Experience the dystopian classic by George Orwell
An island rises between two nations and both immediately claim it.
John Lewis's civil rights years, from Nashville lunch counters to Selma, in three books.
Mandela's autobiography from the Transkei to Robben Island to the presidency.
James Baldwin's two essays of 1963 on race and religion in America.
Michelle Obama from the South Side of Chicago to the White House.
Ta-Nehisi Coates writes to his son about being Black in America; a letter in the tradition of Baldwin.
From Detroit Red to Mecca, told to Alex Haley in the year before his assassination.
Jane Jacobs against the planners; eyes on the street and short blocks.
Hochschild on the Congo Free State and the ten million who died for rubber.
A masked anarchist against a fascist Britain of the 1990s; the Guy Fawkes mask comes from here.
Lawrence Wright on al-Qaeda and the road to 9/11; the Pulitzer.
Socrates on justice, the philosopher-king and the cave; the book Western philosophy replies to.
Choice architecture and how a default option changes what people do; Thaler's Nobel idea.
Machiavelli's advice to a ruler: better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.
Europe from 1945 to 2005 in one volume; Tony Judt's masterpiece.
American history from the losers' side, Columbus to Clinton; Zinn's two million copies.
Anne Applebaum's Pulitzer history of the Soviet camps from the archives.
Edward Said on how the West invented the East to rule it.
The fall of the Iranian monarchy in 1979 through photographs and fragments; Kapuscinski.
Solzhenitsyn's literary investigation of the camps from 227 witnesses; the abridged edition is enough.
A Muslim party wins the French presidency in 2022; Houellebecq published it the day of Charlie Hebdo.
The last day of Trujillo, the Dominican dictator, and a woman who returns; Vargas Llosa.
A physicist between an anarchist moon and its capitalist planet; Le Guin's ambiguous utopia.
Russians remember the end of the Soviet Union and the 1990s; Alexievich's chorus.
Haile Selassie's court told by its servants; Kapuscinski on power anywhere.
A poet returns to Kars in a blizzard as girls kill themselves over headscarves; Pamuk's political novel.
The pigs take over the farm; all animals are equal, but some more than others.
Read Conversation in the Cathedral, Mario Vargas Llosa's great novel of power, corruption and Lima
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