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Summary of Henry Marsh's Do No Harm is neurosurgeon Henry Marsh's memoir, with a particular focus on his mistakes and regrets.
Marsh admits that he grew up privileged. He began his college career studying English, but quit school due to an unrequited love. He took a job working in a mining town hospital, an experience that inspired him to become a surgeon. He returned to Oxford to finish his degree and then attended the Royal Free Medical School in...
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Buy now to get the main key ideas from Anderson Cooper & Katherine Howe's Vanderbilt
The story of the Vanderbilt family embodies the ultimate American dream. Beginning with a farmer who came to America as an indentured servant, they rose to become one of the most influential and wealthiest families of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Anderson Cooper and Katherine Howe's Vanderbilt (2021) uncovers the lives of Cooper's ancestors, individuals...
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Summary of Richard Branson's Losing My Virginity is a memoir focusing on the founding and development of the entrepreneur's multibillion dollar corporation, the Virgin Group. Switching seamlessly between descriptions of inventive business deals and extreme outdoor adventures, Branson tells the story of his unique work life...
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Buy now to get the main key ideas from Stephanie Land's Maid
Stephanie Land worked for years as a maid simply to keep a roof over her daughter's head. She chronicles her life as an overworked and underpaid American in Maid (2019), shedding light on the reality of what it is like to work for upper middle-class America. The work was physically and mentally grinding. Land faced verbal abuse and discrimination from people who looked down on her, while...
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Summary of Trevor Noah's Born a Crime recounts the comedian's childhood in South Africa during and after apartheid, focusing in particular on his relationship with his mother, Patricia Nombuyiselo Noah, whose own independence and character shaped Noah's perceptions and choices.
When Patricia was 22, she decided to leave her family's home in the black township of Soweto to move to Johannesburg and work as a secretary, even though black people were...
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Buy now to get the key takeaways from Brad Stone's Amazon Unbound.
Sample Key Takeaways:
1) Amazon's buildings in Seattle's developing South Lake Union neighborhood, which the company moved into in 2010, were unremarkable physically. There was no conspicuous signage revealing the existence of a renowned online firm with almost $35 billion in yearly sales, at the request of its CEO, Jeff Bezos.
2) Bezos had advised colleagues that nothing beneficial...
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Summary of Joseph J. Ellis's The Quartet is an historical account of the debates and events leading up to, during, and immediately following the creation of the Constitution of the United States of America. The quartet is four politicians that played an integral role in the creation, shaping, and implementation of the Constitution and early federal government in the US. These include George Washington, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay.
Each...
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Buy now to get the main key ideas from Mohandas K. Gandhi's An Autobiography
Mohandas K. Gandhi's An Autobiography (1927) chronicles a life of sacrifice, abstinence, love, and humility. Gandhi recounts his life from his early childhood until 1921, tracing the painful and challenging path he took as he searched for Truth and utmost humility. He details the moral experiments he conducted through self-abnegation, and tackles the topics of child marriage,...
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Summary of Jeannette Walls's The Glass Castle chronicles all the heartbreak, deprivation, humor, and love of her childhood in The Glass Castle, a memoir of growing up dirt-poor on a cross-country odyssey with her charismatic, but alcoholic, father and her codependent mother.
Jeannette began thinking of her childhood after spotting her mother, Rose Mary, rummaging through trash in New York City.
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Buy now to get the main key ideas from Reeves Wiedeman's Billion Dollar Loser
Billionaire entrepreneur Adam Neumann co-founded WeWork with the hope of changing the business market and paving the way for a conglomerate unlike anything the world had ever witnessed.
In Billion Dollar Loser (2020), Reeves Wiedeman chronicles the hectic rise and chaotic fall of WeWork under Neumann. Over ten years, Neumann wasted billions of dollars in investment funds...
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Buy now to get the main key ideas from Mike Ritland's Navy SEAL Dogs
In Navy SEAL Dogs (2013), Mike Ritland shines a light on the importance of military working dogs, especially the more advanced Special Operations Forces dogs and the role they play in the Navy SEAL military special force. He explains what differentiates SEAL dogs from household pets and details how they are trained so that they can be deployed in battlefields. Ritland also narrates...
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Buy now to get the key takeaways from Jeff Benedict's Tiger Woods.
Sample Key Takeaways:
1) On Friday, November 27, 2009, Tiger Woods's life changed forever. His downfall would be one of the harshest ever witnessed.
2) On that night, while he was sleeping, his suspicious wife went through his phone and discovered he had been cheating on her. He woke up to her screaming and fled his house, barely dressed.
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Summary of Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk is a memoir by Helen Macdonald. Macdonald had a life-long fascination with birds of prey, especially falcons, and the goshawk, a large wild bird of prey, is well known to bird enthusiasts as being the hardest to train. The book tells of her efforts to train the bird and process her grief over the loss of her father…
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Buy now to get the main key ideas from Jonathan Karl's Betrayal
Donald Trump, the forty-fifth president of the United States, is regarded as one of the most influential but chaotic presidents in history. What was his downfall really like?
Political journalist Jonathan Karl wrote Betrayal as a documentation of Trump's final days as president. He knew Trump better than any other reporter in the White House, and had a front-row seat to the final showdown...
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Buy now to get the main key ideas from Jennette McCurdy's I'm Glad My Mom Died
Many of us who watched kiddie TV dreamed of having the lives of our favorite child stars. However, in her autobiography I'm Glad My Mom Died (2022), Jennette McCurdy shows us that childhood stardom can be far from a dream – and is closer to a nightmare. She presents a collection of vignettes from moments in her life when she felt she was abused by stardom, by weight...
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Summary of Walter Isaacson's Benjamin Franklin is an account of Benjamin Franklin's different lives, as a statesman, satirist, and scientist. The book traces Franklin's journey from his modest beginnings as a printer in Philadelphia to the pivotal role he played in the American Revolution...
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Summary of Héctor Tobar's Deep Down Dark is a narrative nonfiction book by journalist and novelist Héctor Tobar. The book tells the story of thirty-three miners trapped in a caved-in mine in northern Chile starting on August 5, 2010. They stayed underground for sixty-nine days. The miners' personal stories of their months trapped in the mine are complemented by tales of what the miners' families and the public experienced on the surface during the...
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Summary of Christopher Andersen's Game of Crowns blends historical narrative with an in-depth account of the personal lives of members of the British royal family. He considers the stability of the past, present, and future monarchy under Queen Elizabeth II and her heirs, including the nation's crisis of confidence following the death of Princess Diana in 1997 and the similar crisis that's likely to unfold when Prince Charles assumes power.
In addition...
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Buy now to get the main key ideas from Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl
Anne Frank's diary was discovered in the attic where she spent her last days before being sent to a concentration camp. The Diary of a Young Girl (1947) reminds the world of the horrors of the Second World War and the Holocaust through the eyes of a teenager hiding in a confined space in Amsterdam. Anne wrote in her diary to take her mind off the war, constant hunger, boredom,...