Oh, and I second the vote for Feynman. Such a brilliant man and quite funny in (natch) Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman. Of course that was more of a memoir, but he could make any topic interesting.
Mrs. Furthur
A third vote for Richard Feynman. What a man! What a mind!
For ecology, you will find ne better introduction than the seminal The Diversity of Life, by Edward O. Wilson, perhaps the greatest naturalist in the world today.
I was very much in the same situation as you – solid humanities education, but a bit light on the science. What set me off down the road of reading tons of stuff in evolutionary theory, biology, and related fields was reading Jeremy Campbell’s Grammatical Man: Information, Entropy, Language and Life as a followup to Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. At this remove, it’s easy to see lots of problems with Grammatical Man; it’s wrong in several areas, and by now it’s seriously out of date. But it started me thinking about the connections between information theory, evolution, and genetics in ways that have informed everything I’ve read since.
As a “starter course” in various scientific disciplines, I highly recommend the books in the Basic Books Science Masters series. Each is less than 200 pages, written by one of the leading lights in the field in question, and is very much oriented to the layman. Each of them oversimplifies, omits important areas, and reflects the biases of its author, but they each present a useful introduction to an important topic, and most are very well written. Richard Dawkins’ River Out of Eden is an outstanding introduction to evolutionary theory, and Daniel Dennett’s Kinds of Minds and William Calvin’s How Brains Think are nearly as good.
Jonathan Weiner’s The Beak of the Finch has already been recommended; I’ll second the recommendation as perhaps the best book out there on microevolution. Carl Zimmer’s At the Water’s Edge is a useful complement to it for the macroevolutionary perspective. Matt Ridley’s books have also been mentioned already, and again I have to agree – his Nature Via Nurture : Genes, Experience, and What Makes Us Human is perhaps the best book out there on the current state of thinking about this age-old question, even better than Steven Pinker’s excellent but sometimes too polemical The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. Ridley’s The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation has had a profound impact on my thinking about politics, social structure, etc., and both Genome and The Red Queen are excellent.
I’ve already mentioned William Calvin; he’s my favorite neuroscientist. Some of his books (The Cerebral Code, for example) are over my head, but most are accessible for the lay reader and present a compelling case for his theories on exactly how the brain goes about the business of thinking. And the Bookshelf section of his web site is a treasure trove of recommendations for further reading.
Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct has become one of the classics of contemporary science writing for the layman, for good reason. His How the Mind Works is nearly as good, and is a bit more comprehensive than some of the other works mentioned already.
Antonio Damasio has written at least three excellent books on the interplay between emotion, sensation, and cognition: Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain; The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness; and Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain. V.S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee’s Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind is also extremely enlightening on the complex interrelationship between the body and mind, especially the ways in which “rational” thought can be undermined or superceded by sensory input.
The big kahuna for me is Daniel Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life. Dennett painstakingly and brilliantly sets forth his thesis that Darwin’s theory of evolution is “the most important idea anyone ever had”. He is logically rigorous (even to a fault) and pretty completely demolishes the positions of most of those who would disagree with him. I’ve now read this book three times through, learing more from it each time. It’s one of those rare books, however, that isn’t necessarily easier to read on subsequent times through it; it’s perhaps the most informationally dense book I’ve ever managed to make it through. It’s not that Dennett’s not an exceptionally good writer, or that he’s not entertaining – he’s both, to a surprisingly high degree. It’s just that there’s so much here, and Dennett is so intellectually rigorous, that you have to take your time with this one. I can normally put away a 600 page book like this one in a week or so of opportunistic reading; each time through DDI has taken me at least four to six weeks. I can’t recommend it highly enough, but I don’t recommend starting with it; one of Richard Dawkins’ books, a couple of other books on evolutionary theory, and Dennett’s Kinds of Minds should probably be considered prerequisites. You also probably ought to read some of Stephen J. Gould’s work to get a sense of what it is Dennett is attacking so formidably here.
Seconded! If you don’t mind pics of what happens when a tapeworm accidentally ends up in your brain (it doesn’t end well for the worm or the host…)
Last Chance to See also get’s my vote, although I wouldn’t really call it a science book.
Bryson is good. I never found Paul Davies or Stephen Hawking particularly engaging as writers. John Gribbin isn’t bad (avoid his sci-fi, though!)
