You should definitely take a look at Sociological Insight: An Introduction to Non-Obvious Sociology. The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World is supposed to be a really fascinating read. Peter Bernstein’s Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk might be a little dry for a fifteen year-old boy, but it might be a good idea for later.
Here are some mixed book reports from zompist: (A mixture of sci-fi books, linguistic books and economic ones.
I haven’t read them yet, but his reviews make them sound interesting: The Failure of neoliberalism.
An older book I did read and found interesting: Jonathon Kwitny’s Endless Enemies: The Making of an Unfriendly World shows, as its cover promises, “how America’s worldwide interventions destroy democracy and free enterprise and defeat our own best interests.” (from the bottom of this essay), with some other recommendations.
I’d also recommend the political Noam Chomsky for different perspectives on US foreign politics.
How to learn about authoratians:
If the boy likes military, maybe he’s interested in James Bond analysis?
One about the US empire
Interesting seems to be
More aboutJane Jacobs.
There’s a whole book from the founder of the Grameen bank Muhammed Yunus, on why he founded it, how it works, and that it works, but I can’t find the exact english title for it at the moment.
This is an excellent thread. All these books are going on my list. I just wish I read some of these books when I was 15.
My contribution is Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The Black Swan is his latest book which is probably just as good.
It’s more about how randomness affects life than economics. A very interesting look at how we often give meaning to events that occur by random chance.
One of my alltime favorites is After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection by James West Davidson and Mark Lytle. The authors explain how to think about how history is written. I’ve found their ideas to be generally useful in life.
Unfortunately, the current edition of this book is a two-volume edition with CDs which has greatly increased the price.
The Coming Plague, which is good enough to be used in epidemiology and related courses at university. Gives an overview of an enormous amount of information on diseases, how they spread, how they become plagues. Sections on the Black Plague, ebola, AIDS, the 1918 influenza pandemic, and many others. Huge damn book though, I’ve never read it cover to cover, though I’ve probably read at this point almost every page in it.
Richard Preston’s Hot Zone and The Demon in the Freezer cover some of the same ground, but focus on a single disease (ebola, smallpox respectively) in a more sensationalistic way. That makes them a bit more readable at the cost of a larger perspective. Plus, they’re a lot shorter.
Why We Get Sick, sort of a Freakonomics of disease theory. I have this at home, but haven’t read it yet. I’m recommending it on the strength of the recommendations I’ve received that encouraged me to buy it.
The Barbarians Speak is interesting, though a bit dry and repetitive. By the end of it, you’ll probably never want to read the word ‘fibula’ again, but you will have learned a lot about the relative positions of the Romans and the “barbarians” they conquered. The Celts, Germans and other groups were a lot more advanced than they’re given credit in most histories. Relatively short book, sources and footnotes actually take up a good chunk of pages at the end.
Boilerplate Rhino is a good introduction to David Quammen, a naturalist writer who is very good at what he does. This book is a collection of columns he did for Outside magazine. The Song of the Dodo is also recommended for many points, including a section on the evolution of the Theory of Evolution. In his estimation, Charles Lyell got shortchanged by the scientific community and, while Darwin deserves a lot of credit, he did more or less the same thing as a graduate advisor who realizes that a brilliant student is encroaching on the same territory as his earlier unfinished work and has to scramble to keep the kid from publishing first. He manages to make even technical subjects and relatively dry history interesting and alive.
Forgot to add two more practical books that I meant to include before: Starting Strength and Practical Programming both available from the authors’ page. Rippetoe is a former lifter and weight training coach with decades of experience and a good deal of academic knowledge in his own right, and Kilgore is a PhD. in Kinesiology with his own decades of experience as a lifter and trainer.
Starting Strength is basically a training manual for people who are new to weight training or coaches/trainers who are working with such athletes. It’s useful even for relatively experienced lifters in that it reviews good mechanics and gives practical advice on correcting faults in the core lifts. It’s even better for novice to intermediate lifters who want to have an effective, efficient program that will provide a rock-solid base for progression. It also spends a bit of time debunking some training myths. Very useful for anyone who is interested in getting stronger, whether you have performance goals, or just want to get in better shape.
The companion book, Practical Programming, starts with the premise that there is a gap between coaches and trainers, who have practical experience but usually few academic qualifications, and academics, who often lack both proper training in their field and the practical experience that would provide a reality check to their sometimes misguided recommendations. The book is an attempt to bridge that gap, by examining training methods and periodization from a more rigorous and empirically tested perspective. The authors lay out evidence for shortcomings and faults in most training programs and make recommendations based on the principles they have derived from reconciling research with reality. The writing style of the book is actually a lot more conversational and entertaining than my synopsis 
I bought both of these relatively recently as part of my continuing research into fitness over the last few years, since I stopped being such a lazy fatass. Just from reading through SS I was able to correct a couple of faults that had crept into my form.
I’m glad to hear you say that - I just posted off a copy of The brain that changes itself to my Dad, who is also very much into “how things work” kind of books.
Unfortunately I didn’t have time to read it all before I posted it off (is that still considered rude? I don’t care anyway, he lives in Oxford so it’s the only chance I’ll get to borrow it off him 
) but the bits I skimmed were rivetting.
