Are you looking for a good non-fiction book to read?
Yesterday I asked people to share one of the best non-fiction books they’ve ever read, that may be lesser-known. The request yielded 102 unique recommendations, only 18% of which were familiar to me.
Incidentally, there was very little overlap between this list and Time Magazine’s “All-Time 100 Best Non-Fiction Books” (found here: http://bit.ly/2qOzZrh), there appear to be ~5 books in common.
As a personal frame of reference for the quality of the recommendations I received, I noted that, of the 11 on the list that I had read before, I would rate three of them as ‘great’ (~27%), six as ‘good’ (~54%), and two as ‘pretty good’ (~18%). I would not rate any of them below ‘pretty good.’
Using data from Goodreads.com, I then sorted the book list using this formula: score = average_rating – 1.96/square_root(# of ratings) which calculates to the lower end of the 95th percentile confidence interval on the mean book ratings (under the assumption that the ratings all have a standard deviation of 1 because, unfortunately, I can’t easily get the actual standard deviations). Basically, this formula gives something like the mean rating but applying a mild penalty on books with fewer ratings (since the mean rating is less certain as an indicator of the “true” mean when there are few ratings).
Here’s the spreadsheet of all the books sorted by this score, along with other helpful information (i.e., the year each came out and the number of ratings):
I’ve listed the top 50 according to this scoring system. I hope you use it to find something really good to read!
——— the top 50 list ———
• ‘Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America’ by Ibram Kendi (2016)
• ‘Educated: A Memoir’ by Tara Westover (2018)
• ‘The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey’ by Michael Huemer (2012)
• ‘The Skeptics Guide to the Universe: How to Know What’s Really Real in a World Increasingly Full of Fake’ by Steven Novella (2018)
• ‘Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson’ by Robert Caro (2002)
• ‘The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection’ by Robert Farrar Capon (1989)
• ‘Food for the Heart: The Collected Teachings of Ajahn Chah’ by Ajahn Chah (1992)
• ‘Behave: the biology of humans at our best and worst’ by Robert Sapolsky (2017)
• ‘Tantra Illuminated: The Philosophy, History, and Practice of a Timeless Tradition’ by Christopher D Wallis (2011)
• ‘Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed’ by Ben R. Rich (1994)
• ‘Listening to Whales: What the Orcas Have Taught Us’ by Alexandra Morton (2002)
• ‘The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter’ by Joseph Heinrich (2015)
• ‘Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life’ by Marshall B. Rosenberg (1999)
• ‘Reaching the Animal Mind: Clicker Training and What it Teaches us About Animals’ by Karen Pryor (2008)
• ‘Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid’ by Douglas Hofstadter (1979)
• ‘Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln’ by Doris Kearns Goodwin (2005)
• ‘Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!’ by Richard Feynman (1985)
• ‘Love thy neighbor: a story of war’ by Peter Maass (1996)
• ‘Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud’ by Peter Watson (2005)
• ‘The Character of Physical Law’ by Richard Feynman (1964)
• ‘The Joy of Living’ by Yongey Mingyur (2007)
• ‘The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics’ by Alastair Smith and Bruce Bueno de Mesquita (2011)
• ‘Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time’ by Carroll Quigley (1966)
• ‘Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life’ by Emily Nagoski (2015)
• ‘Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic’ by Sam Quinones (2015)
• ‘Impro’ by Keith Johnstone (1979)
• ‘A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science’ by Barbara Oakley (2014)
• ‘Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World’ by Tracy Kidder (2003)
• ‘A Short History of Nearly Everything’ by Bill Bryson (2003)
• ‘Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century’ by Jonathan Glover (1999)
• ‘The Brain That Changes Itself’ by Norman Doidge (2007)
• ‘The Better Angels Of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined’ by Steven Pinker (2010)
• ‘My Traitor’s Heart: A South African Exile Returns to Face His Country, His Tribe, and His Conscience’ by Rian Malan (1990)
• ‘Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change’ by Steve Hayes (2014)
• ‘My Own Country’ by Abraham Verghese (1994)
• ‘War With the Newts’ by Karel Čapek (1935)
• ‘Our Immoral Soul: A Manifesto of Spiritual Disobedience’ by Nilton Bonder (1998)
• ‘A Brief History of Time’ by Stephen Hawking (1987)
• ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ by Albert Camus (1942)
• ‘Awaken the giant within’ by Tony Robbins (1992)
• ‘Debt: The First 5000 Years’ by David Graeber (2011)
• ‘Self Coaching 101’ by Brooke Castillo (2008)
• ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’ by Daniel Kahneman (2011)
• ‘Hyperspace: Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the 10th Dimension’ by Michio Kaku (1994)
• ‘The Worldly Philosophers’ by Robert L. Heilbroner (1953)
• ‘The Ethics of Ambiguity’ by Simone De Beauvoir (1947)
• ‘Governing the Commons’ by Elinor Ostrom (1990)
• ‘Keeping the Brain in Mind: Practical Neuroscience for Coaches, Therapists, and Hypnosis Practitioners’ by Shawn Carson & Melissa Tiers (2014)
• ‘The Beginning of Infinity’ by David Deutsch (2011)
• ‘Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment’ by Amir Levine (2010)
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