3.44 avg rating — 4,676 ratings

" A mystery about a literary translator who goes to Brazil to search for her missing author"

3.73 avg rating — 539 ratings

"An insightful little book that explores faulty patterns of thought in how we seek to solve problems. It argues, more or less, that over-applying these faulty problem-solving heuristics (in the hopes that they will be panaceas for complex problems) often causes failure and introduces new problems in the process. Adding a note of strange idiosyncrasy and distinct flavor, this is mostly all couched using an extended metaphor about Macbeth and the three witches. "

4.46 avg rating — 15,578 ratings

"This is Tolstoi's War and Peace for WWII--centered on the battle of Stalingrad, the turning point of the war, it ranges from Stalingrad to the gulag, the southern steppes to the site of Auschwitz under construction, populated with an international cast of commissars, tank commanders, fighter pilots, snipers, Nazi planners of extermination centers, ordinary Wehrmacht soldiers, political prisoners and common criminals in Siberia, their wives, mothers, lovers, daughters, and bosses, with a Jewish atomic physicist as the closest thing to a central character. It is huge, brilliant, and devastating--I read it right after Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands, and it certainly demonstrated the power of fiction to move and convince, compared to reams of statistics and objectively narrated anecdotal illustrations. The ending, like Huck Finn, may be less than completely satisfactory, but on the whole, the most powerful novel I can recall recently. "

4.33 avg rating — 878 ratings

"First volume of a trilogy on the British Empire from heyday to collapse, this volume covers about 1820 to 1870. This is not a simplistic anti-colonialist rant; in some beautifully written passages, with wry perspectives and shrewdly selected details, Morris goes further than anyone else I've read to convey the attitudes and characters that motivated the expansion of Britain's reach until "the sun never set on the British Empire," and the episodes and incidents she relates range from the horrendous to the hilarious. (Somewhat analogous in attitude and effect to J. G. Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur.)"

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