[snipenekkid]

My recommendations are really easy this time:

Into Africa: The Epic Adventures of Stanley and Livingstone by Martin Dugard: Outstanding look at the confluence of events that brought these two very driven and very different explorers together to make real history. Inkmesh Link

It is rare when a historical narrative keeps readers up late into the night, especially when the story is as well known as Henry Morgan Stanley's search for the missionary and explorer David Livingstone. But author and adventurer Dugard, who's written a biography of Capt. James Cook among other works, makes a suspenseful tale out of journalist Stanley's successful trek through the African interior to find and rescue a stranded Livingstone. Dugan has read extensively in unpublished diaries, newspapers of the time and the archives of Britain's Royal Geographical Society; he also visited the African locations central to the story. Together these sources enable him to re-create with immediacy the astounding hardships, both natural and manmade, that Africa put in the path of the two central characters. Dugard also presents thoughtful insights into the psychology of both Stanley and Livingstone, whose respective responses to Africa could not have differed more. Stanley was bent on beating Africa with sheer force of will, matching it brutality for brutality, while Livingstone, possessed of spirituality and a preternatural absence of any fear of death, responded to the continent's harshness with patience and humility.

American Prometheus by Martin J. Sherwin and Kai Bird: The life and times of Robert Oppenheimer basically birth through death. Lots of insight into the mind of the genius as well as his fragile humanity. Inkmesh Link

In American Prometheus , Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin delve deep into J. Robert Oppenheimer's life and deliver a thorough and devastatingly sad biography of the man whose very name has come to represent the culmination of 20th century physics and the irrevocable soiling of science by governments eager to exploit its products.

Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson: Basically the same as the Oppie book as it's a look into the the man beyond the myth and how just like anyone else he was. Far from a perfect man, flawed and at times quite cruel. But walk in his shoes before judging him. Inkmesh Link

As a scientist, Albert Einstein is undoubtedly the most epic among 20th-century thinkers. Albert Einstein as a man, however, has been a much harder portrait to paint, and what we know of him as a husband, father, and friend is fragmentary at best. With Einstein: His Life and Universe , Walter Isaacson (author of the bestselling biographies Benjamin Franklin and Kissinger ) brings Einstein's experience of life, love, and intellectual discovery into brilliant focus. The book is the first biography to tackle Einstein's enormous volume of personal correspondence that heretofore had been sealed from the public, and it's hard to imagine another book that could do such a richly textured and complicated life as Einstein's the same thoughtful justice. Isaacson is a master of the form and this latest opus is at once arresting and wonderfully revelatory. --Anne Bartholomew

Every one of these books is very accessible to the non-scientist. They are written for the layperson. There are a few people who come into the story that someone with a science background will recognize but a fast Wiki search and *poof* you will know the person.