Reading / Publication shelf
A reading index connected to the places in the publication.
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A compact manual of strategy built on preparation, intelligence and the avoidance of wasteful conflict. Its enduring insight is that victory is shaped long before confrontation begins, through terrain, timing, discipline and an accurate reading of both oneself and one’s opponent.
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A fictional history of House Targaryen written with the distance, contradiction and uncertainty of a medieval chronicle. Dragons and dynastic violence provide the spectacle, but the book’s real pleasure lies in contested memory: every reign changes depending on who is allowed to record it.
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An argument that prosperity depends less on geography or culture than on the institutions governing political power and economic opportunity. Through a broad sweep of history, the authors contrast inclusive systems with extractive ones and show how each reproduces itself.
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The semiconductor becomes the organizing object of modern power: essential to consumer life, military systems and artificial intelligence, yet produced through a startlingly concentrated global chain. Miller turns technical manufacturing history into a clear geopolitical narrative about dependence, leverage and Taiwan’s central position.
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Ten regions reveal how mountains, rivers, resources and access routes continue to shape political ambition. Marshall’s maps are deliberately broad, useful as an entry point into the physical constraints behind contemporary strategy.
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A brisk introduction to the geographic pressures beneath international politics. By reading borders against plains, seas and mountain ranges, Marshall explains why states repeatedly pursue certain alliances, anxieties and territorial goals.
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The geographic lens moves beyond Earth to the increasingly strategic domain of space. Satellites, lunar resources and orbital infrastructure become extensions of terrestrial rivalry, raising the question of whether old patterns of competition will govern a supposedly borderless frontier.
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A practical case for objectives and key results as a system for turning ambition into visible commitments. The strongest lesson is not measurement for its own sake, but the discipline of choosing a few outcomes clearly enough that a team can align, learn and adjust.
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Moral philosophy is translated into everyday dilemmas with the comic patience of someone who knows that ethical clarity rarely survives contact with ordinary life. Schur moves through major schools of thought without flattening them, asking how imperfect people might still make better choices.
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A sweeping history of Homo sapiens organized around the shared fictions, money, religion, states and corporations, that allow strangers to cooperate at immense scale. Its provocations matter as much as its conclusions, inviting readers to question which parts of social life are natural and which were collectively imagined.
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A shepherd’s journey toward a dreamed-of treasure becomes a fable about attention, courage and the cost of pursuing one’s own path. Its language is deliberately simple, allowing landscape, coincidence and repeated signs to carry the philosophical weight.
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Nike’s origin story is told not as an inevitable triumph but as years of debt, improvisation, strained partnerships and obsessive belief. Knight is most compelling when he exposes how fragile the company remained even as its identity and cultural reach began to take shape.
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Stephen Fry retells the birth of the Greek gods with wit, clarity and a storyteller’s affection for contradiction. The myths retain their violence and strangeness while becoming accessible as an unruly family history of creation, desire and punishment.
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The focus shifts from gods to mortals who confront monsters, impossible tasks and the consequences of exceptional ability. Fry keeps the adventures lively while showing heroism as an unstable mixture of courage, vanity, intelligence and luck.
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The Trojan War is reconstructed from the insult at its origin through siege, stalemate and destruction. Fry balances the scale of epic with the intimate motives beneath it, showing how pride, grief and rivalry turn individual choices into collective catastrophe.
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Odysseus’s long return from Troy becomes a story of endurance, disguise, temptation and the difficult meaning of home. Fry’s modern prose keeps the episodic adventure moving while preserving the hero’s moral ambiguity and Penelope’s quieter intelligence.
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A journey across the Alpine arc that combines geology, political history, tourism and the mythology of high places. O’Shea treats the mountains not as a scenic backdrop but as a connected cultural region repeatedly crossed, contested and reinvented.
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Roald Dahl continues his autobiography through work in East Africa and service as a fighter pilot during the Second World War. The episodes are shaped with a fiction writer’s timing, mixing danger, absurdity and the formation of the observant voice that would define his later books.
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A solitary historian reconstructs his emotional life through the women, memories and competing versions of himself that have accumulated around it. Aguilar Camín turns plural love into a meditation on desire and remembrance, asking whether intimacy can ever be narrated without also being revised.
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An illuminating journey through the immense electrical system that quietly sustains modern American life, and the regulatory compromises, aging infrastructure and competing interests now testing its limits. Bakke makes the grid legible as both an engineering achievement and a cultural institution that must be reimagined for a more distributed, renewable energy future.
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A high-speed quest through a virtual universe where pop-culture knowledge becomes currency, armor and a path out of an increasingly unequal real world. Beneath its exuberant puzzles and nostalgia, Cline’s novel asks who should control the digital spaces in which people build their identities and futures.
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Orwell’s vision of a society governed through surveillance, manufactured truth and the destruction of private language remains unnervingly precise. Winston Smith’s quiet rebellion turns an abstract warning about totalitarian power into an intimate study of memory, fear and the struggle to preserve an independent mind.
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A reported account of the rivalry between OpenAI and DeepMind, and of the founders, researchers and technology giants competing to define the age of generative AI. Olson follows idealistic missions as they collide with enormous capital and corporate ambition, revealing how decisions made by a small circle of people may reshape work, knowledge and power.
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A vivid investigation of the commodity traders who move oil, metals and food across borders while operating largely beyond public view. Blas and Farchy show how risk-taking merchants became geopolitical actors, connecting difficult regimes to global markets and accumulating influence over the material foundations of modern life.
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An insider’s history of Jack Ma’s transformation from English teacher to the architect of one of the world’s largest digital marketplaces. Clark places Alibaba’s rise within China’s economic opening and rapidly evolving internet culture, explaining both the company’s improbable momentum and the ecosystem of consumers and entrepreneurs it helped create.
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