Japan have cultural and political connections that stretch back fifteen hundred years. But today their relationship is strained. China’s military buildup deeply worries Japan, while Japan’s brutal occupation of China in World War II remains an open wound. In recent years less than ten percent of each population had positive feelings toward the other, and both countries insist that the other side must deal openly with its history before relations can improve.

From the sixth century, when the Japanese adopted core elements of Chinese civilization, to the late twentieth century, when China looked to Japan for a path to capitalism, Ezra Vogel’s China and Japan examines key turning points in Sino-Japanese history. Throughout much of their past, the two countries maintained deep cultural ties, but China, with its great civilization and resources, had the upper hand. Japan’s success in modernizing in the nineteenth century and its victory in the 1895 Sino-Japanese War changed the dynamic, putting Japan in the dominant position. The bitter legacy of World War II has made cooperation difficult, despite efforts to promote trade and, more recently, tourism.

Vogel underscores the need for Japan to offer a thorough apology for the war, but he also urges China to recognize Japan as a potential vital partner in the region. He argues that for the sake of a stable world order, these two Asian giants must reset their relationship, starting with their common interests in environmental protection, disaster relief, global economic development, and scientific research.]]> 536 Ezra F. Vogel 0674916573 Ari 0 to-read 4.10
author: Ezra F. Vogel
name: Ari
average rating: 4.10
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date added: 2024/11/27
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]]> 123979561 The world’s most sophisticated gastronomic culture, brilliantly presented through a banquet of thirty Chinese dishes.

Chinese was the earliest truly global cuisine. When the first Chinese laborers began to settle abroad, restaurants appeared in their wake. Yet Chinese has the curious distinction of being both one of the world’s best-loved culinary traditions and one of the least understood. For more than a century, the overwhelming dominance of a simplified form of Cantonese cooking ensured that few foreigners experienced anything of its richness and sophistication―but today that is beginning to change. In Invitation to a Banquet, award-winning cook and writer Fuchsia Dunlop explores the history, philosophy, and techniques of Chinese culinary culture. In each chapter, she examines a classic dish, from mapo tofu to Dongpo pork, knife-scraped noodles to braised pomelo pith, to reveal a distinctive aspect of Chinese gastronomy, whether it’s the importance of the soybean, the lure of exotic ingredients, or the history of Buddhist vegetarian cuisine. Meeting food producers, chefs, gourmets, and home cooks as she tastes her way across the country, Fuchsia invites readers to join her on an unforgettable journey into Chinese food as it is cooked, eaten, and considered in its homeland. Weaving together history, mouthwatering descriptions of food, and on-the-ground research conducted over the course of three decades, Invitation to a Banquet is a lively, landmark tribute to the pleasures and mysteries of Chinese cuisine.]]> 480 Fuchsia Dunlop 0393867137 Ari 0 currently-reading 4.25 2023
author: Fuchsia Dunlop
name: Ari
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/24
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]]> 208842391 How a concentrated attack on political institutions threatens to disable the essential workings of government

In this unsettling book, Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum trace how ungoverning—the deliberate effort to dismantle the capacity of government to do its work—has become a malignant part of politics. Democracy depends on a government that can govern, and that requires what’s called administration. The administrative state is made up of the vast array of departments and agencies that conduct the essential business of government, from national defense and disaster response to implementing and enforcing public policies of every kind. Ungoverning chronicles the reactionary movement that demands dismantling the administrative state. The demand is not for goals that can be met with policies or programs. When this demand is frustrated, as it must be, the result is an invitation to violence.

Muirhead and Rosenblum unpack the idea of ungoverning through many examples of the politics of destruction. They show how ungoverning disables capacities that took generations to build—including the administration of free and fair elections. They detail the challenges faced by officials who are entrusted with running the government and who now face threats and intimidation from those who would rather bring it crashing down—and replace the regular processes of governing with chaotic personal rule.

The unfamiliar phenomenon of ungoverning threatens us all regardless of partisanship or ideological leaning. Ungoverning will not be limited to Donald Trump’s moment on the political stage. To resist this threat requires that we first recognize what ungoverning is and what it portends.]]> 280 Nancy L. Rosenblum 0691250529 Ari 0 to-read 3.97 2024
author: Nancy L. Rosenblum
name: Ari
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/24
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]]> 210943364
The first of the book’s three intertwining essays is set in Dakar, Senegal. Despite being raised as a strict Afrocentrist, Coates had never set foot on the African continent until now. He roams the “steampunk�� city of “old traditions and new machinery,�� but everywhere he goes he feels as if he’s in two places at once: a modern city in Senegal and a mythic kingdom in his mind. Finally he travels to the slave castles off the coast and has his own reckoning with the legacy of the Afrocentric dream.

He takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he meets an educator whose job is threatened for teaching one of Coates’s own books. There he discovers a community of mostly white supporters who were transformed by the “racial reckoning�� of 2020. But he also explores the backlash to this reckoning and the deeper myths of the community—a capital of the confederacy with statues of segregationists looming over its public squares.

And in Palestine, Coates discovers the devastating gap between the narratives we’ve accepted and the clashing reality of life on the ground. He meets with activists and dissidents, Israelis and Palestinians—the old, who remember their dispossessions on two continents, and the young, who have only known struggle and disillusionment. He travels into Jerusalem, the heart of Zionist mythology, and to the occupied territories, where he sees the reality the myth is meant to hide. It is this hidden story that draws him in and profoundly changes him—and makes the war that would soon come all the more devastating.

Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, this work from one of the country’s most important writers is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive nationalist myths that shape our world—and our own souls—and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.]]> 232 Ta-Nehisi Coates 0593230388 Ari 5 4.51 2024
author: Ta-Nehisi Coates
name: Ari
average rating: 4.51
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/06
date added: 2024/11/06
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]]> 60070311 China After Mao , award-winning author Frank Dikötter delves into the history of China under the communist party �� from the death of Chairman Mao in 1976 up until the moment when Xi Jinping stepped to the fore in 2012.

It is a fascinating tale of contradictions and illusions; of shadow banking, repeated anti-corruption drives and the existence of extreme state wealth alongside everyday poverty. Dikötter explores the decades of so-called 'Reform and Opening Up' �� a forty-year period that has left China with the lowest proportion of resident foreigners in any country �� and the country's emergence into a post-industrial era. He examines China's navigation of the 2008 financial crash, its increasing hostility towards perceived Western interference and its development into a thoroughly entrenched dictatorship with a sprawling security apparatus and the most sophisticated surveillance system in the world.

Drawing on hundreds of previously unseen municipal and provincial archives, as well as unpublished memoirs, newspaper reports and the secret diaries of Mao's personal secretary, China After Mao is a brilliantly researched and mesmerizing account of a country in flux �� and in crisis.]]> 416 Frank Dikötter 1639730516 Ari 3 3.84 2022
author: Frank Dikötter
name: Ari
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/02
date added: 2024/11/02
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]]> 58877223 379 Jenny Erpenbeck 332860085X Ari 3 3.35 2021
author: Jenny Erpenbeck
name: Ari
average rating: 3.35
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/28
date added: 2024/11/02
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]]> 209330233 A novel of money and morality from the New York Times bestselling author of Leave the World Behind.

