Non-Fiction
What actually happened, told by people who were there.
95 essential works
On the Origin of Species
Charles Darwin
1859 · United Kingdom
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Silent Spring
Rachel Carson
1962 · United States
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In Cold Blood
Truman Capote
1966 · United States
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The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Thomas S. Kuhn
1962 · United States
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Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass
1845 · United States
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Man's Search for Meaning
Viktor Frankl
1946 · Austria
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The Double Helix
James D. Watson
1968 · United States
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The Selfish Gene
Richard Dawkins
1976 · United Kingdom
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Orientalism
Edward Said
1978 · United States/Palestine
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Thinking, Fast and Slow
Daniel Kahneman
2011 · United States/Israel
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The Right Stuff
Tom Wolfe
1979 · United States
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Hiroshima
John Hersey
1946 · United States
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Guns, Germs, and Steel
Jared Diamond
1997 · United States
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The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Malcolm X with Alex Haley
1965 · United States
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A Brief History of Time
Stephen Hawking
1988 · United Kingdom
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The Feminine Mystique
Betty Friedan
1963 · United States
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The Origins of Totalitarianism
Hannah Arendt
1951 · United States
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The Peloponnesian War
Thucydides
400 BCE · Ancient Greece
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The Histories
Herodotus
440 BCE · Ancient Greece
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The Education of Henry Adams
Henry Adams
1918 · United States
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The Guns of August
Barbara Tuchman
1962 · United States
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The Republic
Plato
380 BCE · Ancient Greece
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The Road to Wigan Pier
George Orwell
1937 · United Kingdom
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Dispatches
Michael Herr
1977 · United States
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Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
Richard Feynman
1985 · United States
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The Diary of a Young Girl
Anne Frank
1947 · Netherlands
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Cosmos
Carl Sagan
1980 · United States
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Democracy in America
Alexis de Tocqueville
1835 · France
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The Wealth of Nations
Adam Smith
1776 · United Kingdom/Scotland
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Long Walk to Freedom
Nelson Mandela
1994 · South Africa
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The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
Siddhartha Mukherjee
2010 · United States
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Chaos: Making a New Science
James Gleick
1987 · United States
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Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945
Tony Judt
2005 · United States/United Kingdom
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Up from Slavery
Booker T. Washington
1901 · United States
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The Warmth of Other Suns
Isabel Wilkerson
2010 · United States
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Open Veins of Latin America
Eduardo Galeano
1971 · Uruguay
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Awakenings
Oliver Sacks
1973 · United Kingdom/United States
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
William Shirer
1960 · United States
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King Leopold's Ghost
Adam Hochschild
1998 · United States
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Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
Dee Brown
1970 · United States
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Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Paulo Freire
1968 · Brazil
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The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
Max Weber
1905 · Germany
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Common Sense
Thomas Paine
1776 · United States/United Kingdom
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Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
James Agee & Walker Evans
1941 · United States
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A Sand County Almanac
Aldo Leopold
1949 · United States
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The Snow Leopard
Peter Matthiessen
1978 · United States
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Being Mortal
Atul Gawande
2014 · United States
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The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
Elizabeth Kolbert
2014 · United States
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Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Yuval Noah Harari
2011 · Israel
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The Prince
Niccolò Machiavelli
1532 · Italy
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York
Robert Caro
1974 · United States
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The Critique of Pure Reason
Immanuel Kant
1781 · Germany
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The Female Eunuch
Germaine Greer
1970 · Australia/United Kingdom
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Homage to Catalonia
George Orwell
1938 · United Kingdom
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The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
Tom Wolfe
1968 · United States
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The Interpretation of Dreams
Sigmund Freud
1899 · Austria
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The Art of War
Sun Tzu
500 BCE · China
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The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
John Maynard Keynes
1936 · United Kingdom
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The Demon-Haunted World
Carl Sagan
1995 · United States
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The Making of the English Working Class
E.P. Thompson
1963 · United Kingdom
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The Open Society and Its Enemies
Karl Popper
1945 · United Kingdom/Austria
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The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant
Ulysses S. Grant
1885 · United States
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Dreams from My Father
Barack Obama
1995 · United States
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Testament of Youth
Vera Brittain
1933 · United Kingdom
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I, Rigoberta Menchú
Rigoberta Menchú
1983 · Guatemala
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Coming of Age in Samoa
Margaret Mead
1928 · United States
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The Lives of a Cell
Lewis Thomas
1974 · United States
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The New Jim Crow
Michelle Alexander
2010 · United States
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Civilization and Its Discontents
Sigmund Freud
1930 · Austria
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The Elements of Style
William Strunk Jr. & E.B. White
1959 · United States
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The Annals of Imperial Rome
Tacitus
c. 117 CE · Roman Empire
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The Botany of Desire
Michael Pollan
2001 · United States
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The Varieties of Religious Experience
William James
1902 · United States
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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Rebecca Skloot
2010 · United States
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Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
Matthew Desmond
2016 · United States
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The Making of the Atomic Bomb
Richard Rhodes
1986 · United States
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A People's History of the United States
Howard Zinn
1980 · United States
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Random Family
Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
2003 · United States
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The Story of a New Name
Elena Ferrante
2012 · Italy
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Mountains Beyond Mountains
Tracy Kidder
2003 · United States
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Into Thin Air
Jon Krakauer
1997 · United States
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The Years of Lyndon Johnson (Vols. 1–4)
Robert Caro
1982–2012 · United States
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Bad Blood
John Carreyrou
2018 · USA
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Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage
Alfred Lansing
1959 · USA
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Quiet: The Power of Introverts
Susan Cain
2012 · USA
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Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World
Mark Kurlansky
1997 · USA
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The Devil in the White City
Erik Larson
2003 · USA
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Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
Mary Roach
2003 · USA
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The Big Short
Michael Lewis
2010 · USA
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Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland
Patrick Radden Keefe
2018 · USA
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Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets
Svetlana Alexievich
2013 · Belarus
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The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
Lawrence Wright
2006 · USA
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Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom
David W. Blight
2018 · USA
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Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity
Andrew Solomon
2012 · USA
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Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity
Katherine Boo
2012 · USA
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