Simon Winchester, I believe. And it is quite a good book, though not so good as to make it into a top 10 favorites list. Definitely in the top 100, though. As are Longitude and Chaos, mentioned by other posters.
Lessee, favorites . . . .
[ul]
[li]Grammatical Man: Information, Entropy, Language and Life, Jeremy Campbell. This book, which I read following up on an interest in information theory sparked by Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, sent me off on several different courses of reading that I’m still purusing.[/li][li]The Third Chimpanzee, Jared Diamond. Written several years before Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, this book sets out to describe the evolution of human beings and how we’ve diverged from the species nearest us, the chimps and bonobos, with whom we share all but about 2% of our DNA. He succeeds brilliantly. I recommend anything by Diamond, but this book above the others.[/li][li]The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker. Profoundly altered my thinking about the nature of language, and about how language developed in the evolutionary history of our species, and how it develops in individual children today. I’m very glad that I’d read this book before having children, as it’s made for a fascinating exercise to watch my kids develop their language skills in the light of what I learned from this book. Not everyone accepts the Chomskian notion of Universal Grammar on which much of Pinker’s argument depends, but it’s a viable theory that accounts for many of the observed phenomena.[/li][li]Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, Daniel Dennett. Dennett makes a strong case for his contention that evolution by natural selection, “Darwin’s dangerous idea”, is the best idea anybody ever had. He presents the evidence for darwinian evolution and deals in detail with the most common and most significant objections to it. Along the way, he steps on the toes of plenty of other scientists and thinkers who have criticized various aspects of modern Darwinism (particularly Stephen Jay Gould), but always in an entertaining, informative, highly readable manner. Probably the book on my list that requires the greatest investment from the reader, but repays that investment many times over.[/li][li]The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time, Jonathan Weiner. Counters the most frequent criticisms of the theory of evolution, namely that it can’t be observed to occur as can most other scientific phenomena, and that it would take too long for evolution alone to have produced the diversity of life on Earth. Weiner describes the work of Peter and Rosemary Grant in the Galapagos Islands, and their observations of natural selection at work in producing substantial changes in the physiology of the various finch species there, in far shorter time frames than have been generally thought necessary for evolution to do its work. If you’re going to have an argument with a creationist, or if you resist accepting evolutionary theory because of a putative lack of evidence, this book is a must-read.[/li][li]The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation, Matt Ridley. Ridley does a great job of explicating the mechanisms by which evolution has shaped human behavior so that we frequently cooperate with others and display altruistic tendencies, when this might seem contrary to our individual self-interest (and hence our evolutionary “fitness”). Not everyone will agree with the libertarian/conservative political conclusions Ridley draws in the last third or so of the book, but whether you agree or disagree, you’ll almost certainly learn a great deal.[/li][li]Rising Tide : The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America, John M. Barry. As a childhood resident of the Mississippi Delta (on the Arkansas side), I enjoyed and learned a lot from this account of the political, geographical, sociological, and of course hydrographical aspects of one of the most significant events of twentieth-century American history – one that is too often neglected in reviewing the history of this century in favor of wars, presidential politics and the like.[/li][li]The Glory of Their Times: The Story of Baseball Told by the Men Who Played It, Lawrence Ritter. The first, and still the best, oral history of baseball in the early twentieth century. Ritter set out, in the early 1960s, to interview as many ballplayers from the first few decades of the the century as possible. This book, first published in 1966, was the result. Ritter did a masterful job of editing the raw interview tapes and assembling them on paper so that the personality of each player comes clearly through. If the Chicago Public Library has it, you should also avail yourself of the audio edition, in which Ritter has assembled five hours worth of the original interview tapes (only about one-third of the material in the book, but it’s still wonderful to hear the voices of the players themselves).[/li][li]The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas S. Kuhn. A classic, responsible for the introduction of the phrase “paradigm shift” into everyday language, in which Kuhn examines how science, commonly thought to proceed by incremental steps, each building on the previous, more often runs in well-known channels for a while before suddenly being turned out of its banks and redirected completely by a new, radically different theory that utterly changes the frame of reference by which observed phenomena are understood.[/li][/ul]
I’m sure I could go on for quite a while, but those are the books that, in hindsight, I’d most regret having missed.
