For stateside Dopers reading this thread, I’ll mention that Jones’ Almost Like a Whale was titled Darwin’s Ghost: The Origin of Species Updated in the U.S. edition. And I heartily second the recommendation. Also, while I haven’t read Zimmer’s Parasite Rex, his *At the Water’s Edge: Fish With Fingers, Whales With Legs, and How Life Came Ashore but Then Went Back to Sea * is very good, and makes an excellent companion to another of my favorite books on evolution, The Beak of the Finch, by Jonathan Weiner (though Beak seems to be out of print in the UK).
For short, highly readable introductions to a wide range of topics in the sciences, it’s hard to do much better than the titles in the Science Masters series put together by John Brockman. The roster of authors includes Richard Dawkins, William Calvin, Steven J. Gould, Daniel Dennett, Richard Leakey, Paul Davies, Jared Diamond, and Daniel J. Hillis (plus about that many more). When you run out of stuff there, you won’t find a much better resource for developing your reading list than neuroscientist William Calvin’s Bookshelf page; Calvin’s interests are wide-ranging, and nearly every important book in any of those areas is included in his list. Elsewhere on his site, you’ll find the full texts of most of his books (which are themselves uniformly excellent, though some of the more technical titles are rather heavy going for a layman like myself).
And for thoroughly engrossing fiction from which you’ll learn a lot about early nineteenth-century history, culture, and science while being completely taken in with the characters and laughing out loud often, there’s always Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin novels. Again, William Calvin anticipates me with his Patrick O’Brian appreciation page, which gives more of the flavor of O’Brian’s novels than I could hope to do.
I found In Search of Schroedinger’s Cat, by John Gribbin, to be an excellent introduction to the weirdness of quantum mechanics.
Anything by or about Richard Feynman is great. He is generally acknowledged as one of the premier teachers of physics ever, and was a hell of an interesting guy as well. His Six Easy Peices is a great book on physics, if a bit more technical than the Gribbin book. Also The Character of Physical Law. And his autobiographies, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! and What Do You Care What Other People Think? are fascinating and highly entertaining.
You like history and science? Do I have a book for you: The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. It is a history lesson, science tutorial, set of biographies, and introduction to cold war politics all-in-one. You will not be disappointed.
I definately wouldn’t read Darwin - reading the original is really overrated imo. Go with a modern dude like Dawkin’s “The Selfish Gene” or Daniel Dennet’s “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea.” If you want a hidden mind-blowing-expanding gem on what the universe is and/or why we are here then I’d go with Arthur Young’s “The Reflexive Universe” - this guy is plain scary- definately the most creative, thought provoking, unique book I’ve ever read.
Tor Norretranders The User Illusion is pretty good, it starts out pretty dry but the ideas blew me away.
Eric Drexler’s Engines of Creation is a good start on nanotech, and you’ll get more of the jokes in Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age when you return to fiction.
Edmund Morris’ The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt is supposed to be great, it won a Pulitzer. I haven’t read it yet and I didn’t much care for Part II Theodore Rex though. Happy reading!
“Flim-Flam” by James Randi. His greatest work. A complete evisceration of psychic, paranormal and pseudo-scientific claims, written with flair, passion and fun. One of the most un-put-down-able books ever.
Along somewhat similar lines to Karl’s suggestion, I recommend The Curve of Binding Energy by John McPhee. It’s a biography of nuclear physicist Theodore Taylor, who designed both the most powerful and the smallest nuclear weapons of his day and went on to campaign for disarmament and better security for weapons-grade nuclear materials.
He’s also the only man on record who ever lit a cigarette with an atomic bomb.
I gotta get my two cents in and recommend Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. It’s one of the most entertaining and informative books I’ve read in a long time. Another good one is Phantoms in the Brain by V.S. Ramachandran, in case you’re interested in a layman’s tour of neurology. Oh yeah, and Consciousness Explained by Dan Dennett.
A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman is a great book of history. I believe it’s subtitled, “The Calamitous History of the Fourteenth Century”.
I read it. I enjoyed every bit of it too.
“There Eyes Were Watching God” by Zola Neale Hurston is a phenomenal book concerning personal growth, spirituality, independence, and healthy relationships.
I second “Godel, Escher, Bach”. Very thought provoking as well as fun.
Lots of the others I was going to say have already been said, most notably “Guns, Germs, and Steel”.
I suppose I could say, “The Art of Computer Programming” by Knuth, but I haven’t read that myself, yet. The three volumes sit quitely waiting on my shelf. It comes very highly recommended though.
I respectfully offer an opinion counter to NightRabbit’s. I read about half of “Einstein’s Dreams” before I became bored. It was like a one-joke sitcom, to me. A series of parables, perhaps, with the same premise. I can’t get excited about it.
“The Chosen”, by Chaim Potok. Although some people might find it really boring (I found it intriguing).
And everybody needs to read “A Brief History Of Time” and “The Universe In A Nutshell”, both by Stephen Hawking. They’re very whimsical, clear and easy to read, and very informative.
