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Leo Tolstoy. Family, ambition, and ordinary life amid the Napoleonic wars, asking how individual choices meet the forces of history.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb. On the people, institutions, and systems that grow stronger through uncertainty, stress, and disorder.

Stefan Zweig. A memoir of European cultural life, from the confidence of prewar Vienna to war, exile, and the loss of a shared world.

Tom Holland. A history of Christianity's influence on the West, tracing how its ideas continue to shape morality, politics, and everyday assumptions.

Plutarch. Biographies of Greek and Roman figures, exploring how character shapes public life. Shown here in the Modern Library's first volume.

Charles Taylor. An interpretation of Hegel's philosophy through the questions of freedom, reason, and society that animated his age.

Umberto Eco. A murder mystery in a medieval monastery, where a search for the truth becomes a struggle over knowledge, faith, and power.

Eric Hobsbawm. How the French and Industrial revolutions transformed society between 1789 and 1848, laying the foundations of the modern world.

David Graeber. Five thousand years of borrowing and obligation, examining how money, power, and moral claims became entangled.

Leo Tolstoy

War and Peace

Family, ambition, and ordinary life amid the Napoleonic wars, asking how individual choices meet the forces of history.