Critic and essayist Adam Gopnik is a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker. In his latest book, The Real Work, he examines how artists, athletes, and others achieve mastery, and what the pursuit does for any of us who undertake it.
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Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell (1791)
The best and most entertaining biography ever written in English — addictive for its prescient, informal, racy prose and Johnson's epigrammatic precision and enduring decency. The dinner party at which suspicious Tory Sam meets the lefty-libertine but welcoming John Wilkes is still one of the funniest and most humane things in literature. Buy it here.
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