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Suggest nonfiction that can be understood/enjoyed by nonspecialists
Some of my favorite books are nonfiction, so I'm looking for more. These could be from your field of expertise, but could also just be books you have enjoyed. They just need to be comprehensible to a moderately intelligent reader with little to no background in the subject matter.
Here a few I have enjoyed.
A Civil Action by Jonathan Harr,
Being Wrong Adventures on the Margin of Error,
Cadillac Desert,
Facing the Mountain by Daniel Brown,
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,
Born a Crime by Trevor Noah,
The Day the World Came to Town,
Travels With Charley by Steinbeck
Edit, a couple more,
Flow the Psychology of Optimal Experience,
Bowling Alone by Putnam,
Because Internet by McCulloch
Thinking, Fast and Slow - my top recommendation, by the Nobel winning behavioral economics pioneer Kahneman, gives a lot of insight into cognitive biases
The Dictator's Handbook - challenged a few views I had, good coverage on how people get in power and stay in power
The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature - starts with a tour of what we've believed about the evolution of sex as it exists before getting into a specific hypothesis
In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts - a compassionate, harm reduction approach to addiction
Moonwalking with Einstein - a journalist becomes a memory athlete, easy read
So You've Been Publicly Shamed - a series of shame-related stories, including some history of it, easy read
Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain - brain stuff, with a focus on the conscious vs. unconscious and mind as a composite
The Emperor of All Maladies - great coverage of cancer
Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies - pretty thorough look at different scenarios of AGI being developed
Weapons of Math Destruction - not perfect but gives good examples for what can good wrong on a system design level for AI
Phantoms in the Brain - a bit of abnormal psychology by the charming V.S. Ramachandran who developed the mirror box therapy for phantom limbs (...and because you listed The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat)
I feel like Thinking fast and slow is often recommended together with Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely, I hated (and put down) the former (I very rarely put down books once I started) and loved the latter. So I suppose if you liked the former, maybe you'll like Predictably Irrational!
It goes, as I recall (it has been a decade since I read it), into a lot of behavioral experiments they did, showing for example that people will (on average) cheat but only a little bit. I keep thinking back to that when coming across this in daily life.
I did not know that. If substantiated, of course that changes my opinion of the person, and if it affects the experiments mentioned in that book, then also of that book.
Reading up now, it starts with some 'he said she said' but gets worse
I don't know if I'm giving the first ones too favorable a reading, and what Wikipedia shows is just a summary of a summary, but then there's also the latter two. Dunno, it's a mixed bag, as always in the field of psychology.
For what it's worth, I don't specifically recognise any of the mentioned studies in this Wikipedia section as having been discussed in the book
Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Software and Hardware by Charles Petzold. It is my all time favorite book, and I truly believe almost any high school graduate could read this book and by the end of it they will have an extremely solid grasp of how computers work at the most fundamental level. The first few chapters are mainly about building up the historical motivation for building a computer in the first place. Then, the bulk of the book walks you through the process of building a (theoretical) computer from scratch out of telegraph relays, and then beyond, exploring the concepts of software and programming.
It’s all presented in a friendly and conversational tone, and chock full of many historical stories that are fascinating in their own right.
Tamed, by Alice Roberts
is, what I found to be, an amazing story about how we "tamed" various plants and animals to be of use to us by making us useful for them.
The story is told in a storylike manner but, while there are short made-up passages about how things could have been (an example of the interplay with wolves, for example), to me it is squarely in the non-fiction category yet I love the way it is written and told. I think it also goes into how we know certain things, like when digging up soil in what was doggerland (now under the sea) they found some grains that were previously believed not to have made it to Europe until later (or maybe I'm mixing up different books now -- you can read descriptions and reviews via official channels, this is just how I recall it :) ).
I listened to the audio book. She narrated it herself and does a fantastic job
Under the sky we make by Kimberly Nicholas is a book about climate change that purports to "[offer] a hopeful, clear-eyed, and somehow also hilarious guide to effecting real change, starting in our own lives." I found this not to be true: the book is good and interesting, and I can see how one might find inspiration in it, but it's not really all that practical if you're already engaged with the topic and aware of the basic things you can do.