Asimov was a superb science essayist with a real gift for explanation - always worth a read, including his stuff for kids. Hard to beat for the basics.
Feynmann is interesting. Many of his books are more biographical/historical than science texts, but still well worth a read. He wrote with the gushy enthusiasm of a fifteen-year old, and he really, genuinely, absolutely did not give a damn about what anybody thought of him. He figured just about anything was a learnable skill, including drawing circles freehand and picking up women in bars, and taught himself both.
Just to throw another couple of titles into the pile - Life at the Extremes, by Frances Ashcroft, and Opening Skinner’s Box by Lauren Slater. The first is a collection of essays on what happens to the human body at its endurance limits of temperature and pressure (lots of arctic explorers, mountaineers, deep divers and people lost in deserts) - fair bit of physics, chemistry and biology in an interesting context.
The second datails a set of important psychological experiments of the 20th century, with some interesting follow-ups and repeats. Example - the infamous Milgram experiments on authority, where volunteers thought they were giving electric shocks to unwilling victims. Slater tracked down some of the original participants and interviewed them.
I think I have my summer reading list now. Thanks, all!
Just a nother to add to the list, my personal favourite -Hyperspace by Mitchio Kaku
a couple quick thoughts:
David Quammen is right at the boundary between science writing and travel/outdoor writing (he used to write for Outside magazine), if that sounds interesting to you, then you’d probably be interested in it.
There’s a regular anthology “Best Science Writing of 200x”, which I’ve found good for shorter magazine style pieces.
Also second Stephen Jay Gould, almost any of his collections are good.
And getting away from reading for fun and interest to reading because it’s important (in a humanities way), Gould’s “The Mismeasure of Man” is also tremendously relevant reading for any discussion of either race or measuring intelligence. But the key is to just gloss over his abstruse statistics discussion, and get into his analysis of papers from the 1800’s where he demonstrates the incredible amount of conscious and unconscious bias in the results that ‘proved’ the inferiourity of whatever ‘race’ was considered inferiour at that time. Gives you a good base to critically look at “The Bell Curve” or whatever the latest tripe is.
I’m going to buck the trend of suggesting current books and advise you to read Darwin’s The Origin of Species and The Voyage of the Beagle. If you don’t mind they Victorian -era verbage they are great foundations for the understanding of modern biology, and demonstrate how far ahead of the curve Darwin was even with respect to his fellow scientists and natural philosophers. (Darwin recognized that there was no end goal to evolution and speculated about the existance of what we now understand to be genes as the mechanism upon which natural selection affects.) After that, Steven Jay Gould and Matt Ridley are both quite readable. I like Dawkins (and tend to agree more with his views technically than I do Gould) but he does tend to get technical and involved in nitpicky diatrabes, and often brings in pointless atheistic tangents to his valid arguments.
Sagan’s Cosmos and The Demon-Haunted World are great introductions to general physical science and the applied scientific method. While Sagan was as much a politician and celebrity as a scientist, he genuinely understood and was passionate about science, and his writing, while not poetic, isn’t as stilted as many popular science books. Alan Dressler’s Voyage To The Great Attractor is a good introduction to modern astrostronomy, but is even more noteworthy for being a very candid description of the benefits and perils collaborative science and seridipity in research.
John McPhee is more of a journalist (in the traditional sense, not a newshound) but many of his books, like The Control of Nature delve heavily into aspects of natural science as they relate to the ordinary world. He’s a bit rambling–well, okay, much of his work is almost completely unstructured–but he gives you a narrated, comprehensive tour of whatever topic he’s covering; tangents, character biographies, geological descriptions, you name it. His writing is extremely visceral and very accessible even to a reader who isn’t particularly interested in the science.
Several people have recommended Bryson; I’m sorry to say that I don’t agree. Bryson admits his ignorance and it is apparent throughout the book. I skimmed through a few chapters while browsing at the bookstore one day and found it rife with errors, urban legands, and other misunderstandings. Apparently his publisher didn’t have the book vetted by anyone versed in the fields covered. (I also find his self-depricating style quickly annoying, but then I don’t like David Sederis either, so take that for what you will.) Ditto for James Burke.
