What are your favorite non-fiction books?

[BlackVoid]

I recommend this to everyone:
Nassim Nicholas Taleb - The Black Swan (The Impact of the Highly Improbable)

Other non-fiction authors that I like:
Desmond Morris
Jared Diamond
Basil Henry Liddell Hart (esp. History of the Second World War, the best book on WW2)
Richard Dawkins
Carl Sagan
David Attenborough

[Greg Anos]

I prefer to stay with light reading for my non-fiction...

Ostwald Spengler - Decline of the West (Non-Abrigded 2 Vol.)
Lord Rees-Moog and James Davidson - The Rational Individual
John Toland - The Rising Sun
John Leckie - The Wars of America

and for an after-dinner mint...

Thr Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need - Andrew Tobias

[BenG]

I enjoyed the histories by Larry Collins and Dominique LaPierre:
Is Paris Burning?
Freedom at Midnight
O Jerusalem

[astra]

Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

[lmarie]

Other than mysteries, about the only thing I read is nonfiction.

Someone I'd recommend is James Hillman. I've lost his book, The Soul's Code, around the house somewhere and I'd really like to find it and finish it. Dang.

I tend to read religion and philosophy, psychology and history, and some biography, science, and economics. I also read gardening, home renovation and repair, health, etc. ("self-help"). I'm a nerd too, lucretiusfiend. (On the other hand, perhaps we could just leave it at "intellectually curious.")

[Timoleon]

A couple of books and authors:

Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon

...and a slightly weightier tome

The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker

I do spend most of my time reading froth, though!

Tim

[bbusybookworm]

Hmm..... Non fiction?

While I do read quiet a bit of Non Fiction, there are a few I'll straight out Recommend, but here goes

* Surely Your Joking Mr Feynmann By Richard P. Feynman
* What Do You Care What Other People Think? by Richard P. Feynman
* Cosmos By Carl Sagan
* Endurance by Alfred Lansing
* The Naked Island by Russell Braddon
* A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
* In Search of Schrodinger's Cat by John Gribbin

And While Technically non Fiction, but so closely tied that they may be

* The Discworld Companion By Stephen Briggs
* The Riven Codex by David Eddings
* Heroes & Monsters: The Unofficial Companion to the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen by Jess Nevins
* The Science of Discworld Series (I, II & III)

Not mentioning the Ton of Management, Finance, Marketing, Computing books because they dont really stand out that much.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by BlackVoid

Basil Henry Liddell Hart (esp. History of the Second World War, the best book on WW2)

I have that here. It's a splendid piece of work, For those so minded, I also highly recommend Liddell Hart's _Strategy_.
______
Dennis

[DMcCunney]

I have broad interests, and read a good deal of non-fiction. Recent works in progress include Macaulay's Essays, Northfrop Frye's _Anatomy of Criticism_, Erich Auerbach's _Mimesis - The Representation of Reality in Western Literature_, Fredrich Schiller's _History of the Thirty Year's War_, and a few random computer technical volumes.

I tell people I've always read anything that didn't read me first, and some that did.
_____
Dennis

[Jellby]

My favourite non-fiction books are (popular) science, I especially enjoy all of Asimov's scientific writings, also Gribbin's "In Search of Schrödinger's Cat", and recently I found Derbyshire's "Prime Obsession" (on Riemann's hypothesis) quite interesting.

[digitalzen]

I enjoyed Truman, The Power Broker, and am just getting into The History of God by Karen Armstrong (written by a former nun, who happens to be an excellent scholar on the major monotheistic faiths)

[DixieGal]

Holy Bible
Elegant Universe

My Granny loved biographies. She was a big reader also. The greatest thing in the world to her was the Dollar Tree, because they have bunches of bios, all for a dollar each. Also bags of cough drops, boxes of grandma hard candy, greeting cards, and notebooks. She also wrote in a notebook every day, called it her diary, but we all knew she was using it to track the most recent calls/visits from grandkids!

[montsnmags]

Originally Posted by DixieGal

Holy Bible
Elegant Universe
...

Elegant Universe - it's good, hey? I have not watched the television series, but I reckon with some visuals it might be an excellent complement to the book. I definitely want to read it again sometime - it provided the best explanations (by also tracing the history of understanding, making the steps seem logical) that I've ever read for that stuff, allowing me to obtain a better grasp on the seemingly-impossible concepts than I've been able to obtain before.

Cheers,
Marc

[Daithi]

In the past I read about four non-fiction books for every fiction book that I read, but since getting a Kindle I've been reading a lot more fiction (the fiction selection is better than the non-fiction selection). Nevertheless, I still read a fair amount of non-fiction.

I especially enjoy philosophy (Bertand Russell is a favorite), mathematics (Morris Kline is a favorite), and science (Asimov's Life and Energy, Atom, and Understanding Physics are all favorites). I very much enjoy learning, and books are wonderful teachers, so I have books for whatever my interest of the moment happens to be -- economics, computers, poker, art/painting, the Irish language, the occult/magic, writing, politics, music, etc.

I just happended to buy a book for my Kindle this morning. Reinventing Gravity by John W. Moffat. It's a non-fiction book that explains gravity by modifying Newton's Second Law and thus doesn't require the existence of dark matter or dark energy to account for our observations of the universe. Oh yeah, I too am a geek.

[DixieGal]

Originally Posted by Daithi

I just happended to buy a book for my Kindle this morning. Reinventing Gravity by John W. Moffat. It's a non-fiction book that explains gravity by modifying Newton's Second Law and thus doesn't require the existence of dark matter or dark energy to account for our observations of the universe. Oh yeah, I too am a geek.

That sounds interesting. I'm not all on board for the dark stuff. Someone posted in another thread that they don't read fantasy because the simple fix to any problem is magic. I sort of get the idea that dark stuff is becoming the catch-all for anything unexplainable in physics. A cheat, so to speak, instead of trying to figure out why the original non-dark phenomenon is not working.

But of course, I'm just a simple layperson, so my opinion is only just that, an opinon. I think that book you mentioned sounds interesting.