WSJ’s Top Book Recommendations-Cary Regional

Discover the best books of the year, handpicked by the editors of The Wall Street Journal. From thought-provoking nonfiction to engrossing fiction, our Top Book Recommendations offer a curated list of exceptional reads that will inform, inspire, and entertain. Featuring titles from acclaimed authors and emerging voices, our selection spans genres and subjects, ensuring there's something for every reader. Dive into the world of ideas, stories, and perspectives that will change the way you think, feel, and see the world.

Showing 1 - 20 of 32  There are a total of 302 valid entries on the list.
Book cover for "All the frequent troubles of our days"
Star rating for All the frequent troubles of our days
Average Rating:
4.5 stars
Description:
Part biography, part political thriller, part scholarly detective story that draws on letters, diary entries, notes smuggled out of a Berlin prison, and other documents, this true story chronicles the life and brutal death of Mildred Harnack, the American leader of one of the largest underground resistance groups in Germany.
Book cover for "The arsenal of democracy"
Star rating for The arsenal of democracy
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
Tells the incredible story of how Detroit answered the call to arms during WWII, centering on Henry Ford and his tortured son Edsel, who, when asked if they could deliver 50,000 airplanes, made an outrageous claim: Ford Motor Company would erect a plant that could yield a "bomber an hour."
Book cover for "The Big hop"
Star rating for The Big hop
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
In 1919, in Newfoundland, four teams of aviators came from Britain to compete in "the Big Hop" : an audacious race to be the first to fly, nonstop, across the Atlantic Ocean. One pair of competitors was forced to abandon the journey halfway, and two pairs never made it into the air. Only one team, after a death-defying sixteen-hour flight, made it to Ireland.
Book cover for "Buckley"
Star rating for Buckley
Description:
"At age 25 in 1951, with the publication of God and Man at Yale, a scathing attack on his alma mater, William F. Buckley, Jr. instantly seized the public stage-and commanded it for the next half century, leading a new generation of activists and ideologues to the heights of political power while he himself attained unique fame and public influence. Ten years before his death in 2008, Buckley chose prize-winning biographer Sam Tanenhaus to tell the...
Book cover for "The café with no name"
Star rating for The café with no name
Description:
"Summer 1966. Robert Simon is in his early thirties and has a dream. Raised in a home for war orphans, Robert has nonetheless grown into a warm-hearted, hard-working, and determined man. When the former owners of the corner café in the Carmelite market square shutter the business, Robert sees that the chance to realize his dream has arrived. The place, dark and dilapidated, is in a poor neighborhood of the Austrian capital, but for some time now...
Book cover for "Capote's women"
Star rating for Capote's women
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"Leamer reveals the complex web of relationships and scandalous true stories behind Truman Capote's never-published final novel, Answered Prayers--the dark secrets, tragic glamour, and Capote's ultimate betrayal of the group of female friends he called his 'swans'"--
Book cover for "The CIA book club"
Star rating for The CIA book club
Description:
"Recounts a covert Cold War operation led by George Minden to smuggle banned literature into Eastern Europe, focusing on the cultural and psychological battle against Soviet censorship and the role underground reading networks played in weakening totalitarian control, especially in Poland"--
Book cover for "The colony"
Star rating for The colony
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"A novel examining the long, complicit aftermath of colonialism, told through the summer of 1979 and a remote island in the west of Ireland, one of the last places where people speak everyday Irish, and two men who come to experience it"--
Book cover for "The determined spy"
Star rating for The determined spy
Description:
"An intimate and expertly-researched biography of Frank Wisner, the father of CIA Black Ops, telling the story of his exciting intelligence escapades as well as his lifelong struggle with bipolar disorder"--
Book cover for "The drowned"
Star rating for The drowned
Series:
Quirke mysteries volume 10.
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"1950s, rural Ireland. A loner comes across a mysteriously empty car in a field. Knowing he shouldn't approach but unable to hold back, he soon finds himself embroiled in a troubling missing person case, as a husband claims his wife may have thrown herself into the sea. Called in from Dublin to investigate is Detective Inspector Strafford, who soon turns to his old ally--the flawed but brilliant pathologist Quirke--a man he is linked to in increasingly...