Stranger
If you want to give yourself an overview of modern physics, I recommend The Second Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics
by Robert P. Crease and Charles C. Mann.
It covers just about everything that happens in the field from the end of the nineteenth century up to the 1978 Nobel Prize. But it does it in sort of a biographical way, rather than as a textbook. After reading it, you not only understand some physics, but you really understand physicists.
You see people like Feynman both from the point of view of his instructors, who thought of him as an upstart that started doing his famous diagrams just to avoid difficult math, as well as from the point of view of his students, who saw that he fully got the math (better than his teachers did, that’s for sure), but knew the diagrams make a lot of it unnecessary.
Leon Lederman’s The God Particle : If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?
It’s a story about the nobel prize laureate’s search for the Higgs-Boson particle nicknamed “The God Particle” because “The God-damned particle” was no-no’ed by the publisher.
Quick excerpt:
It sounds interesting, but physics scares me. Well, physics doesn’t scare me; learning about it does.
Ditto stpauler, nice try with the excerpt – it does make the topic sound very approachable. The book sounds interesting, but it’s physics again. Maybe I’ll just get someone to tell me I’m not smart enough for physics; even though I’m a grown-up, reverse psychology still works on me as well as it did when I was seven and my dad told me I was too young to read Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy because I wouldn’t understand it. Or when I was ten, and he told me I was too young to read Jane Eyre. Or when – wait a minute! I think my dad may be a very crafty man.
Stranger, I read part of one of Bryson’s travelogues when I was a guest in someone’s house. I never finished it, partly because it was pretty awful and partly because I went home. I’ve never tried Sedaris or James Burke (that I know of), but will avoid them on your recommendation. I may try Darwin (I read something of his in college, but that was an age ago) since that ties in nicely with my new-found interest in mutations.
DAMN YOU, PEOPLE. Quit bringing up interesting books. Amazon already has a majority share of my soul and I’m now officially selling my mother into prostitution to pay for the rest of the books I just ordered. 
The Lives of a Cell by Lewis Thomas is probably the most fascinating science book I’ve ever read. It’s a short book, a collection of essays, really. It’s been quite a while since I read it, so I can’t go into any detail.
If you’re not afraid of a 19 MB PDF, there’s a free physics textbook available at http://motionmountain.dse.nl/text.html You can also get individual chapters here.
You’re definitely not bright enough to comprehend physics, even though classical mechanics based only on a handful of easily demonstrated laws. Nope. You can’t get it, and you’re too young, and besides that, your grasp of English is way to limited to read anything more complicated than Barney’s Big Adventure.
How’s that for reverse psychology? 
I’m glad I’m not the only one who finds Bryson tedious. Darwin’s actually quite readable, and The Voyage of the Beagle is a good story of scientific adventure and discovery. There’s quite an interesting backstory to it as well–Darwin was not the ship’s research zoologist and was wedged on board as a companion to the captain, even though they didn’t really get along.
Stranger
There are some great novels about science, if you like reading fiction. The best I can think of is The Periodic Table by Primo Levi. There are a hundred reasons to read this mighty book apart from the science, its a memoir of Levi’s life IIRC with each chaper titled after an element. So its more about Levi than chemistry, a gentle chemistry lesson from a truly great writer.
If anyone else knows of a novel like The Periodic Table I’d love to hear about it! 
How dare you, sirrah! How dare you! You don’t even know me! Well, I’ll show you – hah.
I really am a sucker for that stuff. I can’t tell you how many life decisions I’ve made because someone told me not to do something! (Exhibit A: my career. Exhibit B: my house. Exhibit C: oh, I could go on and on!)
But I am grateful to all the suggestions here, and tonight I plan to swing by the Borders after dinner and see if they have any of these books there. By this time next month, expect to see me accepting my Nobel Prize for Knowledge of Scientific Stuff. (Myler, I’ll keep my eyes peeled for something like the book you mention. If I should deign to wander upstairs to the “fiction” area, that is – now that I am a serious student of science, I shall have no need of such distractions.)
psst…there’s always the public library
I second Guns, Germs, and Steel, by the way. It was such an interesting read that I took it with me everywhere I went. Which is how it got stolen from me in the waiting room of the lab while I was having blood drawn one afternoon. :mad: