# Great \*non-fiction\* books **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [September 1, 2000, 8:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/great-non-fiction-books/31684 "2000-09-01T20:03:04Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![stolichnaya](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/bcef8e/32.png) [@stolichnaya](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/stolichnaya)\ **Post date:** [September 1, 2000, 8:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/great-non-fiction-books/31684/1 "2000-09-01T20:03:04Z")
I’ve been on a big non-fiction, popular science kick lately and I just got a Chicago public library card. Soooo, since every single book I’ve checked out on the advice of a Doper has been a hit, I wanted to start a new topic, **What are your favorite _non-fiction_ books?** Since fair’s fair, here are a few of my favorites: _Genius_ by James Glieck (a biography of Richard Feynman) _Hostile_ Waters by Peter Huchthausen (about a crippled Russian submarine) _The Visual Display of Quantitative Information_ by Edward Tufte (a work of genius in the area of graphic information display) Bring it on! ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [September 1, 2000, 8:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/great-non-fiction-books/31684/2 "2000-09-01T20:09:25Z")
Oh, I’ve got a LOT of non-fiction, science- or technica based favorites. Chaos by James Gleick The Dam Busters by Paul Brickhill Longitude by Dava Sobel The Professor and the Madman (A history of the Oxford English Dictionary) by I Forget the Author’s Name Just About Anything by Martin Gardner The Cuckoo’s Egg, Silicon Snake Oil, and anything else by (?) Clifford Stoll(?) A bunch of books called Straight Dope or something like that ---
**Author:** ![RealityChuck](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/realitychuck/32/195_2.png) [@RealityChuck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RealityChuck)\ **Post date:** [September 1, 2000, 8:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/great-non-fiction-books/31684/3 "2000-09-01T20:25:46Z")
_The Civil War: A Narrative_ by Shelby Foote – the best history of the war, and a great read (if very long). _The Fatal Shore_ by Robert Hughes – the story of the founding of Australia. Superb history. _The Mother Tongue_ by Bill Bryson _Made in America_ by Bill Bryson _A Walk in the Woods_ by Bill Bryson – Bryson is well worth reading. The first two deal with language and social history. The last is a hilarious account of his attempt to walk the Appalachian Trail. _Techniques of the Selling Writer_ by Dwight V. Swain. The best guide to how to write fiction. _The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat_ by Oliver Sachs – fascinating medical histories. I’d also second _Longitude, The Professor and the Madman_, and _Cuckoo’s Egg_. ---
**Author:** ![David\_B](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/51bf81/32.png) [@David\_B](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/David_B)\ **Post date:** [September 1, 2000, 8:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/great-non-fiction-books/31684/4 "2000-09-01T20:35:55Z")
It would take too many messages for me to list ALL of my favorite non-fiction. But let’s hit some high points: Everything by Cecil Adams _The Demon-Haunted World_ by Carl Sagan Everything by James Randi Everything by Richard Dawkins Everything by Jan Harold Brunvand Well, okay, that ought to keep you busy for a while. 😉 ---
**Author:** ![Ellen\_Cherry](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ellen_cherry/32/3600_2.png) [@Ellen\_Cherry](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ellen_Cherry)\ **Post date:** [September 1, 2000, 8:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/great-non-fiction-books/31684/5 "2000-09-01T20:56:51Z")
One of my favorite books of all time – Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt. ---
**Author:** ![jcgmoi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/a9adbd/32.png) [@jcgmoi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jcgmoi)\ **Post date:** [September 1, 2000, 8:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/great-non-fiction-books/31684/6 "2000-09-01T20:57:22Z")
**David B** got Dawkins. John Casti writes about complex matters of physics, biology, and computational science for the intelligent layman. Gives lots of references too. A book I’m recommending this year a lot is _Black Hawk Down_ by Mark Bowden. In 1993 US Delta Force and Ranger units had a routine mission in Mogadishu collapse and were forced to fight their way out. Remarkable story told from both sides. Reads like a novel. Which reminds me. If warfare and its history appeals check out one of John Keegan’s many volumes. He’s one of the top prose stylists going IMO. ---
**Author:** ![Prosser](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/cc9497/32.png) [@Prosser](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Prosser)\ **Post date:** [September 1, 2000, 9:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/great-non-fiction-books/31684/7 "2000-09-01T21:01:30Z")
A Civil Action–Absolutely fantastic book. C- movie. Put it this way, it’s required reading in most Civil Procedure classes these days. ---