Book cover for "The elements of Marie Curie"
Star rating for The elements of Marie Curie
Author:
Average Rating:
3 stars
Description:
"The acclaimed Pulitzer Prize finalist and #1 New York Times bestselling author of Galileo's Daughter crafts a luminous chronicle of the most famous woman in the history of science, and the untold story of the many remarkable young women trained in her laboratory who were launched into stellar scientific careers of their own. "Even now, nearly a century after her death, Marie Curie remains the only female scientist most people can name," writes Dava...
Book cover for "Facing the mountain"
Star rating for Facing the mountain
Average Rating:
4.7 stars
Description:
"From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Boys in the Boat, a gripping World War II saga of patriotism and courage: the special Japanese-American Army unit that overcame brutal odds in Europe; their families, incarcerated in camps back home; and a young man who refused to surrender his constitutional rights, even if it meant imprisonment. They came from across the continent and Hawaii. Their parents taught them to embrace both their Japanese...
Book cover for "The fate of the generals"
Star rating for The fate of the generals
Description:
"For the doomed stand American forces made in the Philippines at the start of World War II, two generals received their country's highest military award, the Medal of Honor. One was the charismatic and controversial Douglas MacArthur, whose orders forced him to leave his soldiers on the islands to starvation and surrender but whose vow to return echoed around the globe. The other was the gritty Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright, who became a hero to the...
Book cover for "The free world"
Star rating for The free world
Description:
"A history of the thinkers, writers, and artists who shaped intellectual culture in Cold War Europe and America"--
Book cover for "Gabriel's moon"
Star rating for Gabriel's moon
Description:
"Gabriel Dax is a young man haunted by the memories of a fire that took his mother's life. Every night, when sleep finally comes, he dreams about his childhood home in flames. His days are spent on the move as an acclaimed travel writer, capturing the changing landscapes of Europe in the grip of the Cold War. When he is offered the chance to interview Patrice Lumumba, newly elected president of the People's Republic of the Congo, he finds himself...
Book cover for "Giant love"
Star rating for Giant love
Description:
"A book that explores the ... American novelist and playwright Edna Ferber--winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction--whose work was made into many Academy Award-winning movies. [It specifically examines] the writing of her controversial, international bestselling novel about Texas, and the making of George Stevens's Academy Award-winning epic film of the same name: Giant"--
Book cover for "I seek a kind person"
Star rating for I seek a kind person
Description:
"This gripping family memoir of grief, courage, and hope tells the hidden stories of children who escaped the Holocaust, building connections across generations and continents. In 1938, Jewish families are scrambling to flee Vienna. Desperate, they take out advertisements offering their children into the safe keeping of readers of a British newspaper, the Manchester Guardian. The right words in the right order could mean the difference between life...
Book cover for "Leadership"
Star rating for Leadership
Description:
"Kissinger analyses the lives of six ... leaders through the distinctive strategies of statecraft, which he believes they embodied. After the Second World War, Konrad Adenauer brought defeated and morally bankrupt Germany back into the community of nations by what Kissinger calls 'the strategy of humility.' Charles de Gaulle set France beside the victorious Allies and renewed its historic grandeur by 'the strategy of will.' During the Cold War, Richard...
Book cover for "The letters of Shirley Jackson"
Star rating for The letters of Shirley Jackson
Description:
"Shirley Jackson is one of the most important American authors of the last hundred years and among our greatest writers of the female experience. This extraordinary compilation of personal correspondence has all the hallmarks of Jackson's beloved fiction, and also features family photographs and Shirley's own illustrations. Written over the course of nearly three decades, from Jackson's college years to three months before her premature death at the...
Book cover for "Mellon vs. Churchill"
Star rating for Mellon vs. Churchill
Author:
Description:
"The ... story of the epic battle of wills between Andrew Mellon and Winston Churchill, as they debated the repayment of the enormous sums loaned by America to Great Britain during World War I."--Provided by publisher.