Brooke wants. She isn’t in need, but there are things she wants. A sense of purpose, for instance. She wants to make a difference in the world, to impress her mother along the way, to spend time with friends and secure her independence. Her job assisting an octogenarian billionaire in his quest to give away a vast fortune could help her achieve many of these goals. It may inspire new desires as well: proximity to wealth turns out to be nothing less than transformative. What is money, really, but a kind of belief?

Taut, unsettling, and alive to the seductive distortions of money, Entitlement is a riveting tale for our new gilded age, a story that confidently considers questions about need and worth, race and privilege, philanthropy and generosity, passion and obsession. It is a provocative, propulsive novel about the American imagination.]]> 288 Rumaan Alam 0593718461 Ari 0 to-read 3.00 2024
author: Rumaan Alam
name: Ari
average rating: 3.00
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/20
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]]> 39860114
Author A.J. Jacobs discovers that his coffee—and every other item in our lives—would not be possible without hundreds of people we usually take for farmers, chemists, artists, presidents, truckers, mechanics, biologists, miners, smugglers, and goatherds.

By thanking these people face to face, Jacobs finds some much-needed brightness in his life. Gratitude does not come naturally to Jacobs—his disposition is more Larry David than Tom Hanks—but he sets off on the journey on a dare from his son. And by the end, it’s clear to him that scientific research on gratitude is true. Gratitude’s benefits are It improves compassion, heals your body, and helps battle depression.

Jacobs gleans wisdom from vivid characters all over the globe, including the Minnesota miners who extract the iron that makes the steel used in coffee roasters, to the Madison Avenue marketers who captured his wandering attention for a moment, to the farmers in Colombia.

Along the way, Jacobs provides wonderful insights and useful tips, from how to focus on the hundreds of things that go right every day instead of the few that go wrong. And how our culture overemphasizes the individual over the team. And how to practice the art of “savoring meditation�� and fall asleep at night. Thanks a Thousand is a reminder of the amazing interconnectedness of our world. It shows us how much we take for granted. It teaches us how gratitude can make our lives happier, kinder, and more impactful. And it will inspire us to follow our own “Gratitude Trails.”]]> 160 A.J. Jacobs 1501119923 Ari 0 to-read 3.70 2018
author: A.J. Jacobs
name: Ari
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/15
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]]> 30759299 “Hilarious and Heartbreaking. Comedy shouldn’t take courage, but it made an exception for��Bassem.�� --Jon Stewart

Semi-Finalist in the Humor category in the ŷ������ Choice Awards.

"The Jon Stewart of the Arabic World"—the creator of The Program, the most popular television show in Egypt’s history—chronicles his transformation from heart surgeon to political satirist, and offers crucial insight into the Arab Spring, the Egyptian Revolution, and the turmoil roiling the modern Middle East, all of which inspired the documentary about his life, Tickling Giants.

Bassem Youssef’s incendiary satirical news program, Al-Bernameg (The Program), chronicled the events of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, the fall of President Hosni Mubarak, and the rise of Mubarak’s successor, Mohamed Morsi. Youssef not only captured his nation’s dissent but stamped it with his own brand of humorous political criticism, in which the Egyptian government became the prime laughing stock.

So potent were Youssef’s skits, jokes, and commentary, the authoritarian government accused him of insulting the Egyptian presidency and Islam. After a six-hour long police interrogation, Youssef was released. While his case was eventually dismissed, his television show was terminated, and Youssef, fearful for his safety, fled his homeland.

In Revolution for Dummies, Youssef recounts his life and offers hysterical riffs on the hypocrisy, instability, and corruption that has long animated Egyptian politics. From the attempted cover-up of the violent clashes in Tahrir Square to the government’s announcement that it had created the world’s first "AIDS cure" machine, to the conviction of officials that Youssef was a CIA operative—recruited by Jon Stewart—to bring down the country through sarcasm. There’s much more—and it’s all insanely true.

Interweaving the dramatic and inspiring stories of the development of his popular television show and his rise as the most contentious funny-man in Egypt, Youssef’s humorous, fast-paced takes on dictatorship, revolution, and the unforeseeable destiny of democracy in the Modern Middle East offers much needed hope and more than a few healing laughs. A documentary about his life, Tickling Giants, debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2016,��and is now��scheduled for major release.]]> 289 Bassem Youssef 0062446916 Ari 4
Merged review:

Less funny than I expected, but a good personal account of an incredibly interesting time.]]> 4.16 2017
author: Bassem Youssef
name: Ari
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2017/11/01
date added: 2024/09/28
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review:
Less funny than I expected, but a good personal account of an incredibly interesting time.

Merged review:

Less funny than I expected, but a good personal account of an incredibly interesting time.
]]> 8503590 279 Dave Eggers 0307739430 Ari 5 4.11 2009
author: Dave Eggers
name: Ari
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2009
rating: 5
read at: 2011/06/27
date added: 2024/09/24
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]]> 198137984
The son of two Chinese immigrants from Hong Kong, Edward Wong grew up around Washington, DC; his father, a former soldier in the People’s Liberation Army under Mao, worked in Chinese restaurants and rarely spoke about his native land. Yook Kearn Wong came of age during the Japanese occupation in World War II, then fell under the spell of Mao’s promise of a new, equitable China, spending harsh years with the Chinese army in northern China and in Xinjiang, along the Central Asian frontier. In 1962, disillusioned with Mao’s brutal policies, he fled to Hong Kong and eventually went to America.


When Edward Wong moved to Beijing as a correspondent for The New York Times in 2008, it gave him a rare opportunity to investigate his father’s mysterious past, while also assessing for himself the dream of a resurgent China that his father once held, then abandoned. He had a front-row seat as the world’s two superpowers met at a crossroads. And the years of his tenure saw China’s economic boom and geopolitical expansion, as well as the darker currents of nationalism and ethnic repression and the autocratic rise of President Xi Jinping.


As a son considering his father’s life and his own time in China, Wong provides an epic, moving chronicle of a family and a nation, one that spans more than 80 years and gives insight into a new authoritarian age in China that is transforming the world. It is the essential work for understanding the sweep and direction of modern China.]]> 464 Edward Wong 1984877402 Ari 0 currently-reading 3.98
author: Edward Wong
name: Ari
average rating: 3.98
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]]> 150779189 368 Anthony Bale 1324064579 Ari 5 3.67 2024
author: Anthony Bale
name: Ari
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/16
date added: 2024/09/16
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]]> 17237713
Aminatta Forna has established herself as one of our most perceptive and uncompromising chroniclers of war and the way it reverberates, sometimes imperceptibly, in the daily lives of those touched by it. With The Hired Man, she has delivered a tale of a Croatian village after the War of Independence, and a family of newcomers who expose its secrets.

Duro is off on a morning’s hunt when he sees something one rarely does in Gost: a strange car. Later that day, he overhears its occupants, a British woman, Laura, and her two children, who have taken up residence in a house Duro knows well. He offers his assistance getting their water working again, and soon he is at the house every day, helping get it ready as their summer cottage, and serving as Laura’s trusted confidant.

