What are you guys reading these days? I'd like advice but this thread is for anyone to share your non-fiction selections.

I'd like to broaden my horizons a bit! I love to read but pretty much the only non-fiction I've read since college is Into Thin Air (loved it) and coffee table books about nature. I'm partial to travelogues.

11/23/2010 5:33:53 PM

The Bible

11/23/2010 5:42:54 PM

Let us now praise famous men

11/23/2010 6:00:19 PM

the doors of perception

11/23/2010 6:54:26 PM

i kind of want to read mark twain's autobiography (he didn't want it published until 100 years after his death...so it just came out)

11/23/2010 6:58:44 PM

The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes

11/23/2010 7:36:21 PM

I happen to know where you could find Foxfire 1-4 and 8.

You know you wanna.

11/23/2010 8:21:37 PM

the vagina monologues

11/23/2010 8:27:34 PM

here's what im reading:

http://www.amazon.com/Kitchen-Confidential-Updated-Adventures-Underbelly/dp/0060899220/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1290565181&sr=1-1
http://www.amazon.com/Drunkards-Walk-Randomness-Rules-Lives/dp/0375424040


the second one i think you'd really be in to NC

[Edited on November 23, 2010 at 9:22 PM. Reason : e]

11/23/2010 9:20:03 PM

it would be helpful to describe the book a bit, explain what you liked about it, etc

11/23/2010 10:34:39 PM

I plan on re-reading the Harry Potter series in the next month or so

11/24/2010 8:10:42 AM

The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch

11/24/2010 8:13:58 AM

Since you enjoyed Into Thin Air, I think you would enjoy Alive by Piers Paul Read. Its about the rugby team from Uruguay that crashed into the Andes Mountain and survived for 70+ days. I'm sure you've seen the movie, but it doesn't even come close of capturing what really happened on that mountain. The book is a lot more graphic than what the movie shows.

11/24/2010 8:31:01 AM

Just bought my brother Monsoon by Robert Kaplan, going to bum it off him myself when I'm done. I'm reading Supercrunchers by Ian Ayres right now and just got done with The Savage Border.

11/24/2010 8:34:31 AM

Anything by Bill Bryson.

He's typically a travel writer (his adventures roaming Australia, England, the Appalachian Trail), but my favorite of his is A Short History of Nearly Everything. It's a history of the physical sciences. Astronomy, geology, quantum, biology. He focuses just as much on the scientists as the discoveries, talking about their weird habits and quirks. He goes into detail on the crazy experiments performed hundreds of years ago that often resulted in pretty severe injuries to the scientists.
And he does it with an utterly charming writing style. Funny as hell and sometimes touching, but also very informative.
Read it. You'll love it.

Also:
Made In America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States
In a Sunburned Country (Australia)
A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail
Notes from a Small Island (England)

11/24/2010 8:59:57 AM

I really wanna read this one:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0312983379/ref=s9_simh_gw_p14_d0_i1?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=0B5W3SMBCP2HQ8BB8GQC&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=470938631&pf_rd_i=507846

11/24/2010 9:16:48 AM

11/24/2010 9:54:41 AM

imagining the tenth dimension

11/24/2010 9:57:32 AM

Quote :

"Since you enjoyed Into Thin Air, I think you would enjoy Alive by Piers Paul Read. Its about the rugby team from Uruguay that crashed into the Andes Mountain and survived for 70+ days. I'm sure you've seen the movie, but it doesn't even come close of capturing what really happened on that mountain. The book is a lot more graphic than what the movie shows."

I read this and did a report on it in 7th grade - it held my attention at that time.

11/24/2010 10:48:05 AM

+1 on the Bill Bryson suggestion--I've read A Walk in the Woods and The Mother Tongue (English and How it Got That Way) and greatly enjoyed both. If you like American history at all, I'd say pick up something by David McCullough as well. Meticulously researched and very detailed, but his writing style really makes the subject matter come alive and can read more like a novel than a dry history text. 1776 could be a good starter because it's his shortest work, but John Adams won the Pulitzer and The Great Bridge (about the building of the Brooklyn Bridge) is also fascinating.

11/24/2010 11:08:50 AM

This may be fitting:



[Edited on November 24, 2010 at 11:37 AM. Reason : .]

