Ooooh, Devil in the White City. Loved that one.
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman. The memoirs of Nobel-laureate physicist Richard Feynman, who led one of the most interesting lives anyone ever led. Just as a sampling, one day he wondered about how so many animals had better senses of smell than humans, and whether that was inborn or learned. So he trained his sense of smell to the point that it was better than a dog’s. And while he was at Los Alamos working on the Manhattan Project, he decided he needed a hobby, so took up safecracking.
Non-fiction I’ve enjoyed recently:
Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything
Michael Pollon, The Omnivore’s Dilemma
Charles C. Mann, *1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
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Anything by Malcolm Gladwell.
How We Decide, by Jonah Lehrer.
Physics Of the Impossible, by Michio Kaku.
I just finished:
The Forever War - eyewitness book about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan by an NYTimes reporter. Fascinating.
The Shame of Survival: Working Through a Nazi Childhood - memoir by a woman who was a child in Germany during WWII. Great book written from a perspective I don’t usually read about.
Sailboat beat me to my recommendation.
I like the mountaineering books - The White Spider is a classic one about the North face of the Eiger. Killing Dragons and The Shining mountain are two less well known ones. The first is a really fascinating historical look at how people started climbing the great Alpine peaks, the second is an account of a landmark ascent of Changabang in the Himalayas by two British climbers. Straightforward, but a bit sad as they both died on Everest a few years later. Anyone who reads Into Thin Air also needs to read *The Climb *for a second opinion.
The Art of the Soluble by Peter Medawar is a classic read for anyone interested in being a scientist. Sort of dated language, but timeless insight into the process of scientific enquiry.
I’ll add to the Bill Bryson love. I don’t believe I’ve read anything of his that I wouldn’t recommend.
I’ll also add to Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air (which was fabulous) and say Under the Banner of Heaven. It’s about the Mormon church(es).
Another one that I know has been recommended here (and one that I’m in the middle of) is Raven: The Untold Story of the Rev. Jim Jones and His People. It is excellent and fascinating and I haven’t even gotten to the “good” part yet.
What else?
And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts about the start of the AIDs crisis is a must read.
Kitchen Confidential is a classic foodie book by Anthony Bourdain but is written for a non-foodie and very interesting and funny.
Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich was a very good look at trying to live on minimum wage.
Fast Food Nation and Reefer Madness both by Eric Schlosser.
I don’t know if all of these qualify as things you’d like but I found them all good enough that I’ll never give up these books!
I’ll second Kitchen Confidential and Fast Food Nation. Of course, you’ll never want to eat out ever again. 
You Belong In A Zoo. I don’t normally read biographies, but this one reads like some crazy thriller advernture novel.
What do you think of autobiographies and biographies? I know the authors are a bit more stretchy with the truth, but they’re usually mostly non-fiction.
Running with Scissors and Dry by Augusten Burrows both captivated me, especially the latter.
I also loved A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
And I Don’t Want To Live This Life by Deborah Spungen was also rather interesting. It’s a book about Nancy, a la Sid and Nancy, written by her mother.
I started reading this one not long ago in order to better understand what Neal Stephenson was playing around with when he wrote Snow Crash. (Fascinating fiction, by the way.)
It was interesting in a trainwrecky way, but mostly frustrating.
First, there’s a lot of neuroscience that’s very dated and sometimes over-generalized and confused. (I was recovering from a final exam on that sort of stuff when I read it, so those things tended to stick out obnoxiously.)
Then there’s a lot of argument from ancient literature which is supposed to prove that the ancients were not actually autonomous or conscious, based on their literary devices. It all feels very…creative. The whole time, I had a nagging suspicion that Jaynes was playing just as fast and loose with that source material as he had with the psychology stuff. Of course I, not having crammed for an exam on the Iliad or the Gilgamesh epic in the original language, would have no idea. Suspicion ensued.
By the time Jaynes got to the bit about how Europe conquered the Americas because the natives probably weren’t even conscious yet, I was pretty fed up and not convinced enough to enjoy playing along, so I ditched it for some lightweight fiction with velociraptors in it. (It’s more fun to laugh at bad science when it’s in, you know, actual fiction.)
If you’re interested in this sort of thing (interesting and controversial explorations of why the human mind is the way it is), I’ll recommend a few things:
The Blank Slate by Stephen Pinker (again, because he’s super cool). Actually an argument against the “blank slate” view of human nature, and less technical than Pinker’s stuff about language.
The Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond. Why we are the way we are, and why our species is so successful, from lots of different angles including ecology, genetics, and sexual selection.
The Red Queen by Matt Ridley. Why we are the way we are, this time blaming sexual selection.
If you find yourself liking Oliver Sacks, who’s been mentioned already, you might also like V.S. Ramachandran. In Phantoms in the Brain, he deals with all sorts of really surreal and bizarre neurological disorders. Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat would be the granddaddy of that genre, but Phantoms has some crazy, crazy stuff (like Charles Bonnet Syndrome, where blind people hallucinate cartoon animals, fairies, and tiny people(!) in the damaged part of their visual field) and I prefer the writing style and the fact that it’s more current.
‘I Wouldn’t Start From Here’ by Andrew Mueller is a truly wonderful book worth eleven out of ten stars. A would-be rock journalist accidentally gets sent to a major war zone to talk to people and ask, ‘Why can’t we all use a bit of common sense and humanity and learn to get along with each other?’. From then on, he reports from other major sites of war and conflict from around the world, always using the same formula: find locals to talk to, and ask them why they can’t sort out the madness and live a bit more ‘normally’. Written with impressive wit and flair, many times laugh-out-loud funny. Hugely insightful, providing a perspective on Iraq, the Middle East conflict, Kosovo and other war zones. Sometimes moving but never mawkish or indulgent, it’s a fantastic and absorbing study that never loses focus on the central question of how people who agree that war is hell can nonetheless insist on perpetuating it. And it’s very, very funny. Mueller will become one of your favourite authors from the first chapter onwards. Buy this book.
In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex tells the story of the 1820 sinking of the whaler Essex and the following ordeal the few survivors endured. It was a well-known event at the time inspiring Melville to write Moby Dick. The story is both fascinating and heart breaking.
I’m currently reading The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks and it’s quite good. I’m enjoying it, though I AM interested in Neurology. But the cases themselves are really interesting to begin with and Sacks does a good job of portraying the patients. After I finish this one, I’ll be reading An Anthropologist on Mars again by Sacks, and along the same lines as these two books. And then hopefully I’ll get to Awakenings.
Stephen King’s two non-fiction books, Danse Macabre (about the horror genre) and On Writing (part autobiography and part a guide to good writing) are required reading for anyone who thinks King can’t write anything but horror fiction.
ianzin’s recommendation reminded me of another author I like: P.J. O’Rourke. His Parliament of Whores, which looks at the U.S. government, is insightful and funny. He’s done other collections that I like, as well – All the Trouble in the World, Give War a Chance, Eat the Rich, and Republican Party Reptile. Good stuff.
Here is a short selection of some of the books I have enjoyed and recommend:
Tobacco: A Cultural History of How an Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization by Iain Gately 2003
A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire by Amy Butler Greenfield-2005
Cod by Mark Kurlansky 1997
The Big Oyster by Mark Kurlansky 2006
Rum: A Social and Sociable History by Ian Williams 2005
The True History of Chocolate by Sophie D. Coe and Michael D. Coe 1996
Vanilla by Patricia Rain 2004
The Frozen Water Trade by Gavin Weightman 2003
**Charlatan **by Pope Brock
A Nation of Counterfeiters by Stephen Mihm 2007
A Pickpockets Tale: The Underworld of 19th Century New York by Timothy J. Gilfoyle 2006
The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxes, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York by Matthew Goodman 2008
Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America’s Soul by Karen Abbot 2007
The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin 2005
Washington: The Making of the American Capital by Fergus M Bordevich 2008
Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the US Navy by Ian W.Toll 2006
Enigma: The Battle for the Code by Hugh Sebag-Montefiore 2000
**Code Breaking: A History and Exploration **by Rudolf Kippenhahn 1999
**Ed Wood: Nightmare of Ecstasy **by Rudolph Grey 1992
I’d forgotten about this until the latest RO thread in the Pit prompted me to look for the case.
I read the condensed version in Reader’s Digest about a decade ago.
Looks like most of the books I was going to recommend along the lines of what you were looking for have already been mentioned…so for something a little different I’ll recommend Truman Capote’s classic “nonfiction novel” In Cold Blood - an amazing read - and David Foster Wallace’s essay collections, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and Consider the Lobster.