But the other residents of Gost are not as pleased to have the interlopers, and as Duro and Laura’s daughter Grace uncover and begin to restore a mosaic in the front that has been plastered over, Duro must be increasingly creative to shield the family from the town’s hostility, and his own past with the house’s former occupants. As the inhabitants of Gost go about their days, working, striving to better themselves and their town, and arguing, the town’s volatile truths whisper ever louder.

A masterpiece of storytelling haunted by lost love and a restrained menace, this novel recalls Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee and Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje. The Hired Man confirms Aminatta Forna as one of our most important writers.]]> 294 Aminatta Forna 1408817667 Ari 0 to-read 3.91 2013
author: Aminatta Forna
name: Ari
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/04
shelves: to-read
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]]> 203579067 Part memoir, part manifesto, the inspiring story of a Louisiana librarian advocating for inclusivity on the front lines of our vicious culture wars. One of the things small town librarian Amanda Jones values most about books is how they can affirm a young person's sense of self. So in 2022, when she caught wind of a local public hearing that would discuss “book content,�� she knew what was at stake. Schools and libraries nationwide have been bombarded by demands for books with LGTBQ+ references, discussions of racism, and more to be purged from the shelves. Amanda would be damned if her community were to ban stories representing minority groups. She spoke out that night at the meeting. Days later, she woke up to a nightmare that is still ongoing. Amanda Jones has been called a groomer, a pedo, and a porn-pusher; she has faced death threats and attacks from strangers and friends alike. Her decision to support a collection of books with diverse perspectives made her a target for extremists using book banning campaigns-funded by dark money organizations and advanced by hard right politicians-in a crusade to make America more white, straight, and Christian. But Amanda Jones wouldn't give up without a she sued her harassers for defamation and urged others to join her in the resistance. Mapping the book banning crisis occurring all across the nation, That Librarian draws the battle lines in the war against equity and inclusion, calling book lovers everywhere to rise in defense of our readers.]]> 288 Amanda Jones 1639733531 Ari 0 to-read 3.81 2024
author: Amanda Jones
name: Ari
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/01
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]]> 195791045
No country was more deeply affected by 9/11 than an entire generation grew up amid the upheaval that began that day. Young Afghans knew the promise of freedom, democracy, and safety, fought with each other over its meaning―and then witnessed its collapse. In Twenty Years , the Wall Street Journal correspondent Sune Engel Rasmussen draws on more than a decade of reporting from the country to tell Afghanistan’s story from a new angle. Through the eyes of newly empowered women, skilled entrepreneurs, driven insurgents, and abandoned Western allies, we see the United States and its partners bring new freedoms and wealth, only to preside over the corruption, war-lordism, and social division that led to the Taliban’s return to power.

Rasmussen relates this history via two main Zahra, who returns from abroad with high hopes for her liberated county, where she must fight to escape a brutal marriage and rebuild her life; and Omari, who joins the Taliban to protect the honor of his village and country and winds up wrestling with doubt and the trauma of war after achieving victory. We also meet Parasto, who risks her life running clandestine girls�� schools under the new Taliban regime, and Fahim, a rags-to-riches tycoon who is forced to flee. With intimate access to these and other characters, Rasmussen offers deep insight into a country betrayed by the West and Taliban alike.]]> 352 Sune Engel Rasmussen 0374609942 Ari 0 to-read 4.49
author: Sune Engel Rasmussen
name: Ari
average rating: 4.49
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/26
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]]> 198902261 New York Times Editors' Choice
Named a best book of the year by Amazon

"A rollicking, unexpectedly affecting story. . . It’s going to be one of the big, buzzy Beltway books of the year."
��Politico

A bridge-burning, riotous memoir by a top PR operative in Washington who exposes the secrets of the $129-billion industry that controls so much of what we see and hear in the media—from a man who used to pull the strings, and who is now pulling back the curtain.

After nearly two decades in the Washington PR business, Elwood wants to come clean, by exposing the dark underbelly of the very industry that’s made him so successful. The first step is revealing exactly what he’s been up to for the past twenty years—and it isn’t pretty.

Elwood has worked for a murderer’s row of questionable clients, including Gaddafi, Assad, and the government of Qatar. In All the Worst Humans, Elwood unveils how the PR business works, and how the truth gets made, spun, and sold to the public—not shying away from the gritty details of his unlikely career.

This is a piercing look into the corridors of money, power, politics, and control, all told in Elwood’s disarmingly funny and entertaining voice. He recounts a four-day Las Vegas bacchanal with a dictator’s son, plotting communications strategies against a terrorist organization in Western Africa, and helping to land a Middle Eastern dictator’s wife a glowing profile in Vogue on the same time the Arab Spring broke out. And he reveals all his slippery tricks for seducing journalists in order to create chaos and ultimately cover for politicians, dictators, and spies—the industry-secret tactics that led to his rise as a political PR pro.

Along the way, Phil walks the halls of the Capitol, rides in armored cars through Abuja, and watches his client lose his annual income at the roulette table. But as he moved up the ranks, he felt worse and worse about the sleaziness of it all—until Elwood receives a shocking wake-up call from the FBI. This risky game nearly cost Elwood his life and his freedom. Seeing the light, Elwood decides to change his ways, and his clients, and to tell the full truth about who is the worst human.]]> 272 Phil Elwood 1250321573 Ari 4 3.83 2024
author: Phil Elwood
name: Ari
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/15
date added: 2024/08/15
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]]> 201544225 The rise of the automobile as told through its Rubicon moment—a sensational, high-risk race across two continents on the verge of revolution.

The racers—an Italian prince and his chauffeur, a French racing driver, a con man, and several rival journalists—battle over steep inclines, through narrow mountain passages, and across the arid Gobi Desert. Competitors endure torrential rain and choking dust. There are barely any roads, and petrol is almost impossible to find. A global audience of millions follows each twist and turn, devouring reports telegraphed from the course.

More than its many adventures, the Peking-to-Paris Motor Challenge took place on the precipice of a new world. As the twentieth century dawned, imperial regimes in China and Russia were crumbling, paving the way for the rise of communist ones. The electric telegraph was rapidly transforming modern communication, and with it, the news media, commerce, and politics. Suspended between the old and the new, the Peking-to-Paris, as best-selling historian Kassia St. Clair writes, became a critical tipping point.

A gripping, immersive narrative of the race, The Race to the Future sets the drivers�� derring-do (and occasional cheating) against the backdrop of a larger geopolitical and technological race to the future. Interweaving events from the fall of the Qing dynasty to the departure of the horse economy and the rise of gendered marketing, St. Clair shows how the Peking-to-Paris provided an impetus for profound social, cultural, and industrial change, while masterfully capturing the mounting tensions between nations and empires—all building up to the cataclysmic event that changed everything: the First World War.

