Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Malcolm Gladwell’s 2005 New York Times bestseller, describes how snap judgments, first impressions, and intuitions can be more useful than painstaking rational thought.Blink contains three central ideas: “Fast and frugal” thinking is a natural attribute of the human mind and often works better than slow-and-careful reasoning, this ability can be distorted or misled, and fast cognition can be trained and improved. The book’s six chapters provide examples from... Read Blink Summary

Peter Schweizer’s book Blood Money: Why the Powerful Turn a Blind Eye While China Kills Americans, published in 2024, is a political narrative that develops Schweizer’s theories about corruption and foreign interference in the United States, focusing primarily on the relationship between American elites and China. Schweizer, a conservative investigative journalist and political counselor, is known for his work on divulging financial dealings and potential conflicts of interest of high-profile figures in the landscape of... Read Blood Money Summary

Blowout, Rachel Maddow's second nonfiction book, was published in 2019 by Crown Publishing Group. In it, TV host and political commentator Maddow interconnects a series of global events, all woven together by one common thread: the oil and gas industry. Through the various vignettes, Maddow offers readers a book that is part rallying cry, part exposé, and part investigative journalism. Blowout sheds light on forgotten news stories; From the opening anecdote about a Russian gas... Read Blowout Summary

Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant, first published in 2004, is a business nonfiction book that presents a groundbreaking new approach to marketing strategy. Written by two professors at the Institut Européen d’Administration des Affaires (INSEAD) business college in France—Renée Mauborgne and W. Chan Kim—Blue Ocean Strategy introduces the concept of value innovation, which encourages businesses to break away from the traditional economic model of competition and... Read Blue Ocean Strategy Summary

Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom (2019) is a work of nonfiction by investigative journalist Katherine Eban. Eban discusses some of the deceit and fraud within generic drug manufacturing with a special focus on Ranbaxy, a prominent Indian pharmaceutical company. Eban explores the consequences of compromised drug quality and regulatory shortcomings, including the challenges of ensuring the safety of generic medications. Throughout the work, Eban discusses The Consequences of Cost-Cutting... Read Bottle of Lies Summary

Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School by John Medina provides 12 rules for how the brain functions and details how those rules can affect everyday life. Medina is a molecular biologist who seeks to filter and refine neuroscientific research in an accessible way. Brain Rules covers topics from stress to sleep while showing how neuroscience can improve quality of life and learning. Each rule is presented in a... Read Brain Rules Summary

Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future is a work of political economy and comparative analysis by Dan Wang, a technology analyst and writer specializing in Chinese industrial policy and US–China relations. Wang brings unique expertise to his subject, having worked for six years at Gavekal Dragonomics, an investment research firm, where he analyzed China’s technological developments and political economy for hedge funds and institutional investors. During this period, he lived in Hong Kong, Beijing... Read Breakneck Summary

Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies (1994) is a nonfiction work co-authored by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras, both professors at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business at the time of publication. Both Collins and Porras have a track record of publishing numerous business works. Prior to the publication of Built to Last, the authors embarked on a comprehensive six-year research project analyzing the characteristics that distinguish visionary companies. Drawing from these insights, they crafted... Read Built to Last Summary

John Brooks’s Business Adventures (1969) is a collection of 12 narrative nonfiction essays, originally published in The New Yorker magazine, that explore major events in American corporate and financial history during the mid-20th century. Through detailed narrative accounts, Brooks examines events like the catastrophic launch of the Ford Edsel, the 1962 stock-market crash, and a massive price-fixing scandal at General Electric. The book uses these events to examine the human decisions, institutional pressures, and unexpected... Read Business Adventures Summary

Originally published in 1986, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water by Marc Reisner illustrates how precarious the American West’s water supply is. This reality was something few people, including Westerners, realized at the time. The book was listed as one of the Modern Library’s 100 Best Non-Fiction Books of the 20th century and was nominated for a National Book Critics’ Circle Award. It was also made into a PBS documentary. There is... Read Cadillac Desert Summary

