My editor at Browser, the awesome Sophie Roell, has informed me that they have collected a selection of interviews with various scholars and luminaries from the “Five Books” site and published them as an e-book: Best of Five Books: 2011. It includes Sophie’s interview with me about my choice of good evolution books, but also interviews by really famous people like Woody Allen, Ian McEwan, Paul Krugman, Erica Jong, Steven Pinker, Alison Gopnik, Colin Thubron, and Fran Lebowitz, all of whom name and discuss five good books in their area of expertise (there are 52 interviews in toto).
I was offered a free Kindle copy of this book, but I can’t use it because I don’t have a Kindle. So I’m going to have a contest for the e-book, which goes for eight bucks. The winner, chosen by moi, will send me his or her email address, and I’ll pass it along to ensure that a copy will be forthcoming. (Note: I’m not sure if people living outside the U.S. can access Kindle books through Amazon, so take that into account until I find out.)
I will pick the winner from those who answer the following simple question, carefully crafted to expand my reading list by exploiting readers.
What work of nonfiction would you recommend that I read and that I haven’t yet read? In one or two sentences (no more), justify your choice.
Now I can’t list everything I’ve ever read, so you’ll have to take a chance here. I have posted about some of the nonfiction I’ve read.
Contest closes on Friday, 5 p.m. Chicago time.
Dr. C., I’m sure you already know this; but there is a free Kindle app for your computer available from Amazon. Works great on my Win 7 machine!
.
I would like to recommend “The Power of Music – Pioneering Discoveries in the New Science of Song” by Elena Mannes. Reason being, it’s probably not in the mainstream of what you normally read, but it’s still science. And what could be better than science and art? Why else have we done all this evolving if not to make and understand beautiful music? You know what Nietzshe says, “Without music, life would be a mistake.”
“Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics” by Marcus du Sautoy. It’s about The Riemann Hypothesis, which is arguably the most intriguing open mathematical problem of our time and du Sautoy is a wonderful storyteller. You’ll learn not just the hypothesis itself in depth, but also learn a lot about all the related fields of mathematics and about the interesting life stories’ of many of the mathematicians that are involved in the search for the answer.
“Paul Revere’s Ride” by David Hackett Fischer
A fantastically written (and easy to read) account of the beginning of the American Revolution, including details of the famed midnight ride of Paul Revere, but so much more. The latter half of the book describes in fascinating detail the battles of Lexington and Concord and is a must read for anyone even remotely interested in learning about the start of the revolution.
“Surely, You’re Joking Mr. Feynman”
From all the things I’ve read, this by far tops it all. It’s someone who lived life with true joy and wonderment every step of the way. And on top of that, that someone actually understood something true about the world at its most fundamental level! Only so few people in the world can really say that they understand something so well and so clear that they automatically become incapable of bullshit. Feynman is the very essence of what Science is!
I would recommend Feynman’s QED ( a tiny book comprising popular lectures on Quantum Electrodynamics given whithout equations, and without compromising on technical accuracy) way above Surely you are Joking …... For what it is worth, Quanum Electrodynamics is one of the biggest successes of modern science: the quip about the predictions of Quantum mechanics having been verified to the accuracy of measuring the distance from New York to San Francisco to an hair’s breadth is derived from an experimental verification of Quantum Electrodynamics.
Yep read that too! That’s a wicked good book too! It was awesome how he kept putting of describing light polarization! lolz.
Actually his daughter’s book that compiled many of his personal letters was awesome too! The funniest was when he was trying to resign from the National Academy of Sciences and they kept trying to convince him to stay! lolz.
Or the correspondence with his first wife. Those were awesome exchanges!
“Evolution and the Levels of Selection” by Samir Okasha. A great book about evolutionary theory and philosophy.
‘No god but God’ by Reza Aslan.
I hope this book will make you change your views about Islam.
Concidering the suicide of the 16 year old girl in Morocco who was forced to marry her rapist and live with his family, I very much doubt it.
“The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of America and its Peoples” by Tim Flannery.
This is a fascinating history of the formation of America from a geological, geomorphological and ecological perspective. Tim Flannery is an excellent (Australian) writer and a superb scientist.
For something lighter “Throwim’ Way Leg” is very entertaining by the same author.
Dr. C.: I read almost exclusivelt non-fiction. It’s very hard to think of just one book to recommend.
Here goes: The Log of the Sea of Cortez by John Steinbeck. IMO the best thing he ever wrote. Interesting, funny, travel, biology, friends, men and women, it has everything and it’s so real. An account of a collecting trip to the Sea of Cortez with his friend Doc Ricketts.
A must-read for everyone. Still in print, which tells you something. Also included in Library of America collection of Steinbeck.