“Consistently mind-boggling, often funny, and occasionally hair-raising�� (Philip Ball), The Race to the Future is the incredible true story of the quest against the odds that propelled us along the road to modernity.]]> 384 Kassia St. Clair 1324094915 Ari 0 wanted-to-read-probably-won-t 3.67 2024
author: Kassia St. Clair
name: Ari
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/13
shelves: wanted-to-read-probably-won-t
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]]> 818517
Focusing on the major transformation of the 1950s at the level of discourse, ideology, language, and ritual, Alexei Yurchak traces the emergence of multiple unanticipated meanings, communities, relations, ideals, and pursuits that this transformation subsequently enabled. His historical, anthropological, and linguistic analysis draws on rich ethnographic material from Late Socialism and the post-Soviet period.

The model of Soviet socialism that emerges provides an alternative to binary accounts that describe that system as a dichotomy of official culture and unofficial culture, the state and the people, public self and private self, truth and lie — and ignore the crucial fact that, for many Soviet citizens, the fundamental values, ideals, and realities of socialism were genuinely important, although they routinely transgressed and reinterpreted the norms and rules of the socialist state.]]> 352 Alexei Yurchak 0691121176 Ari 0 wanted-to-read-probably-won-t 4.13 2005
author: Alexei Yurchak
name: Ari
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2005
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]]> 57680782
The novel begins a decade later, when Chen has just been released from prison for killing his boyfriend. He is about to return to his family’s village, a poor and desolate place. With his parents gone, his sisters married, mad, or dead, there is nothing left for him there. As the story unfurls, we learn what tore this family apart and, more importantly, the truth behind the murder of Chen’s boyfriend.

Told in a myriad of voices, both living and dead, and moving through time with deceptive ease, Ghost Town weaves a mesmerizing web of family secrets and countryside superstitions, the search for identity and clash of cultures.]]> 327 Kevin Chen 1609457994 Ari 0 dnf 3.93 2019
author: Kevin Chen
name: Ari
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2019
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]]> 60149573 A novel about a mother’s unbreakable love in a world consumed by fear.

Twelve-year-old Bird Gardner lives a quiet existence with his loving but broken father, a former linguist who now shelves books in a university library. Bird knows to not ask too many questions, stand out too much, or stray too far. For a decade, their lives have been governed by laws written to preserve “American culture�� in the wake of years of economic instability and violence. To keep the peace and restore prosperity, the authorities are now allowed to relocate children of dissidents, especially those of Asian origin, and libraries have been forced to remove books seen as unpatriotic—including the work of Bird’s mother, Margaret, a Chinese American poet who left the family when he was nine years old.

Bird has grown up disavowing his mother and her poems; he doesn’t know her work or what happened to her, and he knows he shouldn’t wonder. But when he receives a mysterious letter containing only a cryptic drawing, he is pulled into a quest to find her. His journey will take him back to the many folktales she poured into his head as a child, through the ranks of an underground network of librarians, into the lives of the children who have been taken, and finally to New York City, where a new act of defiance may be the beginning of much-needed change.]]> 335 Celeste Ng 0593492544 Ari 0 wanted-to-read-probably-won-t 3.74 2022
author: Celeste Ng
name: Ari
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2022
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]]> 60762443
When Ukrainian journalist Iuliia Mendel got the call she had been hired to work for President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, she had no idea what was to come.

In this frank and moving inside account, Zelenskyy’s former press secretary tells the story of his improbable rise from popular comedian to the president of Ukraine. Mendel had a front row seat to many of the key events preceding the 2022 Russian invasion. From attending meetings between Zelenskyy and Putin and other European leaders, visiting the front lines in Donbas, to fielding press inquiries after the infamous phone calls between Donald Trump and Zelenskyy that led to Trump’s first impeachment.

Mendel saw firsthand Zelenskyy’s efforts to transform his country from a poor, backward Soviet state into a vibrant, prosperous European democracy. Mendel sheds light on the massive economic problems facing Ukraine and the entrenched corrupt oligarchs in league with Russia. She witnessed the Kremlin’s repeated attacks to discredit Zelenskyy through disinformation and an army of bots and trolls.

Woven into her account are details about her own life as a member of Zelenskyy’s new Ukraine. Written with the sound of Russian bombs and exploding shells in the background, Mendel details life lived under Russian siege in 2022. She says goodbye to her fiancé who joins the front lines, like so many other Ukrainian men. Throughout this story of Zelenskyy, Ukraine, and its extraordinary people, Iuliia Mendel reminds us of the paramount importance of truth and human values, especially in these darkest of times.]]> 240 Iuliia Mendel 1668012715 Ari 0 wanted-to-read-probably-won-t 4.12 2022
author: Iuliia Mendel
name: Ari
average rating: 4.12
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]]> 59689783 From the prize-winning, New York Times bestselling author of Say Nothing and Empire of Pain, twelve enthralling stories of skulduggery and intrigue by one of the most decorated journalists of our time.

Patrick Radden Keefe has garnered prizes ranging from the National Magazine Award to the Orwell Prize to the National Book Critics Circle Award for his meticulously reported, hypnotically engaging work on the many ways people behave badly. Rogues brings together a dozen of his most celebrated articles from The New Yorker. As Keefe says in his preface, "They reflect on some of my abiding crime and corruption, secrets and lies, the permeable membrane separating licit and illicit worlds, the bonds of family, the power of denial."

Keefe brilliantly explores the intricacies of forging $150,000 vintage wines, examines whether a whistleblower who dared to expose money laundering at a Swiss bank is a hero or a fabulist, spends time in Vietnam with Anthony Bourdain, chronicles the quest to bring down a cheerful international black market arms merchant, and profiles a passionate death penalty attorney who represents the "worst of the worst," among other bravura works of literary journalism.

The appearance of his byline in The New Yorker is always an event, and collected here for the first time readers can see his work forms an always enthralling but deeply human portrait of criminals and rascals, as well as those who stand up against them.]]> 356 Patrick Radden Keefe 0385548524 Ari 0 wanted-to-read-probably-won-t 4.17 2022
author: Patrick Radden Keefe
name: Ari
average rating: 4.17
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]]> 55004093 What is the purpose of a map?

Nell Young’s whole life and greatest passion is cartography. Her father, Dr. Daniel Young, is a legend in the field and Nell’s personal hero. But she hasn’t seen or spoken to him ever since he cruelly fired her and destroyed her reputation after an argument over an old, cheap gas station highway map.

But when Dr. Young is found dead in his office at the New York Public Library, with the very same seemingly worthless map hidden in his desk, Nell can’t resist investigating. To her surprise, she soon discovers that the map is incredibly valuable and exceedingly rare. In fact, she may now have the only copy left in existence... because a mysterious collector has been hunting down and destroying every last one—along with anyone who gets in the way.

But why?

To answer that question, Nell embarks on a dangerous journey to reveal a dark family secret and discovers the true power that lies in maps...