**Author:** ![JosephFinn](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/3bc359/32.png) [@JosephFinn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JosephFinn)\ **Post date:** [September 1, 2000, 9:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/great-non-fiction-books/31684/8 "2000-09-01T21:04:16Z")
The Victorian Internet. Fascinating history of the wierd parallels between the Internet and telegraph industries. Longitude, by Dava Sobel. A history of the search for the marine chronomoter, invented by James Harrison (whose inventions are still used 3 centuries later in clocks and watches). Story of brilliant technology hounded by really stupid ideas for determining longitude (though I love the one of having ships every 50 miles that would shoot fireworks into the sky every hour). ---
**Author:** ![Robot\_Arm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/robot_arm/32/18280_2.png) [@Robot\_Arm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Robot_Arm)\ **Post date:** [September 1, 2000, 9:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/great-non-fiction-books/31684/9 "2000-09-01T21:06:13Z")
_Gödel, Escher, Bach_ by Douglas Hofstadter ---
**Author:** ![lissener](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lissener/32/6139_2.png) [@lissener](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lissener)\ **Post date:** [September 1, 2000, 9:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/great-non-fiction-books/31684/10 "2000-09-01T21:07:53Z")
I second the “anything by Richard Dawkins” vote. I’ll add: anything by Stephen J. Gould, starting with my favorites _Wonderful Life_ and _The Mismeasure of Man._ Also anything by Jean Henri Fabre, perhaps the most poetical pure-scientist ever to commmit his notes to paper. He was a 19th century French entomologist whose field notes are some of the most entertaining, beautiful, amusing, informative writing I have ever encountered, in any field. And anything by John Crompton, an eccentric self-made, untrained biologist who wrote several wonderful (less than entirely accurate) books about snakes, spiders, bees, wasps, etc. Very, very entertaining: largely reflecting his own observations during a lifelong amateur study of creepy crawlies with some astounding, sometimes outrageous, conclusions. Crompton and Fabre are very difficult to find–they’re on my list as a result of my habit of pawing through dusty piles in used bookstores’ science sections–but well worth tracking down. University libraries have them, and a bunch of Fabre excerpts were recently published in a watercolory coffeetable book titled _The Passionate Observer: Writings from the World of Nature_, but I urge you to track down _The Hunting Wasps_. His three page description of a praying mantis as a kind of bloodthirsty nun, and his anthropormphic description of a female wasp as she sweeps clean the threshhold of her burrow are alone worth the effort of searching it out. (FWIW, CPL has Crompton’s _Hunting Wasp_ [whose references to Fabre led me to seek him out], _Hive,_ and _Spider_, all wonderful little books, and several titles of Fabre’s, including _The Hunting Wasp_.) ---
**Author:** ![yojimbo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/yojimbo/32/232_2.png) [@yojimbo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/yojimbo)\ **Post date:** [September 1, 2000, 9:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/great-non-fiction-books/31684/11 "2000-09-01T21:27:04Z")
Not the best book I ever read but without question the most moving. _Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee_ by Dee Brown ---
**Author:** ![missbunny](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/76d3ee/32.png) [@missbunny](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/missbunny)\ **Post date:** [September 1, 2000, 9:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/great-non-fiction-books/31684/12 "2000-09-01T21:30:03Z")
_Paranormal Borderlands of Science,_ Kendrick Frasier, editor. It is a collection of essays about the debunking of supposed psychic or supernatural phenomenon - clairvoyants, spoon-benders, dowsers, psychic photographers, etc. There are one or two essays by The Amazing Randi included. Excellent reading; particularly useful for showing how and why none of these so-called psychic events can be duplicated when following the scientific method (besides the fact that it’s because these people are lying). I think many people on this board in particular would enjoy it. ISBN: 0879751487. It is out of print, but you can probably find it at the library. ---