So, after pinching myself down to just one book, I need to expand a bit and recommend a pile of great nf books:
Travel
Seven Years in Tibet (Harrer)
Arabian Sands (Thesiger)
No Picnic on Mt. Kenya (Benuzzi)
Into Thin Air (Krakauer)
Into the Wild (Krakauer)
Jupiter’s Travels (Simon)
One-Man Caravan (Fulton)
Eastern Approaches (MacLean)
Full Tilt (Murphy)
News from Tartary (Fleming)
A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (Newby)
Love and War in the Appenines (Newby)
Sailing Alone Around the World (Slocum)
Two Years Before the Mast (Dana)
My Life with the Eskimo (Stefansson)
Motoring with Mohammad (Hanson)
Making the Corps (Ricks)
Enemy Combatant (Begg)
The Songlines (Chatwin) (well, more or less nf …)
Desert Solitaire (Abbey)
Down the River (Abbey)
One Life at a Time Please (Abbey)
Byline (Hemmingway) his writing for the Toronto Star as a foreign correspondent — brilliant
Shadow Divers (Kurson)
A Year in Provence (Mayle)
Canoeing with the Cree (Sevareid)
Adventures on the Wine Route (Lynch)
Berlin Diary (Shirer)
Touching the Void (Simpson)
History
Guns, Germs, and Steel (Diamond)
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (Shirer)
The Guns of August (Tuchman)
The Outline of History (Wells)
Under the Banner of Heaven (Krakauer)
The Conquest of Mexico (Prescott)
Fiasco (Ricks)
Prince of the Marshes (Stewart)
Black Elk Speaks (Neihardt)
Hitler’s Willing Executioners (Goldhagen)
The River War (Churchill)
The Second World War (Churchill) huge, but worth it
The Peloponnesian War (Thucydides)
The Anabasis (Xenophon)
The Histories (Herodotus)
The Annals (Tacitus)
The Gallic War (Caesar)
Sea of Glory (Philbrick, also: In the Heart of the Sea, about the whale ship Essex, that inspired Melville’s Moby Dick.)
Wildlife in America (Matthiessen)
Indian Country (Matthiessen)
Freedom At Midnight (Lapierre, Collins)
The Right Stuff (Wolfe)
A World Lit Only by Fire (Manchester)
Engineering in the Ancient World (Landels)
The Movement and the Sixties (Anderson)
Salt (Kurlansky)
Cod (Kurlansky)
The Survival of the Bark Canoe (McPhee)
The Geology Series (Basin and Range, etc.; Annals of the Former World is the compilation, Pulitzer winner) (McPhee)
Oranges (McPhee, a triumph of concise non-fiction story-telling)
Other Non-fiction
A River Runs Through It (Maclean)
A Sand County Almanac (Leopold)
The Dragons of Eden (Sagan)
The Varieties of Scientific Experience (Sagan)
Seabiscuit (Hillenbrand)
The Omnivore’s Dilemma (Pollan)
The Botany of Desire (Pollan)
Parasite Rex (Zimmer)
Why We Get Sick (Nesse, Williams)
The Third Chimpanzee (Diamond)
Your Inner Fish (Shubin)
Genome (Ridley)
The Song of The Dodo by David Quammen. A history of island biogeography, all the way from Wallace to E.O. Wilson, written in sublime prose.
Quammen is very good.
I highly recommend David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity. It is astoundingly mind blowing and a very optimistic book. I love how what you’ve always thought of in the conventional way gets blown away by the ideas of Deutsch. His clarity of writing is a breath of fresh air.
1. Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, by Richard Wrangham
Why read it?: It explains how we became humans.
2. The 10000 Year Explosion, by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending
Why read it?: It explains how we became civilized humans.
3. A Farewell to Alms, by Gregory Clark
Why read it?: It explains how became modern humans.
4. The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do, by Judith Rich Harris
Why read it?: Steven Pinker says this book “will come to be seen as a turning point in the history of psychology.”
5. The First Human: The Race to Discover Our Earliest Ancestors, by Ann Gibbons
Why read it?: Because it’s fun.
Cod:
A Biography Of The Fish That Changed The World
“Wars have been fought over it, revolutions have been spurred by it, national diets have been based on it, economies have depended on it, and the settlement of North America was driven by it. Cod, it turns out, is the reason Europeans set sail across the Atlantic, and it is the only reason they could. What did the Vikings eat in icy Greenland and on the five expeditions to America recorded in the Icelandic sagas? Cod — frozen and dried in the frosty air, then broken into pieces and eaten like hardtack. What was the staple of the medieval diet? Cod again, sold salted by the Basques, an enigmatic people with a mysterious, unlimited supply of cod. Codis a charming tour of history with all its economic forces laid bare and a fish story embellished with great gastronomic detail. It is also a tragic tale of environmental failure, of depleted fishing stocks where once the cod’s numbers were legendary. In this deceptively whimsical biography of a fish, Mark Kurlansky brings a thousand years of human civilization into captivating focus.”
Interesting! The title is reminiscent of “Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World” which I think I recommended in an earler edition of this contest. And reference to cod is made in the Helge Ingstad books I recommended above.
(And, at my scientific mentor’s recent 70th birthday party in Stockholm, we had the best cod I’ve ever had.)
“The Chaldean Account of Genesis”, by George Smith, [1876]
– Find out where the Genesis story really came from… It’s available online.