From the critically acclaimed author of The Book of M, a highly imaginative thriller about a young woman who discovers that a strange map in her deceased father’s belongings holds an incredible, deadly secret—one that will lead her on an extraordinary adventure and to the truth about her family’s dark history.]]> 392 Peng Shepherd 0062910698 Ari 0 dnf 3.62 2022
author: Peng Shepherd
name: Ari
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2022
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]]> 236856 512 Craig Childs 0316608173 Ari 0 wanted-to-read-probably-won-t 4.17 2007
author: Craig Childs
name: Ari
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2007
rating: 0
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]]> 9767592 136 Nawal Nasrallah 1861897960 Ari 0 to-read 3.58 2011
author: Nawal Nasrallah
name: Ari
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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]]> 36546612 A "magnificent book" (Sebastian Junger) and "monumental achievement" (Mitchell Zuckoff) that tells the epic story of the world's last subsistence whalers and the threats posed to a tribe on the brink


"An extraordinary feat of reportage and illumination." --Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams. "From the very first lines, I was riveted." --Robert Moor, On Trails. "A true work of art . . . Lyrically written and richly observed." --Michael Finkel, The Stranger in the Woods. "Intimate and moving." --Francisco Cantú, The Line Becomes a River. "Remarkable, gorgeously written." --Bronwen Dickey, Pit Bull.
On a volcanic island in the Savu Sea so remote that other Indonesians call it "The Land Left Behind" live the Lamalerans: a tribe of 1,500 hunter-gatherers who are the world's last subsistence whalers. They have survived for half a millennium by hunting whales with bamboo harpoons and handmade wooden boats powered by sails of woven palm fronds. But now, under assault from the rapacious fores of the modern era and a global economy, their way of life teeters on the brink of collapse.



Award-winning journalist Doug Bock Clark, one of a handful of Westerners who speak the Lamaleran language, lived with the tribe across three years, and he brings their world and their people to vivid life in this gripping story of a vanishing culture. Jon, an orphaned apprentice whaler, toils to earn his harpoon and provide for his ailing grandparents, while Ika, his indomitable younger sister, is eager to forge a life unconstrained by tradition, and to realize a star-crossed love. Frans, an aging shaman, tries to unite the tribe in order to undo a deadly curse. And Ignatius, a legendary harpooner entering retirement, labors to hand down the Ways of the Ancestors to his son, Ben, who would secretly rather become a DJ in the distant tourist mecca of Bali.


Deeply empathetic and richly reported, The Last Whalers is a riveting, powerful chronicle of the collision between one of the planet's dwindling indigenous peoples and the irresistible enticements and upheavals of a rapidly transforming world.


]]> 368 Doug Bock Clark 0316390623 Ari 0 wanted-to-read-probably-won-t 4.00 2019
author: Doug Bock Clark
name: Ari
average rating: 4.00
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]]> 53138094
“The mass killings of Jews from 1918 to 1921 are a bridge between local pogroms and the extermination of the Holocaust. No history of that Jewish catastrophe comes close to the virtuosity of research, clarity of prose, and power of analysis of this extraordinary book. As the horror of events yields to empathetic understanding, the reader is grateful to Veidlinger for reminding us what history can do.��
―Timothy Snyder, author of Bloodlands

Between 1918 and 1921, over a hundred thousand Jews were murdered in Ukraine by peasants, townsmen, and soldiers who blamed the Jews for the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. In hundreds of separate incidents, ordinary people robbed their Jewish neighbors with impunity, burned down their houses, ripped apart their Torah scrolls, sexually assaulted them, and killed them. Largely forgotten today, these pogroms―ethnic riots―dominated headlines and international affairs in their time. Aid workers warned that six million Jews were in danger of complete extermination. Twenty years later, these dire predictions would come true.

Drawing upon long-neglected archival materials, including thousands of newly discovered witness testimonies, trial records, and official orders, acclaimed historian Jeffrey Veidlinger shows for the first time how this wave of genocidal violence created the conditions for the Holocaust. Through stories of survivors, perpetrators, aid workers, and governmental officials, he explains how so many different groups of people came to the same that killing Jews was an acceptable response to their various problems. In riveting prose, In the Midst of Civilized Europe repositions the pogroms as a defining moment of the twentieth century.]]> 480 Jeffrey Veidlinger 1250116252 Ari 0 wanted-to-read-probably-won-t 4.36 2021
author: Jeffrey Veidlinger
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average rating: 4.36
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]]> 57693493 336 Tochi Onyebuchi 1250782953 Ari 0 wanted-to-read-probably-won-t 3.26 2022
author: Tochi Onyebuchi
name: Ari
average rating: 3.26
book published: 2022
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]]> 55659625 In the vein of Neal Stephenson and Jeff VanderMeer, an epic speculative novel from Young Lions Fiction Award–finalist Matt Bell, a breakout book that explores climate change, manifest destiny, humanity's unchecked exploitation of natural resources, and the small but powerful magic contained within every single apple.��

In eighteenth-century Ohio, two brothers travel into the wooded frontier, planting apple orchards from which they plan to profit in the years to come. As they remake the wilderness in their own image, planning for a future of settlement and civilization, the long-held bonds and secrets between the two will be tested, fractured and broken—and possibly healed.

Fifty years from now, in the second half of the twenty-first century, climate change has ravaged the Earth. Having invested early in genetic engineering and food science, one company now owns all the world’s resources. But a growing resistance is working to redistribute both land and power—and in a pivotal moment for the future of humanity, one of the company’s original founders will return to headquarters, intending to destroy what he helped build.

A thousand years in the future, North America is covered by a massive sheet of ice. One lonely sentient being inhabits a tech station on top of the glacier—and in a daring and seemingly impossible quest, sets out to follow a homing beacon across the continent in the hopes of discovering the last remnant of civilization.

Hugely ambitious in scope and theme, Appleseed is the breakout novel from a writer “as self-assured as he is audacious�� (NPR) who “may well have invented the pulse-pounding novel of ideas�� (Jess Walter). Part speculative epic, part tech thriller, part reinvented fairy tale, Appleseed is an unforgettable meditation on climate change; corporate, civic, and familial responsibility; manifest destiny; and the myths and legends that sustain us all.���ձ�> 465 Matt Bell 006304014X Ari 0 wanted-to-read-probably-won-t 3.54 2021
author: Matt Bell
name: Ari
average rating: 3.54
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]]> 55437277 An epic history of the Mongols as we have never seen them―not just conquerors but also city builders, diplomats, and supple economic thinkers who constructed one of the most influential empires in history.

The Mongols are widely known for one thing: conquest. In the first comprehensive history of the Horde, the western portion of the Mongol empire that arose after the death of Chinggis Khan, Marie Favereau shows that the accomplishments of the Mongols extended far beyond war. For three hundred years, the Horde was no less a force in global development than Rome had been. It left behind a profound legacy in Europe, Russia, Central Asia, and the Middle East, palpable to this day.

Favereau takes us inside one of the most powerful sources of cross-border integration in world history. The Horde was the central node in the Eurasian commercial boom of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and was a conduit for exchanges across thousands of miles. Its unique political regime―a complex power-sharing arrangement among the khan and the nobility―rewarded skillful administrators and diplomats and fostered an economic order that was mobile, organized, and innovative. From its capital at Sarai on the lower Volga River, the Horde provided a governance model for Russia, influenced social practice and state structure across Islamic cultures, disseminated sophisticated theories about the natural world, and introduced novel ideas of religious tolerance.

