As the single work at the heart of Christianity, the world's largest organized religion, the Bible is the spiritual guide for one out of every three people in the world. It is also the world's most widely distributed book and its bestselling, with an estimated six billion copies sold in the last two hundred years. But the Bible is a complex work with a complicated and obscure history. Its contents have changed over the centuries, it has been transformed...

In On The Wealth of Nations, America's most provocative satirist, P. J. O'Rourke, reads Adam Smith's revolutionary The Wealth of Nations so you don't have to. Recognized almost instantly on its publication in 1776 as the fundamental work of economics, The Wealth of Nations was also recognized as really long: the original edition totaled over nine hundred pages in two volumes-including the blockbuster sixty-seven-page "digression concerning the variations...

In this brilliant book, Francis Wheen, the author of the most successful biography of Karl Marx, tells the story of Das Kapital and Marx's twenty-year struggle to complete his unfinished masterpiece. Born in a two-room flat in London's Soho amid political squabbles and personal tragedy, the first volume of Das Kapital was published in 1867 to muted praise. But after Marx's death, the book went on to influence thinkers, writers, and revolutionaries,...