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Can you help recommend books and documentaries?
I’m always looking for a good new book or, on lesser occasions, a good documentary. I love reading about “how stuff works”, astrophysics (space and its sheer size are insane to me), and oddly, random fantasy stuff like wizarding worlds, etc.
Judgements aside I like reading Harry Potter and some of the books by Neil Degrasse Tyson as well as watching Cosmos (Carl and Neil both).
What hidden gems do you have?
Salt Fat Acid Heat is the "how stuff works" of cooking. It explains the chemistry of topics like salt breaking down meat and how flavor molecules are carried by fat better than water.
You mention fantasy and science. The Expanse is a series with realistic science fiction. The books use actual orbital mechanics. On the other end of the SciFi spectrum are works like Dune and DiskWorld with some fanstastic worldbuilding.
Educational YouTube is wonderful. SciShow, PBS Spacetime, Kurzgesagt, CGP Grey, Alpha Pheonix and Atomic Frontier are a few classics.
Also Veritasium, Smarter Every Day, and physicsGirl (hope she's doing better) for those classic educational YouTubes.
Along these lines Food Lab by Kenji Lopez-Alt, and The Perfectionists by Simon Winchester
"On food and cooking" by Harold McGee is another often cited work. McGee has a more academic tone than Nosrat, but their both very good ressources.
I came here to recommend this and also Sauces Reconsidered: Aprés Escoffier by Gary Allen, which classifies and explains sauces in terms of their physical properties.
One book suggestion I have is Amanda Ripley's The Unthinkable. This book discusses how the human mind reacts in terrifying, 'unthinkable', disaster situations - generally, not productively. People tend to freeze up, deny or ignore the signs something terrible is happening, and as a result, perish. The author researches why this occurs (through the lenses of psychology, sociology, evolutionary biology, etc.), provides compelling examples (there's a whole chapter on 9/11, if I recall correctly), and promotes techniques for productively coping in disaster situations. It's good stuff for anyone to learn about.
Other non-fiction, pop-science-type authors I would recommend include:
My first thought was Cooked by Michael Pollan and the accompanying documentary on Netflix, I thought both were fascinating. I’ve rewatched Cooked since it came out and I’ve given up on ever getting the book back, it’s been passed around so long I forgot I ever owned it until just now.
I highly recommend The World at War from 1973.
It's the oldest documentary I've watched but it is very good. I'm 10 episode in, out of 26. I can't think of any recent documentary on the war that gives as many detailed first-hand eyewitness accounts of events. And the amount of high ranking officers they interview is truly mindblowing!
The World at War is phenomenal! So many eyewitness accounts, primary sources that could only have been available when at the time it was made.
I'm watching a BBC documentary, Nazis: A warning from History. It's got a lot of interviews with WWII Vets, but not anywhere near the level of detail as The World at War.
These seem to fit your criteria :
"A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson
Lost Moon by Jim Lovell and Jeffery Kluger
Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky! Just read it a few weeks ago, great millennia-spanning sci fi. It has several books out, too
Great series! I'm a big fan of this series. Each book manages to take the initial concept in a wholly different direction whilst still keeping the magic of the first one. The philosophy about what is a 'person', especially once you strip away everything human in an entity, is a great topic to explore.
Spoilers for book 3
The crows were amazing in book 3. I loved every interaction with them.The simulation was very confusing at first but as it all clicked together became brilliant. What a great way to continue to explore these topics from multiple different angles in parallel.
Agree! I'm just starting book two now, my wife keeps telling me how much I'll like it.
The shifting narrative of Portia/Bianca was wonderful, my absolute favorite part.
I read a ton of books between the start of COVID and when I finally went back to college.
My three favorites would be:
Pure Invention: How Japan's Pop Culture Conquered the World by Matt Alt. It tells several stories corroborated by in-person interviews of toy cars, kawaii design but more specifically Hello Kitty, the Gameboy, the karaoke machine, and 2ch. That last part is a bit controversial and some of the reviews of the book are quite negative towards the obvious bias of Matt Alt's that 2ch indirectly influenced the 2016 election. Overall, I still think it's worth checking out.
Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power by Anna Merlan. It's a surprisingly thoughtful and considerate view towards American conspiracy theorists. Covering doomsdayers to the original pizzagate, birtherism to black paranoia, and of course the assassination of JFK. I think it was a rather fascinating read and a lot easier to digest than The United States of Paranoia.
This last one isn't much of a hidden gem but much more beloved. Sweet Bean Paste by Durian Sukegawa (translated by Alison Watts) is an adorable story of a bitter middle aged man who works in a dorayaki shop after failing at his aspirations of a writer. While grinding away, an elderly woman enters who changes his life.
Do you know that Sagan wrote a book to go with the 'Cosmos' TV series? If not, get onto it!
My favourite "how stuff works" book is The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. It just makes evolution so clear! I highly recommend that you get one of the revised editions that comes with the added chapters - specifically Chapter 12 "Nice guys finish first" - for reasons I explain in this old comment.
I highly recommend American War.
I can’t possibly reply to every single one but wanted to say thanks! I’ve got a full kindle library to get going on now. I love the recommendations!
You might as well add any of Kelly Link's short story collections. Not so much fantasy as off-beat magical realism, or maybe real magicalism, but you might get a kick out of them. Plus, they're stories, so you can dip in and out without committing to a full read-through.
If you haven't already, I'd browse through this post for some recommendations. There is a whole lot more than the topics you listed here, but definitely worth a look if you haven't already.
Not sure if this is quite up your alley, but there are 2 documentaries on YouTube that follow Red Pine (pen name of Bill Porter, translator of Chinese poetry and eastern religious texts) that are companions to his book about the search for Chinese hermits, Road to Heaven). I found these to be relaxing explorations into very foreign, but interesting, ways of life
The first, Searching for Hermits in China documents an early visit and is narrated by a travelling companion. The quality is quite poor but still engaging.
The second I don't know the titleis a follow up visit a few years later.
A favorite recommendation of mine is "My Tank is Fight". It documents experimental weapons of WW2. Most never saw production or only got to the prototype phase, but there's some really crazy stuff that was proposed and worked on. Massive super tanks, helicopter backpacks, planes designed to fly directly into other planes.
Carl Sagan. I've liked all of his books. A brief history of time. I like Feynma as well. That'll get you started.
Any of Brian Greene’s books are quite enjoyable to read. Also if you want a lecture type experience check out World Science Festival YouTube channel. He and other astrophysicists/scientists give talks on all kinds of topics.
Here’s a good one: The Matter of Antimatter
Definitely suggest sorting by popular. The ones on black holes and multiverses are fascinating.
One that might be up your alley is Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny by Robert Wright.
Wright uses the non-zero-sum lens of game theory to show how human cultural development is a product of non-zero-sum, win-win situations.
An offbeat unique one you might enjoy is Being Wrong Adventures on the Margin of Error. It skims the surface of a variety of fields of interest around making mistakes and error prevention. It covers magic tricks, mirages, surgical checklists, divorce cases, cults, con artists and more. I quite enjoyed it.