The Horde is the eloquent, ambitious, and definitive portrait of an empire little understood and too readily dismissed. Challenging conceptions of nomads as peripheral to history, Favereau makes clear that we live in a world inherited from the Mongol moment.]]> 377 Marie Favereau 0674244214 Ari 0 wanted-to-read-probably-won-t 3.79 2021
author: Marie Favereau
name: Ari
average rating: 3.79
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]]> 56790170 For those who could read between the lines, the censored news out of China was terrifying. But the president insisted there was nothing to worry about.

Fortunately, we are still a nation of skeptics. Fortunately, there are those among us who study pandemics and are willing to look unflinchingly at worst-case scenarios. Michael Lewis’s taut and brilliant nonfiction thriller pits a band of medical visionaries against the wall of ignorance that was the official response of the Trump administration to the outbreak of COVID-19.

The characters you will meet in these pages are as fascinating as they are unexpected. A thirteen-year-old girl’s science project on transmission of an airborne pathogen develops into a very grown-up model of disease control. A local public-health officer uses her worm’s-eye view to see what the CDC misses, and reveals great truths about American society. A secret team of dissenting doctors, nicknamed the Wolverines, has everything necessary to fight the pandemic: brilliant backgrounds, world-class labs, prior experience with the pandemic scares of bird flu and swine flu…everything, that is, except official permission to implement their work.

Michael Lewis is not shy about calling these people heroes for their refusal to follow directives that they know to be based on misinformation and bad science. Even the internet, as crucial as it is to their exchange of ideas, poses a risk to them. They never know for sure who else might be listening in.]]> 304 Michael Lewis 0393881555 Ari 0 wanted-to-read-probably-won-t 4.25 2021
author: Michael Lewis
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average rating: 4.25
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]]> 49524790 From the bestselling author of Lawrence in Arabia, a gripping history of the early years of the Cold War, the CIA's covert battles against communism, and the tragic consequences which still affect America and the world today

At the end of World War II, the United States dominated the world militarily, economically, and in moral standing - seen as the victor over tyranny and a champion of freedom. But it was clear - to some - that the Soviet Union was already executing a plan to expand and foment revolution around the world. The American government's strategy in response relied on the secret efforts of a newly-formed CIA.

The Quiet Americans chronicles the exploits of four spies - Michael Burke, a charming former football star fallen on hard times, Frank Wisner, the scion of a wealthy Southern family, Peter Sichel, a sophisticated German Jew who escaped the Nazis, and Edward Lansdale, a brilliant ad executive. The four ran covert operations across the globe, trying to outwit the ruthless KGB in Berlin, parachuting commandos into Eastern Europe, plotting coups, and directing wars against Communist insurgents in Asia.

But time and again their efforts went awry, thwarted by a combination of stupidity and ideological rigidity at the highest levels of the government - and more profoundly, the decision to abandon American ideals. By the mid-1950s, the Soviet Union had a stranglehold on Eastern Europe, the U.S. had begun its disastrous intervention in Vietnam, and America, the beacon of democracy, was overthrowing democratically-elected governments and earning the hatred of much of the world. All of this culminated in an act of betrayal and cowardice that would lock the Cold War into place for decades to come.

Anderson brings to the telling of this story all the narrative brio, deep research, skeptical eye, and lively prose that made Lawrence in Arabia a major international bestseller. The intertwined lives of these men began in a common purpose of defending freedom, but the ravages of the Cold War led them to different fates. Two would quit the CIA in despair, stricken by the moral compromises they had to make; one became the archetype of the duplicitous and destructive American spy; and one would be so heartbroken he would take his own life.

The Quiet Americans is the story of these four men. It is also the story of how the United States, at the very pinnacle of its power, managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.]]> 562 Scott Anderson 0385540450 Ari 0 wanted-to-read-probably-won-t 4.07 2020
author: Scott Anderson
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average rating: 4.07
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]]> 50482979 From the author of the National Book Award-winning short story collection Redeployment comes an astonishing novel of Conradian suspense, set in Colombia among other fronts of America's wars, as four lives become fatally entangled thanks to our country's gift for projecting its power into situations it half understands.

Neither Mason, a U.S. Army Special Forces medic, nor Lisette, a foreign correspondent, has emerged from America's long post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan unscathed. Yet war also exerts a terrible draw that neither can shake--the noble calling, the camaraderie, the life-and-death stakes. Where else in the world can such a person go? All roads lead to Colombia, where the US, with its patented fusion of intelligence dominance and quick-striking special operators, has partnered with local government to stamp out a vicious civil war and keep the predatory narco gangs at bay. Mason, now a liaison to the Colombian military, is ready for the good war, and Lisette is more than ready to cover it.

For Juan Pablo, Mason's counterpart in the Colombian officer corps, translating reality into a language the Americans can understand requires a cartoonist's gift for caricature, but it's child's play next to the challenge of navigating the viper's nest of factions bidding for power, in the capital and far out in the field. And if Juan Pablo's view is dark, the outlook of Abel, a lieutenant in the militia Los Mil Jesuses, which controls territory in rural Norte de Santander, a region on the Venezuelan border where the writ of law scarcely runs, is positively Stygian. Abel has lost everything he loves in the carnage that for his entire life has flowed unceasingly in this region, where the lines between drug cartels, militias, and the state are semi-permeable. It is Abel's cruel fate to find safety only by serving a man he has come to fear and loathe.

Missionaries is an astonishment, a novel of extraordinary suspense whose central, unsparing drama is infused by a geopolitical sophistication and a wisdom about the human heart that would be rare even in isolation. As Los Mil Jesuses make their move to fill a power vacuum in Norte de Santander, aided and abetted by the Colombian military for its own reasons, the Americans are made pawns of a game they don't even begin to understand. The result is an unfolding calamity that will leave no character unscathed, and will echo across the planet. A work whose accomplishment calls forth comparisons to Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, and Robert Stone, Missionaries ultimately stands apart as its own electrifying new form of artistic reckoning with the forces we have unleashed in our world.]]> 416 Phil Klay 1984880659 Ari 0 wanted-to-read-probably-won-t 3.81 2020
author: Phil Klay
name: Ari
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2020
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]]> 52696537 If I Had Your Face plunges us into the mesmerising world of contemporary Seoul - a place where extreme plastic surgery is as routine as getting a haircut, where women compete for spots in secret 'room salons' to entertain wealthy businessmen after hours, where K-Pop stars are the object of all-consuming obsession and ruthless social hierarchies dictate your every move.