**Author:** ![Lamar\_Mundane](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/85f322/32.png) [@Lamar\_Mundane](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lamar_Mundane)\ **Post date:** [September 1, 2000, 9:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/great-non-fiction-books/31684/13 "2000-09-01T21:41:25Z")
**And the Band Played On…** This is an absolutely great book, a contemporary story about a horrible disease but it reads like a detective novel. I read it when it first came out and although it got good reviews, it never received the accolades it deserved. Probably because the subject matter was still taboo at that time. Can’t recommend it highly enough. Also, **The Glory of Their Times** by Lawrence Ritter. Required reading for any baseball fan or historian. I gave it to my dad for christmas a few years back, and it made him cry. ---
**Author:** ![rackensack](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e5b9ba/32.png) [@rackensack](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rackensack)\ **Post date:** [September 1, 2000, 10:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/great-non-fiction-books/31684/14 "2000-09-01T22:04:41Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by CalMeacham \* > **The Professor and the Madman (A history of the Oxford English Dictionary) by I Forget the Author’s Name** 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. ---
**Author:** ![Necros](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/necros/32/11086_2.png) [@Necros](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Necros)\ **Post date:** [September 1, 2000, 10:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/great-non-fiction-books/31684/15 "2000-09-01T22:09:32Z")
And the other one by Steven Pinker (whom **rackensack** mentioned), _How the Mind Works_. ---
**Author:** ![keeper0](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/b19c9b/32.png) [@keeper0](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/keeper0)\ **Post date:** [September 1, 2000, 10:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/great-non-fiction-books/31684/16 "2000-09-01T22:59:52Z")
I just recently read “Lies My Teacher Told Me” by James Loewen. I was outraged at the realization of how much my education had been whitewashed and sanitized for political purposes. Made me want to quit my job and become a history teacher… for about a day. ---
**Author:** ![lissener](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lissener/32/6139_2.png) [@lissener](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lissener)\ **Post date:** [September 1, 2000, 11:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/great-non-fiction-books/31684/17 "2000-09-01T23:50:44Z")
I wholeheartedly second rackensack’s mention of _Darwin’s Dangerous Idea_ and Weiner’s _The Beak of the Finch_ and shamelessly steal them to add them to my own list. Dennett is a slog, but a delicious slog, and if were Dictator I’d force every creationist to read _Beak_; I have very little doubt that its irrefutable evidence would cut their numbers by about 90%.(“Force” being the key word: I once lent mine to a creationist, and he said that as soon as he realized it had a “pro-evolution” bias he put it down. :rolleyes: ) I also highly recommend (thanks for the reminder, rackensack) Dennett’s _Consciousness Explained_, another worthwhile slog. And Jaynes’s _The Origin of Consciousness Through the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind_ (or some such title; memory here), though considered by some not to be non-fiction, is not entirely convincing, but fascinating nonetheless. ---
**Author:** ![Lsura](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/7993a0/32.png) [@Lsura](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lsura)\ **Post date:** [September 2, 2000, 12:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/great-non-fiction-books/31684/18 "2000-09-02T00:12:43Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by RealityChuck \* > _The Mother Tongue_ by Bill Bryson > _Made in America_ by Bill Bryson > _A Walk in the Woods_ by Bill Bryson – Bryson is well worth reading. The first two deal with language and social history. The last is a hilarious account of his attempt to walk the Appalachian Trail. I adore Bill Bryson’s books- the first one I read was _The Lost Continent_ very funny. Got me hooked… can’t wait to read the newest one about Australia…can’t remember the name, but saw it in B&N the other day ---
**Author:** ![divemaster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/divemaster/32/78_2.png) [@divemaster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/divemaster)\ **Post date:** [September 2, 2000, 12:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/great-non-fiction-books/31684/19 "2000-09-02T00:35:33Z")
I recommend _Radical Son_ by David Horowitz. He grew up a communist in America, as his parents were high up in the American Communist Party. He was a Berkely radical who started the journal _Ramparts_, and was one of the inner circle of the Black Panthers. He is now an outspoken conservative. He came to realize just how insidiuos these movments were, and how they used power, intimidation, and murder as means to achieve their goals. If you want to go behind the scenes of American radicalism with one who was there, and understand the regrets of one of the movers and shakers, then read this book. A thought-provoking experience. ---
**Author:** ![stuyguy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ec9cab/32.png) [@stuyguy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/stuyguy)\ **Post date:** [September 2, 2000, 12:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/great-non-fiction-books/31684/20 "2000-09-02T00:47:09Z")
“The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York,” by Robert Caro. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/great-non-fiction-books/31684.md?page=2)