11/24/2010 11:36:44 AM

+1 on "Me Talk Pretty One Day"... Hilarious

My favorite memoir will always be this, though:

11/24/2010 11:39:29 AM

Quote :

"Anything by Bill Bryson. He's typically a travel writer (his adventures roaming Australia, England, the Appalachian Trail), but my favorite of his is A Short History of Nearly Everything. It's a history of the physical sciences. Astronomy, geology, quantum, biology. He focuses just as much on the scientists as the discoveries, talking about their weird habits and quirks. He goes into detail on the crazy experiments performed hundreds of years ago that often resulted in pretty severe injuries to the scientists. And he does it with an utterly charming writing style. Funny as hell and sometimes touching, but also very informative. Read it. You'll love it. "

Seconded...great book

[Edited on November 24, 2010 at 12:27 PM. Reason : ]

11/24/2010 12:26:33 PM

The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins. Pictures, not preachy, very well done.

11/24/2010 12:43:51 PM

i've read 9 books on the everest tragedies in 1996 and 2006. it's really cool to get the story of the 1996 disaster from the other people's perspectives. these are just a few. the lincoln hall story, dead lucky, is REALLY good. he was left behind above 8000m (death zone) & was found alive the next day. he had a ton of hallucinations & it is amazing that he survived. at one point, he was sitting on a ledge w/ his feet hanging over, stripped the top half of his down suit off bc he was hot (last throws of hypothermia), just chillin/hanging out (no pun intended for either of those). he had no clue what he was doing.

11/24/2010 1:06:12 PM

Geography of Time - Robert Levine
Social psychologist's take on the development of time-keeping and cultural perceptions of time. Neat experiments where they measure the pace of life in cities around the world.

Geography of Bliss - Eric Weiner
Former NPR correspondent travels the world looking for the happiest places.

The Gecko's Foot - Peter Forbes
Novel materials and structures inspired by biology on the nanoscale.

The Undercover Economist - Tim Harford
The Logic of Life - Tim Harford
Explanations of life from an economic perspective.

Brain Rules - John Medina
Talks about how the brain works and some strategies to take better advantage of its strengths.

The Predictioneer's Game - Bruce Bueno de Mesquita
This guy uses game theory to predict real-life outcomes with approximately 90% accuracy.

11/24/2010 1:30:32 PM

anything by Stephen Ambrose

11/24/2010 9:51:51 PM

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel

11/24/2010 10:33:08 PM

I was reading a book about helium the other day, and I couldn't put it down.

11/25/2010 10:48:12 AM

^^best evar

11/25/2010 11:22:30 AM

Oh man!! I was gonna post Guns, Germs, and Steel

Also

11/25/2010 7:37:08 PM

Profiles in Courage, by John F. Kennedy.

11/25/2010 7:41:07 PM

slide rule
leonardo to the internet
angle of attack
face of battle
The Western Way of War

11/28/2010 9:03:07 AM

I've heard good things about Born To Run, and the book about Admiral Rickover might be interesting if you're interested in that stuff. He was a odd character who did some ridiculous stuff and pretty much singlehandedly ruled the U.S. nuclear sub program for quite a while.

Guns, Germs, & Steel will probably be the next thing I read. Someone recommended that to me a few days ago, and it sounds interesting.




This is an incredible book if you have the patience for it. It's somewhat long, incredibly into the weeds, and at times just slightly awkwardly written/edited (in my view, and just slightly). It is probably my favorite book that I've ever read, though.

[image]
http://images.swap.com/images/books/1X/006097771X.jpg[/image]

This is an interesting book, too. Easy reading; a collection of short stories (each maybe a few dozen pages long). Pretty mind blowing to read about some of the stuff the CIA, NSA and Navy were doing 40-50+ years ago.



I read this a couple of days ago on my flight back from Peru. You might have already read it...I felt like the last person in the world to pick up a copy. It's very easy reading (I read it in a day, over just a few hours on an airplane), and in my opinion kinda overhyped--it doesn't really present anything mind-blowing at all, at least not to an educated person with a decent grasp of logic, critical thinking, and mathematics. I did, however, still enjoy it simply because my brain works similarly to the stuff in this book. It was kinda fun to constantly know where the authors were going next, and what the "surprising" conclusion would be.

There's also a sequel, Super Freakonomics.



This is not an intricately researched, minimally editorialized historical account in the vein of Ghost Wars, with 100 pages of footnotes and citations, etc. It's simply a single smart dude's realpolitik and geopolitics-heavy analysis of American foreign policy in Iraq and Afghanistan. I don't buy everything he puts forth, but he does make a lot of really good points that you probably haven't thought about. At the least, it helped to give me a new, more sophisticated way of thinking about geopolitics and foreign policy. Also worth noting that the author is the founder of STRATFOR, a private intelligence company/think-tank contracted to various Fortune 500 companies, governments, etc.



