Recent Non-Fiction Books You Think Everyone Should Read

As per the title, on this thread you are invited to share at least two recent non-fiction books you think everyone should read.. Perhaps you found them interesting or they deserve to be better known. (At least two are requested in case some people read little and think every book they read is noteworthy.)

I nominate Elderhood (Louise Aronson) and Noise (Kahneman, Sunstein, Sibony).

What are they about? Why are they worth reading?

Yes, I can go and look them up, but it would help if you could say a bit about why you think they are interesting, and what unique perspectives they have to offer.

Hans Rosling : Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think
People believe the world is poorer, less healthy, less educated and more dangerous than it actually is. Rosling thinks this is due to misinformation and some inherent biases, which he demonstrates and presents counters to.

World Bank: The Economic Case for Nature : A Global Earth-Economy Model to Assess Development Policy Pathways
Much as I loathe the WB, this report does present a convincing case that its in everyone’s immediate economic interests to protect ecosystems (to the tune of $2.7 trillion a year in losses)

It Came from Something Awful by Dale Beran. It basically explores how the Internet has normalized, emboldened, and politically weaponized sociopathic behavior and beliefs.

Elderhood is a book by a physician specializing in gerentology. It is a series of well written essays discussing her personal and clinical experiences. She makes a convincing case medicine and society do a poor job of respecting aging, why this is, and what we do and do not understand about it.

Noise is a book by Kahneman, who largely founded the science of how people make decisions. Many people understand bias - how decisions are influenced by experiences, social cues, desired conclusions and irrelevant information. Fewer know about noise - which is different and as important - the massive variability between different experts using the same data, or even the same expert at different times - and the surprising and counter-intuitive things that affect and improve the accuracy of group and individual decisions, including simple and complex rules, the benefits and limitations of AI and algorithms and the importance of re-evaluation.

The whole point of the discussion board is for often learned people to state their views. You could look up much of what is discussed on the SDMB and that is not the same.

I’m currently reading “Don’t Call It A Cult”, about NXIVM. They were basically a Scientology wannabe.

https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Call-Cult-Shocking-Raniere/dp/1586422758/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=don't+call+it+a+cult&qid=1626648466&sr=8-1

I also recently read “Freedom” by Sebastian Junger.

Does it count if it’s not recent, just one of my favourite non-fiction books that I think most people would pass by?

The Chocolate Wars, by Deborah Cadbury, who’s obviously in the Cadbury family but doesn’t work in the chocolate industry. I’m not even a huge chocolate eater or anything, but focusing on one specific development in history sometimes works very well. It does in this one. You learn about chocolate (which is way more interesting than you’d expect), but you also learn about Quakers, advertising, and Victorian life in general.

The audiobook version is also one of the best I’ve heard.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Chocolate-Wars-Cadbury-Success-Rivalry/dp/0007325576

The quality of Cadbury’s chocolate went down drastically after they were taken over by Kraft. It’s now like sugary American chocolate. Pity.

I highly recommend English Pastoral by James Rebanks.

It follows his highly successful bestseller The Shepherd’s Life, and has also become a bestseller and won numerous awards.

“There is a very thin line between idealism and bullshit.” - James Rebanks, English Pastoral

James Rebanks’ family have been sheep farmers in the Lake District in England for at least 600 years. That’s as far back as the records go, but it may be longer.

He never had any desire to do anything with his life other than farming. But he won a scholarship to Oxford University, and graduated with a double first (the highest level degree) in History… and then went back to sheep farming on his family farm, which is still his main occupation today.

He has also worked for Unesco as an expert advisor on sustainable farming, sustainable tourism, and world heritage sites. He cares a lot about ecology and the environment, and encouraging wild animals, birds, insects, and plants in a farming environment.

English Pastoral is a wonderful account of three generatons of farmers, brilliantly written and highly readable. Rebanks writes about the things closest to his heart with complete honesty and penetrating intelligence.

Despite the title, it’s not at all an idealised book. It’s a practical, hard-headed view of farming and how it’s changed and evolved over the last 50-60 years.

He covers family farmers having to compete with large comglomerates, factory farms, and cheap imported food. He talks about the damage pesticides, fertizers, and large areas dedicated to single crops do to the enviroment. He talks about food production in the modern world in general.

His book is shortlisted for the 2021 Orwell Prize for Political Writing – as well as being the Sunday Times Nature Book of the Year.

His family moved in three generatons from old-style mixed farming to modern industrial farming methods, and then back to sustainable, carbon-neutral, ecologically friendly mixed farming.

It’s a fascinating, profound, thought-provoking book, never glib and with no easy solutions, which will change your ideas about food and farming in the modern world.

Guardian review:

If “everyone” means “people who can focus on a task for longer than 2 minutes” I would suggest David Graeber’s book Debt: The First 5,000 Years.

Graeber traces the history of credit and its impact on culture from Mesopotamia on up. Including all the ways people have been owned as chattel, or as property, as well as the status of women and captives from war. There were debt panics from crop failures in ancient times.

Detailed descriptions of the transatlantic slave trade and African colonial meddling. He also explains the depravity of the Spanish conquistadors as a function of debt. Cortez, for example, was a truly terrible person: a dandy, a philanderer, and a spendthrift; a very corrupt and disorganized individual, who ripped off his own men as well as the Aztecs. The whole colonial enterprise was a pyramid scheme from beginning to end.

Graeber also talks about the finances of kings, how they can create money out of thin air but the rest of us can’t. And the development of civilizations around the globe: Asia, India, Africa, Mediterranean, Europe. All at various points in history. Very interesting geopolitical history from the Bronze Age forward. Long: feels like 5,000 pages but it’s actually around 450.