I was going to recommend The Coming Plague. It’s a good, thick, globe-trotting tour of the work of epidemiologists and the origins of disease. Really just completely fascinating.
Oh, The Coming Plague is good.
However, on a more lighthearted note you could get Willam Poundstone’s Big Secrets and Bigger Secrets…slightly out of date, but still fun.
The Egyptology books Temples Tombs and Hieroglyphs and Red Land, Black Land by Barbara Mertz (who usually writes as Elizabeth Peters, the mystery writer) are very readable.
I recently finished At Day’s Close, which is a study on the changing nature of night in early modern Europe. There are a fair amount of quotations of sources (ie, the spelling is strange) but if he’s interested in history it could be a great exploration of a less-studied aspect.
ETA: I apologize for the lack of links but if you PM me I can find them.
That’s what I came in here to recommend. An intelligent five year old can certainly handle that book. Bonus point: it discourages drug dealing in a refreshing way. In the chapter"Why Do Drug Dealers Still Live With Their Mother?" the book shows that the average starting drug dealer could make more money at less risk by flipping burgers.
For a 15-year-old boy interested in military history, I think John Keegan’s The Face of Battle is required reading. It debunks a lot of romantic myths and attempts to understand what battle has been like for actual participants. While parts of it are thrilling to read, other parts bring that immediate sense of “oh, of course!” understanding (I’m particularly thinking of his examination of what cavalry charges were really like). It’s also, in the end, profoundly sobering for a boy who might dream of heroism in war.
I also found Howard Bloom’s The Lucifer Principle fascinating in much the same way as Guns, Germs, & Steel, although I harbor considerably greater doubt about what it says. It’s much more controversial and frankly does not flow as logically, nor is it as well documented, but it is very provocative. In my opinion some of what Bloom says can be taken with a grain of salt, but some parts, for example, his explication of superorganism theory and his application of it to his thesis of human evil is, I think, very thought-provoking, even enlightening.
I found that The Lucifer Principle made me think about Guns, Germs, & Steel in new ways, and vice versa. They sit side-by-side on my bookshelf.
Sailboat
Also The City in Mind, by James Howard Kunstler. Very readable and thought-provoking, and not only about city planning as such. As are his The Geography of Nowhere and Home from Nowhere.
Marvin Harris’s books seem like a great fit. Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches is the best known (and the only one I’ve read so far). He covers broad cultural themes from that “inside workings” perspective. I found it an invaluable tool for designing civilizations for role-playing games.
I havethisone but haven’t read it yet: The Measure of All Things: The Seven-Year Odyssey and Hidden Error That Transformed the World. Pierre Méchain and Charles Messier worked to determine part of an arc from England and Spain, and therefore invented the meter – doctoring some data along the way.
I was going to say Freakonomics and Spook, but I think those are taken. But another really great book is the new Physics for Future Presidents–I just finished it and it’s really good. The author is my husband’s favorite physics prof from college, so you have his endorsement too. 
We should start a thread like this a few times a year to see what Dopers have discovered new. I went a got a few from this list - thanks!
a few comments:
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No one’s mentioned **Simon Winchester **yet (sorry if I missed it)? His books The Professor and the Madman, **The Map that Changed the World **and others are great looks at the thinking behind dictionaries (Professor) and geology and evolution (Map) with great stories used to as the central narrative to fork off of and return to. They don’t pull together great “truths” the way GG&S or Blink does, but insightful.
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I would add **Thomas Friedman **to the list. If the kid likes Gladwell - well, Friedman is trading in ideas at the same level and offers up anecdotes and insights at the same level of thinking. It’s just that Friedman is focused on globalization, society and the economy as they exist today, etc. **The World is Flat **and it’s predecessor **The Lexus and The Olive Tree **are great books about fascinating ideas.
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Justinian’s Flea by William Rosen is a great polymath of a book (if a book can be considered…um, polymathic? ;)) where the author focuses on the Late Antiquity Roman Empire - how the Emperor Justinian, the last to be referred to as “Great,” reunited the Western and Eastern Empires only to have the first pandemic of the Plague decimate society and put the Empire back on a path of decline. But while moving through this narrative arc, the author goes off into detailed diversions on war strategy, architecture, human, flea and rat biology and epidemiology - all woven into the expected discussions of historical context, biography of characters, etc. Fascinating and readable.
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I may need to start a new thread about this, but I have read a number of **Oliver Sacks’ **articles in the New Yorker and am halfway through **Musicophilia **right now and I don’t find him to be…all that great. I feel like he spends all of his time telling stories like a batty relative: “why that reminds me of a time that patient H told me he experienced musical hallucinations - he heard Chopin’s Scherzo in D minor all time - fascinating! We don’t know why, how or what it means - but the mind is a mysterious, dynamic organ!” Uh, okay - thanks Uncle Oliver. So far, I don’t see where Sacks is pulling out any deep insights other than “minds are complex and interesting when it comes to music” - and his stories and cataloguing of conditions maps out some areas of brain functioning, but that is about it. If anyone thinks other works of his are more deeply insightful, I would appreciate hearing about it. He is held up so high, but this book is okay at best…
My $.02
What 15yo boy doesn’t like sex? He ought to have a sexy book like Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation.
evolutionary biology is sexy, right?
I recently finished Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbuilt and thought it was really good.