Homage to Catalonia
The factions and characters populating George Orwell’s account of his time fighting in the Spanish Civil War may now seem distant, but Homage to Catalonia remains one of the world’s most clear-sighted works of reportage and reflection. Orwell, a committed socialist, signed up to fight Franco’s fascists but found himself on the wrong side of a Soviet-authored purge of those in the Republican ranks in Barcelona who disagreed with Stalinist communism. His contempt for the lies, thuggishness, brutality and cynicism of men in uniform and in power — regardless of their political commitment — shines through and would later morph into his allegorical tale Animal Farm. His political insights seem as relevant now as they were more than half a century ago, and there are few better craftsmen of the English language than Orwell. Here’s a line from the battlefront: “When an aeroplane swoops down and uses its machine-gun the sound, from below, is like the fluttering of wings.”
Autobiography / Memoir
- The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
- Black Boy
- Dreams from My Father
- A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
- I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
- Manchild in the Promised Land
- Maus
- A Moveable Feast
- Notes of a Native Son
- On Writing
- Speak, Memory
- A Walk in the Woods
Biography
Business
- Capitalism and Freedom
- Fast Food Nation
- The General Theory
- How to Win Friends and Influence People
- No Logo
- Unsafe at Any Speed
- What Color Is Your Parachute?
Culture
- The American Cinema
- A Child of the Century
- Within the Context of No Context
- Mystery Train
- The Story of Art
Essays
- Against Interpretation, and Other Essays
- A Room of One's Own
- Slouching Towards Bethlehem
- A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
Food Writing
Health
History
- The Best and the Brightest
- Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
- Carry Me Home
- The Fatal Shore
- The Gnostic Gospels
- Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
- A People's History of the United States
- The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
Ideas
- The Closing of the American Mind
- The End of History and the Last Man
- Godel, Escher, Bach
- The Hero with a Thousand Faces
- Imagined Communities
- The Nature and Destiny of Man
- Orientalism
- Syntactic Structures
- A Theory of Justice
- Understanding Media
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Nonfiction Novels
Politics
- All the President's Men
- The Clash of Civilizations
- Conscience of a Conservative
- God & Man at Yale
- Homage to Catalonia
- The Making of the President
- The Origins of Totalitarianism
- The Paranoid Style in American Politics
- What It Takes
Science
- A Brief History of Time
- Coming of Age in Samoa
- The Double Helix by James Watson
- The Emperor of All Maladies
- The Lives of a Cell
- The Naked Ape
- On Human Nature
- The Selfish Gene
- Silent Spring
- The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Self-Help / Instructional
Social History
- The American Way of Death
- Animal Liberation
- The Beauty Myth
- The Death and Life of Great American Cities
- The Feminine Mystique
- Guns, Germs, and Steel
- Nickel and Dimed
- The Other America
- Why We Can't Wait
- Working
