Book Reviews

4.9

Julia Donaldson and illustrator Axel Scheffler's The Gruffalo is one of the most beloved and best-selling children's picture books of the modern era, combining a clever trickster narrative, rhythmic rhyming couplets, and a memorably invented monster into a read-aloud experience that has sold over 13.5 million copies worldwide and won the Nestlé Smarties Book Prize — a record that speaks for itself.

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey

4.8

First published in 1989 and reissued in an anniversary edition by Simon & Schuster, Stephen R. Covey's The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is a foundational business and self-help book that has sold over 40 million copies and was named the #1 Most Influential Business Book of the Twentieth Century — a record that makes it one of the most consequential works in its genre.

Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli

4.8

Becky Albertalli's debut young adult novel follows Simon Spier, a closeted gay sixteen-year-old whose secret email correspondence with a classmate named Blue is weaponized against him by a blackmailer — a premise that earned the book the American Library Association's William C. Morris Award, a place on the National Book Award Longlist, and a celebrated film adaptation. Kirkus Reviews called it "funny, moving and emotionally wise," and the novel stands as one of the most decorated YA debuts of the past decade.

The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk

4.8

Bessel van der Kolk's The Body Keeps the Score is a widely-read popular science book on psychological trauma that has earned both broad acclaim and substantive scholarly criticism — essential reading for anyone seeking to understand trauma's reach, but one that deserves to be approached alongside current evidence-based literature.

The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss, and Long-Term Health by T. Colin Campbell and Thomas M. Campbell

4.7

First published in 2005 and expanded in a 2016 revised edition from BenBella Books, The China Study by T. Colin Campbell and Thomas M. Campbell is one of America's best-selling books about nutrition, making a forceful case that a whole-food, plant-based diet can help people escape, reduce, or reverse a wide range of chronic diseases — a claim that has driven both widespread adoption and sustained scientific debate.

The BFG by Roald Dahl

4.7

Originally published in 1982, Roald Dahl's The BFG remains one of children's literature's most enduring novels, built on an unlikely friendship between a small orphaned girl and a gentle giant, and backed by sales of more than 37 million copies worldwide as of 2009.

The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli

Machiavelli's The Prince is a 16th-century political treatise — composed in 1513 and first published posthumously in 1532 — that has endured for half a millennium as one of the most controversial and consequential works in the history of political thought, offering a bracingly pragmatic guide to acquiring and holding power.

Feb 22, 2026

Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson

Walter Isaacson's Benjamin Franklin: An American Life is a comprehensive biography of Benjamin Franklin — statesman, scientist, printer, and Founding Father — that traces the full arc of his remarkable life while arguing for his enduring relevance to American identity, pragmatism, and political thought.

Feb 22, 2026

They Both Die at the End by Adam Silvera

Adam Silvera's third novel — originally published September 5, 2017, by HarperTeen — is a young adult romance that follows two teenage boys, Mateo Torrez and Rufus Emeterio, through the single day they have left to live after receiving calls from Death-Cast, a company that predicts its clients' imminent deaths. A #BookTok phenomenon that returned to The New York Times Best Seller list in 2020, the novel earned four starred reviews and a wide sweep of year-end honors, cementing its place as one of the defining YA novels of its era.

Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics by Henry Hazlitt

First published in 1946 and reissued in a Crown Currency Kindle edition, Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson remains one of the most enduring lay introductions to economic reasoning, built on a single, repeatable analytical principle drawn from Frédéric Bastiat and applied across twenty-four chapters to dismantle common economic fallacies — a framework that has earned praise from economists and journalists alike across more than seven decades.

Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert

4.2

Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness is a New York Times bestselling work of popular psychology that dismantles the assumption that human beings reliably know what will make them happy — and explains, with rigour and wit, exactly why they don't.

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer

First published in 1960 by Simon & Schuster, William L. Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich remains one of the most widely read single-volume histories of Nazi Germany — a National Book Award winner built on captured Nazi documents, Nuremberg trial testimony, and Shirer's own six years on the ground in Germany as a CBS Radio and UPI correspondent, though its central interpretive thesis has drawn sustained debate from academic historians ever since.