Pelletier: the forgotten castaway of Cape York, by Stephanie Anderson. I am paraphrasing below the Syndetic Solutions summary of this book:
“French cabin boy Narcisse Pelletier was fourteen years old when the Saint-Paul was shipwrecked near Rossel Island off New Guinea in 1858. Leaving behind more than 300 Chinese labourers recruited for the Australian goldfields - believed to have been subsequently massacred by the Rossel Islanders - the ship’s captain and crew, including Pelletier, escaped in a longboat. After a gruelling voyage across the Coral Sea to Cape York, Pelletier was abandoned by the crew. He was rescued by an Aboriginal family and remained with them as a member of their clan until 1875 when he was sighted by the crew of a pearling lugger. ‘Rescued’ against his will, Pelletier was conveyed to Sydney and then repatriated to France. Even though Pelletier’s Cape York experience is all but forgotten in Australia, and in France it is known only in its broad outlines, his story rivals that of the famous William Buckley, both as a tale of human survival and as an enthralling and accessible ethnographic record. The author, Stephanie Anderson, came across Pelletier’s story by chance in an old French anthropological journal [ … ] She found that Pelletier had left an account of his experiences, first published in 1876, that had never been translated into English.”

I found this book fascinating on a number of levels. The common conception, among Europeans, of Australian Aborigines at that time was as savages. However, Pelletier owed his life to the Aboriginal group that took him in. He neither appeared to re-settle properly in France after being “rescued”, nor did he speak much about his experiences with the tribe. There is also ample evidence of the co-existence, including trade, between the Queensland Aboriginal group of whom he was a member, and European sailors.

Immune: A Journey into the Mysterious System That Keeps You Alive, by Philipp Detmer, founder of the YouTube-channel Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell. It gives an eminently readable and brilliantly illustrated overview of the human immune system, how it reacts to various threats, how things can go wrong with it, and how vaccines work. If you know the channel, it’s very much in the same style, colloquial, even breezy in style, but still quite hefty in substance. Seriously, if you’ve ever wondered how immunity actually works, how pathogens are dealt with in the body, and much more, I’d heartily recommend this book. There’s various videos explaining parts of the story told in the book on the channel, starting with this one, which also served as the book’s original announcement.

The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. On the face of it, it’s an investigation of the global trade networks distributing matsutake mushrooms, a highly sought after delicacy in Japan, but it’s really much more a multi-pronged analysis of late-stage capitalist and post-capitalist economical and ecological interrelationships, the precarious existences within them, and the possibility of renewal or regrowth from such disturbed or ruined systems. It’s a unique book, but it may not be for everyone.

You and I have some common ground if not quite overlap. I thought Kahneman’s name looked familiar so I went to my bookshelvesand found I owned:
https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/0374533555

And while investigationg Noise, I saw Cass R. Sunstein was a co-author and that name sounded familiar and found another book I have on my shelves:

These reminded me of a book I read a couple of times but don’t own:

Which spent as much time with me as it did in the library from where it came a few years ago.

I could recommend a few other books on similar topics, but I have decided the winner of brain development and decision making is Daniel Levitin who wrote The Organized Mind and many others. One that is sort of short and aimed at a broader audience is A Field Guide to Lies (and there is a version of this book entitled Weaponized Lies)

Here is one I really thought I was going to love, but never got into it that deeply (eventually I returned it to the library before finishing it). Thought it was a cool idea though:

But none of those are my recommendations. Neither are very recent, but both are good books full of useful and fun information:

and:
https://www.amazon.com/Sapiens-Humankind-Yuval-Noah-Harari/dp/0062316095

Sorry, feel compelled to add one or two more and they are both older books but everyone should have to read this book (and once they start to be successful and have disposable income, they should have to read the second one.

Most useful and practical book I have ever read on the subject. He wrote another one that sort of opened my eyes to a bigger view of money and what it means.

I agree. I could suggest two books myself, but then I would have to defend my choices, according to what other people have written here. I would rather not do that.

Wow - great thread. I just put in my Alibris order for Noise, Immune, Pastoral, Mushrooms and Pelletier. I’ll skip Elderhood for now since I am experiencing it.

My contribution:

The Invention of Science by David Wootton is a history of, and argument for, the scientific revolution. Wootton details the origin of our current concepts of fact and discovery as he nimbly treads the line between philosophy and engineering.

Honeybee Democracy by Thomas Seeley The swarm must identify potential homes, survey them, select one and simultaneously navigate a million bugs over a route they have never traveled to a place they have never seen, but all agree upon. Seeley provides an engaging description of the methods he uses to reveal the bee’s methods. He proposes that individual bees function as neurons carrying out neuronal processes. There is plenty here for the philosopher, engineer, political scientist and the intellectually curious.

The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber (of Debt fame), and David Wengrow, an anthropologist.
I am recommending it despite not having read further in than four chapters as yet. So far, they are delineating their argument that the Enlightenment and hence, modern democracy, was intensely influenced by the encounters of Europeans with the philosophies and morality of the preColombian Americas. I believe the rest of the book continues to expand on the idea that our beliefs about the inevitability of societal selfishness, cruelty, and violence are both false and self-perpetuating.

There’s actually a lot of fascinating and new (to me anyway) information in the later chapters. Much of it comes from research and discoveries in the last couple of decades.

It’s a very good book. Not the easiest read. A lot of fascinating information. I liked it much more than Bullshit Jobs.