Silvia Federici’s 2004 monograph, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, is a synthesis of the history of Europe’s transition to capitalism from a global and applied perspective. The author, a philosopher, places the origins of modern patriarchy within this transition using Marxist-feminist theory as her primary mode of analysis.This study guide uses the edition of the text published in 2014 by Autonomedia. Content Warning: This book contains references to violence, especially... Read Caliban and the Witch Summary

Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead is the 2019 memoir of former US Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, a retired four-star Marine Corp general, with Bing West as a coauthor. His stated purpose in writing the memoir is to teach others some of the leadership skills he obtained as a military officer. While there is some discussion of philosophy of leadership, the lion’s share of the book consists of narrative military history. Mattis follows an... Read Call Sign Chaos Summary

Capital in the Twenty-First Century is a 2013 work of political economy by French economist Thomas Piketty. Piketty explores the historical evolution of wealth from the late 18th century to the present, looking at how wealth ownership changed in that time. Specifically, he asks why inequality fell between the First World War and the 1950s and why it has been increasing since. He also explores the ramifications of this growing inequality for 21st-century capitalism. This... Read Capital in the Twenty-First Century Summary

First published in 1962, Capitalism and Freedom is a nonfiction book about economics, politics, and government. Author Milton Friedman advocates a classical-liberal approach to economic policy in the United States, one that promotes individual freedom by allowing the free market to function as effectively as possible.Friedman wrote Capitalism and Freedom while he was an economics scholar at the University of Chicago. He opens the book with a quote by President John F. Kennedy: “Ask not... Read Capitalism And Freedom Summary

Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy is a work of economics and political theory by Austrian born economist Joseph A. Schumpeter, originally published in 1942. Schumpeter argues that capitalism, where private, for-profit ownership controls a nation’s industry, will be eventually replaced by socialism, an economic system based on the public, state ownership of industry. However, he disagrees with German philosopher Karl Marx. Unlike Marx, Schumpeter does not believe the shift to socialism will come about due to... Read Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy Summary

In the 2013 nonfiction book, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil, British political theorist Timothy Mitchell upends the traditional view on the relationship between carbon-based energy (primarily coal and oil) and democracy. Mitchell takes issue with previous accounts because they typically gloss over how workers, oil companies, imperial powers, the public, and carbon-energy producing countries create political relations out of the flows of and demand for energy. As a political scientist and... Read Carbon Democracy Summary

Chain-Gang All-Stars (2023) is a dystopian satirical novel by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. In a dystopian near-future United States, incarcerated people facing either execution or 25-plus years of imprisonment can elect to become Gladiators in lieu of their original sentence. If they survive three years of death matches against other incarcerated people, they can be granted a pardon and rejoin society. Told through rotating perspectives, the novel exposes the violence that is woven through the penal... Read Chain-Gang All-Stars Summary

James Gleick’s Chaos: Making a New Science (originally published in 1987) details the history and ideas of chaos theory, or chaos science. Many of these ideas have since become relatively mainstream; for example, a 2004 science fiction movie, The Butterfly Effect, was named for one of its key precepts. However, when Gleick was writing, in the mid-1980s, chaos was still a fairly revolutionary concept. Gleick, a renowned science historian, explores the breakthroughs that chaos science... Read Chaos: Making a New Science Summary

Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It is a psychological exploration written by Ethan Kross, an award-winning neuroscientist and professor of psychology at the University of Michigan who directs the Emotion & Self Control Laboratory. Published in January 2021, this science-based self-help text draws from cutting-edge research in psychology, neuroscience, and sociology to examine the phenomenon of internal dialogue. The work represents a significant contribution to both academic... Read Chatter Summary

Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology (2022) by Chris Miller is a comprehensive examination of the global semiconductor industry and its impact on international power dynamics. Miller, a distinguished economic historian specializing in the intersection of technology and national security, leverages his extensive research to illuminate how semiconductors have become central to economic prosperity and military strength. This nonfiction work details the rivalry between the United States and China, exploring how... Read Chip War Summary