Great Books Around 200 Pages

What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden? Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates's attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son--and readers--the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children's lives were taken as American plunder. Beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward.

Griffin was a well-to-do white Southerner in the 50s who darkened his skin to see what it felt like to be a black man in the South. His discoveries shocked the nation and revealed the depth of the nation's racial bigotry and intolerance.

It's time to move "doing nothing" to the top of your to-do list. Manoush explains the connection between boredom and original thinking, exploring how we can harness boredom's hidden benefits to become our most productive and creative selves without totally abandoning our gadgets in the process. Grounding the book in the neuroscience and cognitive psychology of "mind wandering" what our brains do when we're doing nothing at all--Manoush includes practical steps you can take to ease the nonstop busyness and enhance your ability to dream, wonder, and gain clarity in your work and life. The outcome is mind-blowing. Unplug and read on.

This book details the author's life story from a patriotic soldier in Vietnam, to his severe battlefield injury, to his role as the country's most outspoken anti-Vietnam War advocate, spreading his message from his wheelchair.

In 1942, the U. S. government forcibly relocated approximately 110,000 Japanese nationals and Japanese Americans to housing facilities called "War Relocation Camps", in the wake of Imperial Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor. The Houston's book follows the lives of the members of the Wakatsuki family before, during, and after the experience of internment.

Flatland is a story of an inhabitant of a two dimensional world and his discovery of a third dimension. He finds out that he is a cube, not a square.

Lindbergh's book addresses the timeless questions of how does a woman fulfill the roles of citizen, artist, wife/partner, mother, career person, friend, sibling/relative, and balance all of that with the time and self-commitment for spiritual/emotional nurturing?

Paulsen offers this collection of wilderness survival/hunting essays that concentrates on drawing parallels between his own life and the fictional adventures and misadventures of Brian Robeson in Hatchet

The story of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, Japan in 1945, the first city ever destroyed by a nuclear blast in wartime, as told by survivors of the attack.

After graduating from Emory University in Atlanta in 1992, top student and athlete Christopher McCandless abandoned his possessions, gave his entire $24,000 savings account to charity and hitchhiked to Alaska, where he went to live in the wilderness. Four months later, he turned up dead. His diary, letters and two notes found at a remote campsite tell of his desperate effort to survive, apparently stranded by an injury and slowly starving

This book contains the reflections of a Carnegie Mellon computer science professor who lectured on "Really achieving your childhood dreams," shortly after having been diagnosed with terminal cancer. His advice concerned seizing the moment while living, rather than dying.

Stewart beautifully captivates the imagination with letters to his niece about why math matters. He gets you thinking about how has is in every basic item of our daily lives.

In A Long Way Gone, Beah, now twenty-five years old, tells a riveting story: how at the age of twelve, he fled attacking rebels and wandered a land rendered unrecognizable by violence. By thirteen, he’d been picked up by the government army, and Beah, at heart a gentle boy, found that he was capable of truly terrible acts. This is a rare and mesmerizing account, told with real literary force and heartbreaking honesty

Back in the 18th century, thousands of seamen lost their lives because of man's inability to accurately determine an east-west position. Then along came a country carpenter whose skill at clock-making changed the fate of the world.

This journal captures the simple traveler's life of the road in South America. The author is better known as the infamous Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, guerrilla leader, military theorist and major figure of the Cuban Revolution.

In Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel's memoir Night, a scholarly, pious teenager is wracked with guilt at having survived the horror of the Holocaust and the genocidal campaign that consumed his family. His memories of the nightmare world of the death camps present him with an intolerable question: how can the God he once so fervently believed in have allowed these monstrous events to occur?

In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf imagines that Shakespeare had a sister--a sister equal to Shakespeare in talent, and equal in genius, but whose legacy is radically different. This imaginary woman never writes a word and dies by her own hand, her genius unexpressed. If only she had found the means to create, argues Woolf, she would have reached the same heights as her immortal sibling. In this classic essay, she takes on the establishment, using her gift of language to dissect the world around her and give voice to those who are without. Her message is a simple one: women must have a fixed income and a room of their own in order to have the freedom to create.

On July 29th 1914, the world’s peace was shattered as the artillery of the Austria-Hungary Empire began shelling the troops of the country to its south. Soon most of Europe was fighting in the First World War. But who could have guessed that on December 25 the troops would openly defy their commanding officers by stopping the fighting and having a spontaneous celebration of Christmas with their "enemies"?

The book is basically about Morrie Schwartz, a history professor at Brandeis University, who has been diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig's Disease) and is dying. A former student, Mitch Albom, who had become a fairly well known sports writer, heard about his teacher from an interview with Ted Koppel on Nightline and decided to pay a visit.