The immortal life of henrietta lacks is such an eye-opener for me. The book was such a journey. It's basically about HeLa, Henrietta Lack's cancer cells that were the first cells we managed to grow in culture. Without giving too many spoilers, this was before we could read DNA at all and we really knew very little about how these small things work at that time, making this a very useful stepping stone, but little did we know just how potent these particular cancer cells are.
But what made it such a journey, for me, is that I knew very little about black lives before, well, today really. I knew we had slavery, but what I should have realised sooner is that we didn't just one day decide "oh, they're human too? Well then it's a bad idea and now we shall just treat everyone equally". In the 60s in the USA there was quite some racism and racial segregation going on, and mistrust between whites and blacks. (I'm not from the USA but I presume it would have been the same where I live.) Henrietta was black, and I didn't even know that would make any difference, but it made a world of difference. Her cells were taken but she nor her family were told of anything. When they learned, they didn't have the education to understand -- most people wouldn't, but especially black people, as I understood it. Like, "Does mom still live in a lab?" level of understanding. The author, Rebecca Skloot, being white, needs to undertake quite the journey to win the trust of the Lacks family and piece together the story about HeLa cells, as is also described in the book.
Wikipedia of course also has an article on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa
The cells were world-changing and this informed consent requirement is just one minor part of it.
The Alchemy of Air, is about the development and importance of the Haber-Bosch process (fixing nitrogen from air), biography about both Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, and it's ramifications for WW2.
The New Jim Crow, about how the justice/prison system has replaced the Jim Crow laws as a self-perpetuating system of oppression for minorities in the US.
Command and Control, about the Damascus incident, many other near accidents and the history of nuclear weapon safety in general.
Skunk Works, about the development of the U-2 Stealth Fighter, what makes a 'skunk work' from a management perspective, and the memoirs of Ben Rich.
Complexity: A Guided Tour - Melanie Mitchell
Largely about how complex patterns and behavior can (and do) arise from simple interactions. I picked it arbitrarily for a class several years ago, loved it, and got my mom a copy afterwards. Definitely not an area of expertise for me, but interesting and easy to follow
The Elegant Universe has very good and easy-to-understand explanations of relativity and quantum mechanics. However, the second half of the book deals with string theory, which is no longer a relevant theory for understanding the universe.
The Dictators Handbook was already mentioned by @TemulentTeatotaler and I don't only want to underline that recommendation but also mention the video Rules for Rulers by CGP Grey that's essentially a 20 minute summary of the book. Wholeheartedly recommend everyone to check it out to see if they may like the book.
I can also recommend Algorithms to Live by by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths. It tackles questions of how to organise things on your live, how to balance the old with the new, when to make decisions when you have limited knowledge, etc. from a computer science perspective and shows what are the mathematically optimal choices and how to potentially implement them in your life easily. It's never preachy or anything and I also wouldn't describe as a self-help book, just as interesting recommendations for life.
Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond can be quite divisive whenever mentioned, but I found it very interesting and most criticism aimed against it missing a lot of what the author actually said. In essence it tries to work through how Europe came to be the globally dominant region through the scientific revolution after being a completely uninteresting and unremarkable backwater peninsula for millennia. Spoiler: it's not the people themselves but mostly a combination of outside forces and internal interactions that created the right environment for the ideas of the enlightenment to take hold (vast oversimplification).
Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari can also be divisive, but also provides a very interesting perspective on the history of humanity. Unlike Guns, Germs and Steel, which goes about this in a very big picture way of complex systems interacting, Sapiens follows are more linear path from one big change in our lives to the next, discussion what may caused it and what consequences it had. I don't agree with everything the author says in it, but it's certainly an interesting perspective that I'm glad I've read.
Lastly I can recommend The Good Virus by Darrel Ray, which (unsurprisingly) takes on religions as a concept and treats them like an organism undergoing evolution through natural selection (the irony is not list in the author). Basically it looks at how religions change with the societies they inhabit, what causes them to change and why, and how some changes are surprisingly predictable when you see religions like organisms. Guaranteed to ruffle some feathers when brought up in particular spaces because of the title alone.
