What is your top, unknown, non fiction recommendation ?

Peopleware should be mandatory reading to anyone working in, with, or leading teams in the software industry.

It's from 1987 and lays out clear step by step instructions how to have an efficient team of programmers. It's 2026 and we're using none of them properly.

I'm on a bit of a food-history/stories kick after I read Ritz and Escoffier (Luke Barr) at an AirBnB. Recently flew through:
Provence by Luke Barr
Spice by Rodger Crowley
The Brewers Tale by William Bostwick
Frostbite by Nicola Twilley

I don’t know what counts as obscure? Mildly successful still okay? How about used to be mainstream but now more forgotten?

Here are some that I don’t see mentioned much, but might be more mainstream than I realised:

• with the end in mind by Kathryn Mannix- about Palliative care. Trigger warning: lots of emotional content, I rarely cry and cried listening to it in the car.
• Range by David Epstein. Useful counter to the whole specialism argument.
• alchemy by Rory Sunderland. About people’s expectations, perceived value and advertisement
• how Westminster works and why it doesn’t by Ian dunt. It’s shocking how poorly it works.
• the etymologicon by mark forsyth. A funny easy read about word origins.
• A history of western philosophy by Bertrand Russell. It’s from 1945. It was very popular but it’s rarely said now. It’s quite a different style of writing which is quite refreshing.

"For God, Country & Coca-Cola: The Definitive History of the Great American Soft Drink and the Company That Makes It". Really amazing book about the history of coca cola.

...just a few random titles which immediately come to mind, no particular theme nor critical grouping, but these are each books i've appreciated sufficiently to buy additional copies as gifts for close friends...

Temperament (Stuart Isacoff)
Inventing Reality (Bruce Gregory)
Inside the Machine (Jon Stokes)

This I think for me:

https://www.amazon.com/Fever-Malaria-Ruled-Humankind-Years/dp/0312573014

"The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years" -- Sonia Shah

The Toaster Project
It is short, it is mostly a record by the writer on his project to try to build a toaster, but ends up very thought provoking.

I like Not Always So by Shunryu Suzuki.

Like others have said, I have a lot of different favorite books, so I will give three recommendations.

• Memory Craft by Lynne Kelly. This is an amazing book on the history of memory palaces and the wild implications of our brains and non-literary cultures.
• The Warlord Chronicles by Bernard Cornwell. It is both gritty and "fairy-tale-ish" at the same time. It is fun, new, and familiar all at once.
• American Gods by Neil Gaiman. This is despite the controversy and Gaiman being a dislikable person in general. The work stands apart from the author.

A Spectre, Haunting by China Mieville. I would probably have never come across this re-examination of The Communist Manifesto were I not already a fan of Mieville's fiction, so I assume this flew under the mainstream radar.

The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph Tainter, which I read many years ago, still resonates with me, especially with the current state of the world.

Neither of these is the easiest read but they're both thought-provoking and insightful.

Two books from me, although I'm not sure if this are 'unknown' or not.

The Professor and the Madman, https://www.amazon.com/Professor-Madman-Insanity-English-Dictionary/dp/0060839783. One of the biggest single contributors to the Oxford English Dictionary was someone who was committed to an insane asylum.

Word Freak, https://www.amazon.com/Word-Freak-Heartbreak-Obsession-Competitive/dp/0142002267. Dives into the competitive world of Scrabble.

Here are some of my top picks — not quite unknown, but rather underappreciated(?):

• The rebel: an essay on man in revolt - Albert Camus
• Development as Freedom - Amartya Sen
• A new green history of the world: the environment and the collapse of great civilizations - Clive Ponting
• Climate wars - Gwynne Dyer

How to think: A survival guide for a world at odds, by Alan Jacobs.

I read it more than 5 years ago now, but it was pretty influential to my way of thinking. I don’t remember it well, but it talks about why and how people change their minds, why stereotypes exist, and things like that. I think it is a very useful book to read, especially in the current political climate.

Positioning. The battle for your mind.

Farming the cutover: a social history of Northern Wisconsin, 1900-1940

After northern Wisconsin was cleared by commercial loggers early in the twentieth century, enthusiastic promoters and optimistic settlers envisioned transforming this "cutover" into a land of yeoman farmers. Here thousands of families—mostly immigrants or second-generation Americans—sought to recreate old worlds and build new farms on land that would come to be considered agriculturally worthless. In the end, they succumbed not to drought or soil depletion but to social and political pressures from those who looked askance at their way of life.

First Light: The Search for the Edge of the Universe, by Richard Preston who also wrote Hot Zone. It’s about building the Hale telescope near San Diego. The description of how the mirror was polished really stuck with me.

I liked The Sport and Prey of Capitalists: How the Rich Are Stealing Canada’s Public Wealth.

There's a lot of things that I took for granted that people fought for in the past.