Navigating this cutthroat city are four young women balancing on the razor edge of survival: Kyuri, an exquisitely beautiful woman whose hard-won status at an exclusive 'room salon' is threatened by an impulsive mistake with a client; her flatmate, Miho, an orphan who wins a scholarship to a prestigious art school in New York, where her life becomes tragically enmeshed with the super-wealthy offspring of the Korean elite; Wonna, their neighbour, pregnant with a child that she and her husband have no idea how they will afford to raise in a fiercely competitive economy; and Ara, a hair stylist living down the hall, whose infatuation with a fresh-faced K-Pop star drives her to violent extremes.]]> 288 Frances Cha 0593129466 Ari 0 wanted-to-read-probably-won-t 3.74 2020
author: Frances Cha
name: Ari
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2020
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]]> 23848139
In Putin’s People, the investigative journalist and former Moscow correspondent Catherine Belton reveals the untold story of how Vladimir Putin and the small group of KGB men surrounding him rose to power and looted their country. Delving deep into the workings of Putin’s Kremlin, Belton accesses key inside players to reveal how Putin replaced the freewheeling tycoons of the Yeltsin era with a new generation of loyal oligarchs, who in turn subverted Russia’s economy and legal system and extended the Kremlin's reach into the United States and Europe. The result is a chilling and revelatory exposé of the KGB’s revanche―a story that begins in the murk of the Soviet collapse, when networks of operatives were able to siphon billions of dollars out of state enterprises and move their spoils into the West. Putin and his allies subsequently completed the agenda, reasserting Russian power while taking control of the economy for themselves, suppressing independent voices, and launching covert influence operations abroad.

Ranging from Moscow and London to Switzerland and Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach―and assembling a colorful cast of characters to match��Putin’s People is the definitive account of how hopes for the new Russia went astray, with stark consequences for its inhabitants and, increasingly, the world.]]> 640 Catherine Belton 0374238715 Ari 0 wanted-to-read-probably-won-t 4.17 2020
author: Catherine Belton
name: Ari
average rating: 4.17
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]]> 12382651 The Man Without a Face is the chilling account of how a low- level, small-minded KGB operative ascended to the Russian presidency and, in an astonishingly short time, destroyed years of progress and made his country once more a threat to her own people and to the world.

Handpicked as a successor by the "family" surrounding an ailing and increasingly unpopular Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin seemed like a perfect choice for the oligarchy to shape according to its own designs. Suddenly the boy who had stood in the shadows, dreaming of ruling the world, was a public figure, and his popularity soared. Russia and an infatuated West were determined to see the progressive leader of their dreams, even as he seized control of media, sent political rivals and critics into exile or to the grave, and smashed the country's fragile electoral system, concentrating power in the hands of his cronies.

As a journalist living in Moscow, Masha Gessen experienced this history firsthand, and for The Man Without a Face she has drawn on information and sources no other writer has tapped. Her account of how a "faceless" man maneuvered his way into absolute-and absolutely corrupt-power has the makings of a classic of narrative nonfiction.]]> 304 Masha Gessen 1594488428 Ari 0 wanted-to-read-probably-won-t 3.78 2010
author: Masha Gessen
name: Ari
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2010
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]]> 52669505 In this medical thriller Dr. Henry Parsons, an unlikely but appealing hero, races to find the origins and cure of a mysterious new killer virus as it brings the world to its knees.

At an internment camp in Indonesia, forty-seven people are pronounced dead with acute hemorrhagic fever. When Henry Parsons--microbiologist, epidemiologist--travels there on behalf of the World Health Organization to investigate, what he finds will soon have staggering repercussions across the globe: an infected man is on his way to join the millions of worshippers in the annual Hajj to Mecca. Now, Henry joins forces with a Saudi prince and doctor in an attempt to quarantine the entire host of pilgrims in the holy city... A Russian émigré, a woman who has risen to deputy director of U.S. Homeland Security, scrambles to mount a response to what may be an act of biowarfare... already-fraying global relations begin to snap, one by one, in the face of a pandemic... Henry's wife Jill and their children face diminishing odds of survival in Atlanta... and the disease slashes across the United States, dismantling institutions--scientific, religious, governmental--and decimating the population.]]> 374 Lawrence Wright 0525658653 Ari 0 wanted-to-read-probably-won-t 3.68 2020
author: Lawrence Wright
name: Ari
average rating: 3.68
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]]> 68210 Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson returns with an intimate tale of three generations, from the Civil War to the 20th century: a story about fathers and sons and the spiritual battles that still rage at America's heart. In the words of Kirkus, it is a novel "as big as a nation, as quiet as thought, and moving as prayer. Matchless and towering." GILEAD tells the story of America and will break your heart.]]> 247 Marilynne Robinson 031242440X Ari 0 wanted-to-read-probably-won-t 3.84 2004
author: Marilynne Robinson
name: Ari
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2004
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]]> 25489134
After Vasilisa's mother dies, her father goes to Moscow and brings home a new wife. Fiercely devout, city-bred, Vasilisa's new stepmother forbids her family from honoring the household spirits. The family acquiesces, but Vasilisa is frightened, sensing that more hinges upon their rituals than anyone knows.

And indeed, crops begin to fail, evil creatures of the forest creep nearer, and misfortune stalks the village. All the while, Vasilisa's stepmother grows ever harsher in her determination to groom her rebellious stepdaughter for either marriage or confinement in a convent.

As danger circles, Vasilisa must defy even the people she loves and call on dangerous gifts she has long concealed—this, in order to protect her family from a threat that seems to have stepped from her nurse's most frightening tales.

The Bear and the Nightingale is a magical debut novel from a gifted and gorgeous voice. It spins an irresistible spell as it announces the arrival of a singular talent.]]> 319 Katherine Arden 1101885939 Ari 0 wanted-to-read-probably-won-t 4.07 2017
author: Katherine Arden
name: Ari
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2017
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]]> 35450727 The Darkening Age is the largely unknown story of how a militant religion deliberately attacked and suppressed the teachings of the Classical world, ushering in centuries of unquestioning adherence to 'one true faith'.

Despite the long-held notion that the early Christians were meek and mild, going to their martyr's deaths singing hymns of love and praise, the truth, as Catherine Nixey reveals, is very different. Far from being meek and mild, they were violent, ruthless and fundamentally intolerant. Unlike the polytheistic world, in which the addition of one new religion made no fundamental difference to the old ones, this new ideology stated not only that it was the way, the truth and the light but that, by extension, every single other way was wrong and had to be destroyed. From the 1st century to the 6th, those who didn't fall into step with its beliefs were pursued in every possible way: social, legal, financial and physical. Their altars were upturned and their temples demolished, their statues hacked to pieces and their priests killed. It was an annihilation.

Authoritative, vividly written and utterly compelling, this is a remarkable debut from a brilliant young historian.]]> 363 Catherine Nixey 1509816089 Ari 0 wanted-to-read-probably-won-t 4.07 2017
author: Catherine Nixey
name: Ari
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/13
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]]> 35297399 304 Paolo Bacigalupi 1481497294 Ari 0 wanted-to-read-probably-won-t 3.56 2018
author: Paolo Bacigalupi
name: Ari
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/13
shelves: wanted-to-read-probably-won-t
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]]> 35167727 Former Teacher Had Motive. Recently suspended for a so-called outburst, high school English teacher Anna Crawford is stewing over the injustice at home when she is shocked to see herself named on television as a suspect in a shooting at the school where she works. Though she is quickly exonerated, and the actual teenage murderer identified, her life is nevertheless held up for relentless scrutiny and judgment as this quiet town descends into media mania. Gun sales skyrocket, victims are transformed into martyrs, and the rules of public mourning are ruthlessly enforced. Anna decides to wholeheartedly reject the culpability she’s somehow been assigned, and the rampant sexism that comes with it, both in person and online.

