Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on 100 easiest to think of off the top of his head.
I’m not a fan of ranking things, but anyway here are some non-fiction books that have made me ever so slightly little less clueless:
David Archer: The Long Thaw – How Humans Are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth’s Climate
Laura Bates: Everyday Sexism
Sean Carroll: From Eternity to Here – The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time
Sean Carroll: The Particle at the End of the Universe – How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World
Barbara Ehrenreich: Bright Sided – How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America
Thomas Gilovich: How We Know What Isn’t So – The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life
Michelle Goldberg: Kingdom Coming – The Rise of Christian Nationalism
Michelle Goldberg: The Means of Reproduction – Sex, Power and the Future of the World
James Hansen: Storms of my Grandchildren – The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity
Margaret Heffernan: Willful Blindness – Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril
Susan Jacoby: The Age of American Unreason
Daniel Kahneman: Thinking, Fast and Slow
Bill McKibben: Eaarth – Making a Life on a Tough New Planet
Naomi Oreskes / Eric Connway: Merchants of Doubt – How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming
Lisa Randall: Warped Passages – Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions
Daniel Simons / Christopher Chabris: The Inivisible Gorilla – And Other Ways Our Intuition Deceives Us
Stuart Sutherland: Irrationality
Carol Tavris / Elliot Aronson: Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me) – Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions and Hurtful Acts
Comments
14 responses to “Guest post: A better list”
And my ‘to read’ list just got a lot longer. Thank you, I think…
It’s always better to have more than you can read rather than fewer. Always.
DAMN YOU!
I thought I had my reading list for the next 3 months, but looks like a few here need to go to the head of the pile.
In that case, I’m in great shape – I’d have to live to be 200 to finish my list of desired reading, and that’s only if no one writes anything more!
A few I couldn’t live without:
The Demon-Haunted World — Carl Sagan
The Two-Headed Boy and Other Medical Marvels — Jan Bondeson
Dreamland: Travels Inside the Secret World of Roswell and Area 51 — Phil Patton
Genie: A Scientific Tragedy — Russ Rymer
Ooh, Martin Gardner’s Fads and Fallacies. Still fascinating 70 years later. Some of the fads he wrote about are still around; others still make for interesting reading.
My honeymoon reading! Now you know what a weird couple my husband and I are. Of course, he was reading a book about traveling across Liechtenstein, so we make a pretty good couple.
The Demon-Haunted World is on my list too of course. This seems almost prophetic now, doesn’t it:
A few years ago – before you know what – my list would have included a lot more atheo-skeptical material, including everything by that “Dear Muslima” guy. They’re still great books, I guess (especially The Ancestor’s Tale), although saying so makes me feel dirty. I have to remind myself that if the only thing that keeps me from no longer liking a book is the assumption that the author is a decent person, I should probably never have liked it in the first place.
Here are some more books I have enjoyed
David Aaronovitch: Voodoo Histories – The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History
Douglas Adams / Mark Carwardine: Last Chance to See
Jung Chang: Mao – The Unknown Story
Nick Cohen: What’s Left? – How the Left Lost Its Way
Nick Cohen: You Can’t Read This Book – Censorship in an Age of Freedom
Charles Darwin: The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection – The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life
Barbara Ehrenreich: Bait and Switch – The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream
Stephen Hawking: A Brief History of Time – From the Big Bang to Black Holes
Michael E. Mann: The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars – Dispatches from the Front Lines
Simon Sebag Montefiore: Stalin – The Court of the Red Tsar
Angela Nagle: Kill All Normies – Online Culture Wars From 4Chan And Tumblr To Trump And The Alt-Right
Charles P. Pierce: Idiot America – How Ignorance Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free
And here are some books I haven’t yet managed to get through, but will:
Brian Czech: Economic Growth at the Crossroads and the Steady State Solution
Joachim Fest: Hitler
Susan Haack: Evidence and Inquiry – Towards Reconstruction in Epistemology
Susan Haack: Defending Science, Within Reason – Between Scientism and Cynicism
Bjarte, I’m warning you: Stay out of my bookcases! ;-)
I love all these book recommendations!
A few to add:
Cordelia Fine, “Delusions of Gender”.
Robert Jensen, “The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men.” I found this an excellent survey of radical feminist thought, a good introduction for someone like me who is just learning about the issues.
Bill Bishop, “The Big Sort.” It helped me understand better how people organize and isolate themselves into communities of various kinds. It also gave me an inkling into the “why” of megachurches.
Delusions of Gender is definitely on my to-read list as well. Oh, and I’m ashamed to say I haven’t yet read Does God Hate Women? and Why Truth Matters, but I’ve ordered both, and they’re on their way.
While I’m at it, here are a few more that I have read (iknklast, you’ll get your books back, I promise):
Natalie Angier: The Canon – A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science
Bill Bryson; A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dan Ariel: Predictably Irrational – The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
Daniel C. Dennett: Darwin’s Dangerous Idea – Evolution and the Meanings of Life
Rob Dietz / Dan O’Neill: Enough Is Enough – Building a Sustainable Economy in a World of Finite Resources
Bart D. Ehrman: Misquoting Jesus – The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why
Richard P. Feynman: QED – The Strange Theory of Light and Matter
Richard P. Feynman: Six Easy Pieces – Fundamentals of Physics Explained
Israel Finkelstein og Neil Asher Silberman: The Bible Unearthed – Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel
Ben Goldacre: Bad Science
Elizabeth F. Loftus: Eyewitness Testimony
Bill McKibben: The End of Nature
Bill McKibben: Deep Economy – The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future
Bill McKibben: Oil and Honey – The Education of an Unlikely Activist
Barry Schwartz: The Paradox of Choice – Why More is Less
Timothy Snyder: On Tyranny – Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
Alan Sokal / Jean Bricmont: Fashionable Nonsense – Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science
Haydn Washington / John Cook: Climate Change Denial – Heads in the Sand
Spencer R Weart: The Discovery of Global Warming
…and since I can never write anything without making at least one error, the first book on my “unfinished” list was supposed to be:
Brian Czech: Supply Shock – Economic Growth at the Crossroads and the Steady State Solution
As I have mentioned a few times, I’m reading up on things like degrowth and steady-state economic models these days since I’ve concluded that there is no non-pathological version of perpetual economic growth. Any reading suggestions along those lines will be greatly appreciated.
Whaaaaaaaaaaat?
*faints dead away*
I know *blush* :-/
Fixed :)