Actually I lied, I have one more recommendation: Mythos, an audiobook written and performed by Steven Fry retelling the ancient Greek mythology. Very informative and extremely entertaining. He also made Heroes about the ancient Greek heroic legends of the Argo, Atalanta, Bellerophon and many more you may or may not have heard before.
I mean, to believe that it was the people themselves that made europeans become dominant would be similar to believing in racial superiority. I'm sure there's a lot more to the book and I've heard the title often enough that I'm curious to at least browse it and see if it's something for me (I'm a picky reader), but I'm not sure I'd pick that as the teaser :p
Algorithms to live by is one that I heard about before and sounds interesting but somehow got off my radar. Bookmarked it now, thanks for the reminder and the other recommendations :)
You are absolutely correct about that and yet there are still a surprising number of people that claim Diamond book is racist. Despite the fact that it not only starts with the question "people in Papua New Guinea and the US aren't really all that different from each other, how come the US or rather the Europeans came to dominate everyone?" and diamond spending quite a long time establishing how all people are all capable of pretty much the same if given the right circumstances.
Nowadays the very statement of "Europe became worldwide dominant, how did that happen?" is sometimes called "narrow minded" and "Eurocentric".
But I digress, I mostly put it there less as a teaser and more to avoid anyone thinking that Diamond puts forth a racist argument. Those are unfortunately way to common when talking about this topic. But I definitely see why I can come across as a very oddly chosen teaser, I'll just blame it on being quite tired right now.
Glad you found my recommendations helpful and I hope you'll enjoy the books when/if you decide to pick them up.
Thank you. Re religion evolving, I very much enjoyed two books by historian Jaroslav Pelikan, Jesus Through the Centuries and Whose Bible is it. He very much establishes that ideas change over time and includes a lot of interesting detail about what changed, when and some of why.
Girl in A Band by Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon.
Her very personal take on living through the punk/post-punk/no wave/noise rock scene of the late 70's through the modern day, and in particular her relationship with ex-husband/bandmate/collaborator Thurston Moore.
Being one of the most influential bands of the last 50 years, if you're interested in alternative rock at all it is a must-read in my opinion. Made me wistful for a time and place I was not even around for.
I'll include some classics:
Behave - The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert M. Sapolsky
Holistic approach to understanding human behavior, it describes how various biological processes influence human behavior, on scales ranging from less than a second before an action to thousands of years before. (from Wikipedia). One of my all-time favorite reads!
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
The title says it all. Popular science book about the history of (nearly) everything, easily digestable. Basically an overview on what we know today and how we know what we know today. Maybe a bit outdated, but I'm sure there are current revisions.
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
Perspective-changing and provocative take on why humans rule the world.
From the press release: "It explains that money is the most pluralistic system of mutual trust ever devised; that capitalism is the most successful religion ever invented; that the treatment of animals in modern agriculture is probably the worst crime in history; and that even though we are far more powerful than our ancient ancestors, we aren’t much happier."
Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street by John Brooks
Published in 1969. Twelve short, but very(!) entertaining essays about the old american corporate world and lessons to be learned from them. Still very relevant, even today.
Thunder Below! by Eugene B. Fluckey
First-hand account of a decorated US submarine captain during WWII. Captivating on a technical and personal level, even for people who aren't interested in war stories. Maybe a bit dry sometimes, but there are stories about the testing/first use of torpedoes/rocket launchers from subs, night-time sabotage sorties on Japanese land, rescuing downed British pilots during high seas and many more.
The Fall of Berlin 1945 by Antony Beevor
Very thorough retelling of the final months of Berlin at the end of WWII, through hundreds (maybe thousands) of eye-witness accounts. From insights into high-ranking politics to the most gut-wrenching descriptions of vile war-actions, interweaved with military strategy and personal anecdotes by people ranging from lowest soldiers to highest Generals.
I'm still floored by the scope of that book. Antony Beevor apparently dug through mountains of untouched Soviet archives to get all of the required material. Took me a while to process the atrocities I read about.
Strongly second A Short History of Nearly Everything -- and, really, basically anything by Bryson, particularly if you like books about language and/or travel.
I've been on kind of a Marc Morris kick lately and am getting close to the end of The Anglo-Saxons. The first one of his I read was The Norman Conquest, and it prompted me to read more of them.
