The Torchlight List

A brilliant road map for discovering history, science, civilization, and the human condition, this engaging record recommends must-read books: those so revealing about times and places that they take the reader beyond day-to-day concerns into a magic realm of knowledge and imagination. From Arthur Koestler's take on the universe and Barbara Tuchman's view on 14th-century life to F. Scott Fitzgerald's impressions of American morality and Robert Fisk's analysis of the West's history of intervention in the Middle East, this engaging account is an idiosyncratic and endlessly interesting tour of the world through literature.