Historical:
The Code Book, by Simon Singh
Endurance: Shackelton’s Incredible Voyage, Alfred Lansing
Human Behavior:
The Human Zoo, Desmond Morris (This one you’ll really like if you like Science of Shopping)
Man who Mistook His Wife For a Hat, Oliver Sacks
The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker
Birth and Death of Meaning, Ernest Becker
Concioiusness Explained, Daniel Dennett
Looks like it was renamed for the US market, to “The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of The Oxford English Dictionary”. Absolutely fascinating stuff.
I’m reading Measuring America by Andro Linklater at the moment - it’s fascinating! It describes both the evolution of America’s weights & measures system and also the great efforts made to survey the land, and why lots, blocks, etc. are the size they are.
And, having just reached a section with references to the Lake Erie Canal, I’m about to order Artificial River by Carol Sheriff, which is all about it’s construction…
Peter the Great by Robert Massie is the best biography I ever read.
My husband laughed when I bought this one. We were in a rush, and I was taking too long at the bookstore. When I finally came out, he asked me what I had bought.
“I bought a book about salt!” I chirped.
Later, he said he was sure it was a very interesting book, but it cracked him up to think I had spent an hour searching, and had ended up with a book about salt.
Another book I enjoyed about everyday objects was *The Social History of the Toilet. *
Any book by Oliver Sacks…
The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat : And Other Clinical Tales
I second that!!! I absolutely love this book. He writes with such a sense of responsibility to his patients. Every page of this book is great.
Cardinal Richelieu by Anthony Levi
Holidays in Hell - PJ O’Rourke
How the West has won - Victor Hanson
The mismeasure of man: Steven Gould. -
Cows, Pigs, wars, & witches: The riddles of culture. Marvin Harris.
Rivethead: Tales from the assembly line. Ben Harper
I like any biography by Alison Weir, but The Six Wives of Henry VIII is very good.
And for a really riveting read (I love to read this book over and over) there’s Restoration London: From Poverty to Pets, from Medicine to Magic, from Slang to Sex, from Wallpaper to Women’s Rights
Yep. Good book but an older one you’d have to most likely get it through a used book source.
If you read Alison Weir, bear in mind she has a premise in the beginning and sets out to prove it. Not quite objective reporting is what I am getting at, but good reading anyhow.
Brunelleschi’s Dome & Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling by Ross King are exception books about the Renaissance.
The Age of Homespun by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is a great book about American History, economics and racism.
Women’s Work The First 20,000 Years by Elizabeth Weyland Barber is a really good read about the birth of weaving and textiles.
Another old one
Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves Women in Classical Antiquity by Sarah Pomeroy. It is one of the FIRST books written on ancient women and their roles in their societies.
Warrior Queens by Antonia Fraser is a very good analysis of the perceptions and misperception that strong women acquire from observers.
And just cause it was a fun book and we all want to run off to sea with Johnny Depp- Under the Black Flag by David Cordingley. Its a very good in depth look at pirates in the Carribean primarily. He looks at the myth and the reality of the pirating life.
HAVE FUN!!!
Brunelleschi’s Dome andMichelangelo and The Pope’s Ceiling are two different books. Sorry if I didn’t make that clear in the last post
***JOHNSTOWN FLOOD*** by David McCullough. I re-read it nearly every year. It’s that good.
Almost anything by John McPhee.
Genome by Matt Ridley, a fascinating look into the human chromosome.
On a totally different level, try Operating Instructions by Anne Lamott, a journal of her first year with her baby son. Hilarious, open, honest.
The Last Shot, by Darcy Frey, an account of college basketball recruiting. Very interesting and illuminating, and includes a couple of ‘name’ basketball stars you may recognize now.
New Jack by Ted Conover, about being a prison guard. Great stuff, won the National Book Critics award for Nonfiction
It’s All Over But the Shouting, by Rick Bragg.
My husband uses this one as one of the textbooks for the Sociology 101 class he teaches.
Our local bookstore had no trouble getting ahold of 100 new copies for last semester’s class. I’m not sure from whom they ordered it, though-- just that youcan still get it new.
I also loved Harris’ Our Kind. My only complaint about this book was how short it really is. (If you removed all of the needless chapter breaks, it’d be half as long.)
The Age of Homespun by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich was good, but I liked her Diary of a Midwife much more.
I’m not a big fan of most of the current non-fiction, where the idea sounds great but the book only has an article’s worth of interesting stuff in it. (I’m looking at you, Simon Winchester!)
But here’s two nonetheless:
Fermat’s Enigma by Simon Singh. Very readable, very interesting.
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman by Richard Feynman. A classic. Funny, inspiring, etc.
I liked this, and in my perverse way, I bought this to read on an airplane - high altitude link, you know…
If you get this, you may want to consider Boukreev's (sp?) * The Climb * - he was a guide in the other expedition that was trying to summit. They have somewhat differing accounts of events. Sometimes seeing two points of view of the same event is interesting.
There is a third account I haven’t read by a client, but reviews say much of it regarded his time after the climb - * Left for Dead * by Weathers. He was lost and assumed dead and stumbled into camp later. Lost a lot of fingers, nose, etc to frostbite.
If you like Marvin Harris, try Cannibals and Kings: Origins of Cultures.
I am glad to hear that about Harris. I also really enjoyed Good to Eat by him.
I haven’t read Diary of a Midwife yet, but I will someday! I have an older one of hers called Good Wives about Puritan women on my shelf to read as well.
A brief read, surely?
Have you already read, “Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World,” by Margaret MacMillan? Great stuff, with all the backstairs intrigue and backstabbing at the conference to develop the Peace Treaty (and lay the framework of world history since). Very readable and utterly fascinating.
Tony Horwitz’s “Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before” is excellent, although it came out a year or so ago now. You may recall his “Confederates in the Attic.” (and if ou haven’t read it–run out and buy it. Now.)
The Moral Animal by Robert Wright: a popular book on evolutionary phsychology. Very readble. Another vote for Non-Zero by the same author. Also How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker.
As for history John Roberts has written some highly readable big-picture books.Check out his one volume history of the world and one volume history of the 20th century.