I thought Taubman's Krushchev: A Man and His Era was outstanding, and I learned a ton about 20th century Russian/Soviet History and the Cold War in general. Yet another book about history I liked was Beard's SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome.
Steven Pinker is pretty controversial these days, but I think I'd still recommend his first "popular" book, The Language Instinct.
Richard Dawkins's The Ancestor's Tale is fascinating and easy to digest in fairly short chunks, if that's your preferred reading style.
(Edit: had a wrong word in a title.)
Here's a few suggestions:
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
This explains how evolution works, at a genetic level, and makes the case that genes are the basic unit of evolution, not individuals or species. Along the way, you'll get a good understanding of what evolution is and what it isn't.
I highly recommend reading the 1989 revised edition, which includes a couple of extra chapters, including one entitled "Nice guys finish first", which applies game theory to evolution, and demonstrates that it really is better to be nice.
Cosmos by Carl Sagan
This is the companion book to Sagan's 12-part popular science television series about the universe and everything in it. It covers all sorts of sciences, from biology to cosmology.
God is Not One by Stephen Prothero
This book makes the case that the various religions are not just different paths up the same mountain, as some religious apologists like to say. To make this case, the writer (a professor of religion) devotes a whole chapter to each of the eight major religions (plus atheism). This book therefore acts as a primer to the various world religions, and is a good work of comparative theology.
The Gutenberg Revolution by John Man
A story about how Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press, and how the printing press changed the world.
The Adventure of English by Melvyn Bragg
A companion book to a television documentary series, about a history of the English language, and how it developed from a local Germanic language spoked by Frisian farmers in northern Denmark to a world-spanning language incorporating vocabulary from other languages around the globe.
Make It Stick by Henry L. Roediger III, Mark A. McDaniel, and Peter C Brown. It's a book written by top academics in the field of learning sciences (with help from a freelance writer), and it provides rock-solid, evidence-based principles on optimizing learning.
Some of the complaints about the book is that the key points can be summarized in one page and the book gets repetitive. This is true, but this is also by design - the authors try to implement spacing principles into the book itself, so key points are repeated throughout the book. There's a lot of "filler" anecdotes, but the purpose is to give you more ways to integrate new knowledge into existing frameworks.
I had heard of many of the principles in the book, namely spacing. I had used Anki, a spaced repetition system, to successfully study for the MCAT. (SRSs are pretty trendy right now and you see the Gwern or Michael Nielsen articles posted on HackerNews often.) However, after reading the book and conducting some n=1 self experiments, I realized that there were pretty gaping holes in my study system, namely 1. SRS flashcards are absolutely awful at connecting information to existing schemas, despite what boosters say (I was an SRS booster for a long time) and 2. the recommended workflow of quickly flipping through cards creates a sense of fluency which is actively bad for learning.
I don't start medical school for a couple more weeks, but if the recommendations in Make It Stick prove to work, this may be potentially one of the most useful books I have read.
Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson - the story of two deep sea wreck divers who find a German sub and their quest to discover the identity and history of the sub. It has the drama and thrills of an adventure tale, and the historical perspective to humanize it.
Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe is one of the best non-fiction books I've ever read. He frames the story of the Troubles around the kidnapping and murder of a single mother of 10 while placing her story and that of several IRA members within (mostly) the overall context of the Republican movement. Plus it has a twist at the end that's worthy of any great thriller. Unverified, to be sure, but a true shock to the system when you read it.
The Liberation Trilogy by Rick Atkinson. A (the?) comprehensive history of the American Armed Forces in World War II, with one volume each for North Africa, Italy, and Western Europe. Covers pretty much everything you might want to know about the US's role in the Atlantic Theater. Atkinson's scope ranges from the individuals struggle to survive moment-to-moment to the biggest decisions made at the highest level. A lot of pages, but worth it if you're at all interested in military history.
Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981-1991 by Michael Azerrad. The story of every band that mattered, at least for some of us. Mission of Burma, Sonic Youth, Black Flag, Hüsker Dü, the Replacements and, of course, Minutemen. If 80s indie mattered to you or someone you love, this is the book for you. Or read it as a companion to Girl in a Band, recommended by @TheDiabeetle