Author is a retired U.S. Army Ranger officer turned psychology professor. The book talks about human beings' natural aversion to killing each other, and how over the last 100 years, military training techniques have helped to overcome that aversion. It gets into the psychology of soldiers, psychopaths, and others who kill. Finally, it presents an argument that various cultural factors (most notably first-person shooter video games) serve as enablers that break down our aversion to killing and could lead to an increase in violence (a claim that might be at least partially refuted by the analysis in Freakonomics that claims that the 1990s spike in violence--and quelling thereafter--is tied strongly to the Roe v. Wade decision.)



This is admittedly a biased book. It's also a good read, in my opinion. The premise is that America turns out some real dumbshit 18-year olds, but some of the world's finest 30-year olds, due to the fact that, for example, our public grade schools are pretty "soft", while corporate America and the "real world" is significantly more "hard." It makes the case that we can only allow some parts of our society to be soft by virtue of keeping other parts of it hard--an obvious conclusion, of course, but it's still an interesting read.

[Edited on November 28, 2010 at 9:43 AM. Reason : ]

11/28/2010 9:40:35 AM

SUPER interesting book. it goes into human crash test dummies, decomp, and lots of other topics. it's not dark & creepy. mary roach has a way of writing about this stuff, somehow making it light and funny.


mary roach's 2nd best book. still worth reading. covers near death experiences, how to find the soul by weight, etc.


her 3rd best book. the science of sex. sex machines & sex inside a MRI...


she has a new book out now that i haven't read. i'm hoping to get some amazon gift cards for xmas.

11/28/2010 6:30:41 PM

non-fiction is extremely broad, seems like you need to say what you like, that said,

anything by David Foster Wallace (except his fiction of course)

just read

fascinating and enlightening




(also called Zen of Fish)

if you like sports (or pro basketball anyway):



if you like knowing how bad humans are for the earth:


actually diamond has alot of really good stuff

11/28/2010 9:32:50 PM

I have wanted to read Collapse for a while. I may pick that up when I can do some free reading.

11/28/2010 9:56:17 PM

So I didn't get anything over Thanksgiving because I figured it would be impolite to read nonstop over the holiday.

I picked up "A Short History of Nearly Everything," and I LOVE it! tl PM'd me about it and I said after reading "A Walk in the Woods" I thought Bryson was just a buffoon. BUT this book is awesome! I love the Victorian scientists, the drama, and the science! it's delightful. gg tl

12/2/2010 8:26:24 PM

Fuck all the books listed above.

"Rise of Theodore Roosevelt"

12/2/2010 10:35:03 PM

Great book that tells the story of AIDS in 80s through a variety of perspectives (doctors, teh gays, the French, and scientists)

12/2/2010 11:25:14 PM

currently reading:

12/3/2010 1:51:56 PM

Great read...definitely not too political (I think the author got fired, at least temporarily, by The NYT).

12/3/2010 1:55:16 PM

Rise of Theodore Roosevelt is good and all, until you realize that TR wrote his own autobiography in first person.

12/3/2010 2:10:02 PM

^^^ Great read.

12/28/2010 9:34:23 PM

Anything by McCullough is awesome

12/28/2010 9:40:59 PM

Howard Zinn: A People's History of the United States

12/28/2010 9:55:26 PM

a great, short read:

12/28/2010 11:38:29 PM

Bah. nvm.

[Edited on December 29, 2010 at 12:25 AM. Reason : .]

12/29/2010 12:24:41 AM

[Edited on December 29, 2010 at 7:23 AM. Reason : fuu]

12/29/2010 7:22:43 AM

The Forever War was pretty good.

I'm re-reading "The Worst Journey in the World" by Aspley Cherry-Garrard which is about Scott's last polar journey. The book is simply fantastic. Good writing, wry-British humor, and an incredible tale.

"Endurance" by Shackleton is also a great book on antarctic exploration. Which makes me wonder why no one has ever made a movie about these voyages.

As for mountaineering, David Roberts wrote some really good stuff. He was Krakauer's English professor and also an accomplished climber in the 60s and 70s.
Check out his autobiography "On the Ridge Between Life and Death" as well as "Mt. Deborah", "Escape from Lucania", "Four Against the Arctic", & "The Mountain of My Fear".
Other recommended mountaineering books include: "The Shining Mountain" by Peter Boardman, "K2: The Savage Mountain" about the 1952 American expedition, and "The White Spider" about the first climb of the Eiger north face.

12/29/2010 2:07:45 PM