A piercing feminist howl written in trenchant prose, How to Be Safe is a compulsively readable, darkly funny exposé of the hypocrisy that ensues when illusions of peace are shattered.]]> 240 Tom McAllister 1631494139 Ari 0 wanted-to-read-probably-won-t 3.19 2018
author: Tom McAllister
name: Ari
average rating: 3.19
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/13
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]]> 16251
From the highest corridors of government to the domain of the ruthless drug cartels, we watch the unfolding of a bizarre drama replete with fascinating characters Cesar Gaviria, the nation's cool and secretive president; Diana Turbay, a famous television journalist and magazine editor; three indomitable women who are imprisoned for miserable months in a small room with a light perpetually on; an eighty-two-year-old priest with a mission to bring the regime and the cartel to the negotiating table; and Escobar himself, the legendary drug baron who changes his bodyguards daily and maintains a private zoo with giraffes and hippos from Africa.

All of this takes place in a country where presidential candidates and cabinet officers are routinely assassinated; where police go into the Medellín slums to murder boys they think may be working for Escobar; but where brave and honest citizens are trying desperately to make democracy survive.

An international best-seller, News of a Kidnapping combines journalistic tenacity with the breathtaking language and perception that distinguish the writings of Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez. It draws us unto into a world that, like some phantasmagorical setting in a great Garcí­a Márquez novel, we can scarcely believe exists--but that continually shocks us with its cold, hard reality.]]> 291 Gabriel García Márquez 0140267832 Ari 0 dnf 3.89 1996
author: Gabriel García Márquez
name: Ari
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1996
rating: 0
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]]> 58772754 The memoir of a refugee caught between her identity as a gay woman and the love and life debt she owes her mother.

When Putsata Reang was 11 months old, her family fled war-torn Cambodia, spending 23 days on an overcrowded navy vessel before finding sanctuary at an American naval base in the Philippines. Holding what appeared to be a lifeless baby in her arms, Ma resisted the captain's orders to throw her bundle overboard. Instead, on landing, Ma rushed her baby into the arms of American military nurses and doctors, who saved the child's life. "I had hope, just a little, you were still alive," Ma would tell Put in an oft-repeated story that became family legend.

Over the years, Put lived to please Ma and make her proud, hustling to repay her life debt by becoming the consummate good Cambodian daughter, working steadfastly by Ma's side in the berry fields each summer and eventually building a successful career as an award-winning journalist. But Put's adoration and efforts are no match for Ma's expectations. When she comes out to Ma in her twenties, it's just a phase. When she fails to bring home a Khmer boyfriend, it's because she's not trying hard enough. When, at the age of forty, Put tells Ma she is finally getting married--to a woman--it breaks their bond in two.

In her startling memoir, Reang explores the long legacy of inherited trauma and the crushing weight of cultural and filial duty. With rare clarity and lyric wisdom, Ma and Me is a stunning, deeply moving memoir about love, debt, and duty.]]> 400 Putsata Reang 0374279268 Ari 0 to-read 4.39 2022
author: Putsata Reang
name: Ari
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/07
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]]> 62919887
During the Arab Spring, an American spy's final mission goes dangerously awry in this "crackling debut thriller" (The New Yorker) written by a former CIA officer and hailed as "an instant classic" (Paul Vidich, author of Beirut Station).

Shane Collins, a world-weary CIA spy, is ready to come in from the cold. Stationed in Bahrain off the coast of Saudi Arabia for his final tour, he's anxious to dispense with his mission—uncovering Iranian support for the insurgency against the monarchy. But then he meets Almaisa, a beautiful and enigmatic artist, and his eyes are opened to a side of Bahrain most expats never experience, to questions he never thought to ask.

When his trusted informant becomes embroiled in a murder, Collins finds himself drawn deep into the conflict. His budding romance with Almaisa—and his loyalties—are upended; in an instant, he's caught in the crosswinds of a revolution. Drawing on all his skills as a spymaster, he sets out to learn the truth behind the Arab Spring, win Almaisa's love, and uncover the murky border where Bahrain's secrets end and America's begin.]]> 308 I.S. Berry 1982194545 Ari 2 3.60 2023
author: I.S. Berry
name: Ari
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2024/08/04
date added: 2024/08/04
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]]> 198563650 A sweeping, heart-racing, mystical novel about a university student in Lagos trying to save his brother, and himself, amid the chaos of Nigeria’s civil war—a story of love, friendship, and personal triumph by the two-time Booker Prize finalist and “the heir to Chinua Achebe�� (New York Times)

“A wondrous novel.”—Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of Chain-Gang All Stars, finalist for the National Book Award

“Chigozie Obioma is that rare thing: an original. His world is a mix of the real and the folkloric, and his writing sounds like no one else’s.”��The Wall Street Journal

The first images of the vision are grainy—like something seen through wet glass. But slowly it clears, and there appears the figure of a man.

Set in Nigeria in the late 1960s, The Road to the Country is the epic story of a shy, bookish student haunted by long-held guilt who must go to war to free himself. When his younger brother disappears as the country explodes in civil war, Kunle must set out on an impossible rescue mission. Kunle’s search for his brother becomes a journey of atonement that will see him conscripted into the breakaway Biafran army and forced to fight a war he hardly understands, all while navigating the prophecies of a local Seer, he who marks Kunle as an abami eda—one who will die and return to life.

The story of a young man seeking redemption in a country on fire, Chigozie Obioma’s novel is an odyssey of brotherhood, love, and unimaginable courage set during one of the most devastating conflicts in the history of Africa. Intertwining myth and realism into a thrilling, inspired, and emotionally powerful novel, The Road to the Country is the masterpiece of Chigozie Obioma, a writer Salman Rushdie calls “a major voice�� in literature.]]> 384 Chigozie Obioma 0593596978 Ari 0 to-read 3.79 2024
author: Chigozie Obioma
name: Ari
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/02
shelves: to-read
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]]> 145624505
“My mother stayed, so that we could go.��

Having fled conflict in the former-Soviet Republic of Georgia as children, Saba and his brother have fought to make peace with the past. In particular, they struggle with the sacrifices of a mother who remained in a war zone so that their father could get them out. Now, years later, the brothers are young adults, their mother is dead, and their father has been lured back to their beautiful, decaying homeland �� only to disappear. Then Saba’s older brother, chasing after their missing father, vanishes too.

Left alone to figure out what has happened and to find his family, Saba sets off on his own urgent, haunted search across his homeland. Accompanied by new friends and old ghosts as he follows a breadcrumb trail of clues, he must wrestle the present from the past as he crosses into the kind of danger zones �� both physical and emotional �� that he thought he had left behind.��

Harrowing and tender but leavened with humor and an appreciation for the absurd, Hard by a Great Forest offers a unique story about traumas of war felt even decades after the fighting, and the long-term effects on those families driven not just to survive, but to remember.]]> 352 Leo Vardiashvili 0593545036 Ari 0 to-read 3.85 2024
author: Leo Vardiashvili
name: Ari
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/02
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]]> 200196843 496 Michael Taylor 1324093927 Ari 0 to-read 4.01 2024
author: Michael Taylor
name: Ari
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/02
shelves: to-read
review:

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