SS > NF reviews > recommendations

I have classified my non-fiction recommendations a bit, but many slop across different categories. I also have some summaries of the rest of the non-fiction I've read, not all recommended!

Cellam sine lectione infernum reputo sine consolatione, patibulum sine releuamine, carcerem sine lumine, sepulcrum sine respiramine.

I consider a room without reading material to be hell without consolation, punishment without relief, prison without light, burial without an airshaft.

-- Peter of Celle

My Ten Most Recently Read Recommendations (although these are not always recently published; I'm adding new books to my unread book pile faster than I'm reading them):

Robert P. Abelson • Statistics as Principled Argument
Ludwig von Bertalanffy • General System Theory
Malcolm Gladwell • Outliers
Bill Buxton • Sketching User Experiences
Atul Gawande • Better
Paul Ormerod • Why Most Things Fail
Susan Schaller • A Man without Words
Atul Gawande • Complications
Jon Barwise, John Etchemendy • The Liar
J. Storrs Hall • Nanofuture

When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left, I buy food and clothes

-- Desiderius Erasmus

Susan Blackmore • The Meme Machine
A. G. Cairns-Smith • Seven Clues to the Origin of Life -- clay as a pre-biotic substrate
Sean B. Carroll • Endless Forms Most Beautiful -- EvoDevo
Richard Dawkins
Daniel Dennett • Darwin's Dangerous Idea • Freedom Evolves
Henry Gee • Deep Time
Brian Goodwin • How the Leopard Changed Its Spots
Stephen Jay Gould • Wonderful Life -- The Burgess Shale, the Cambrian Explosion, and contingent evolution
Franklin M. Harold • The Way of the Cell
Evelyn Fox Keller • Making Sense of Life
Denis Noble • The Music of Life
Matt Ridley • Genome • The Red Queen
Ricard Solé and Brian Goodwin • Signs of Life

Sandra Blakeslee, Matthew Blakeslee • The Body has a Mind of Its Own
Andy Clark • Being There
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi • Beyond Boredom and Anxiety
Richard E. Cytowic • The Man Who Tasted Shapes -- synaesthesia, or mixing up the senses
Daniel Dennett
Temple Grandin • Animals in Translation • Thinking in Pictures -- autism
Douglas Hofstadter
J. A. Scott Kelso • Dynamic Patterns
George Lakoff • metaphors and categories
Marvin Minsky • The Emotion Machine • The Society of Mind
Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini • Inevitable Illusions
V. S. Ramachandran • Phantoms in the Brain
Oliver Sacks • strange brain problems
Nassim Nicholas Taleb • The Black Swan • Fooled by Randomness
Donna Williams • autobiography of autism

Per Bak • How Nature Works
Philip Ball • The Self-Made Tapestry
Ludwig von Bertalanffy • General System Theory
Mark Buchanan • Small World • Ubiquity
Irun R. Cohen • Tending Adam's Garden
Jack Cohen, Ian Stewart • The Collapse of Chaos
K. Eric Drexler • Engines of Creation -- nanotechnology
Joshua M. Epstein, Robert Axtell • Growing Artificial Societies
Gary William Flake • The Computational Beauty of Nature
Murray Gell-Mann • The Quark and the Jaguar
J. Storrs Hall • Nanofuture
Steven Johnson • Emergence
Richard Jones • Soft Machines
Stuart Kauffman • At Home in the Universe • Investigations
Kevin Kelly • Out of Control: the new biology of machines
Robert Laughlin • A Different Universe
Steven Levy • Artificial Life -- the people and history
Benoit B. Mandelbrot, Richard L. Hudson • The (Mis)Behaviour of Markets
Paul Ormerod • Butterfly Economics • Why Most Things Fail
Heinz-Otto Peitgen, Hartmut Jürgens, Dietmar Saupe • Fractals for the Classroom
William Poundstone • The Recursive Universe
Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz, Aristid Lindenmeyer • The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants -- L-systems
Ed Regis • Nano! -- the people and history of nanotechnology
Ian Stewart, Jack Cohen • Figments of Reality
Steven Strogatz • Sync
Stephen Todd, William Latham • Evolutionary Art and Computers

Kent Beck
Damien Broderick • The Spike -- the coming Singularity
Julian Brown • The Quest for the Quantum Computer
David Gelernter • The Aesthetics of Computing
Neil Gershenfeld • When Things Start to Think
Tracy Kidder • The Soul of a New Machine
Hans Moravec • Mind Children • Robot
Eric Raymond • The Cathedral and the Bazaar • The New Hacker's Dictionary
Rudy Rucker • Mind Tools
Joel Spolsky • Joel on Software
Clifford Stoll • The Cuckoo's Egg -- stalking the wily hacker
Linus Torvalds • Just for Fun
Peter Wayner • Disappearing Cryptography
David Weinberger • Everything is Miscellaneous
Colin P. Williams, Scott H. Clearwater • Ultimate Zero and One

Christopher Alexander -- a philosophy of building design, developing a 'pattern language', picked up by the object oriented computing community for OO pattern languages, and also deliciously socially subversive
Bill Buxton • Sketching User Experiences
Robert L. Harris • Information Graphics
Donald Norman • The Psychology of Everyday Things • Turn Signs are the Facial Expressions of Automobiles
Robert Pirsig • Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Edward Tufte -- reducing 'chartjunk' -- exploiting macro and micro readings

Sir, my friend John Baynes used to say that the man who published a book without an index ought to be damned ten miles beyond Hell, where the Devil could not get for stinging nettles.

-- Francis Douce, Notes and Queries, 5th series, vol. Viii. p.87,
in Henry B Wheatley, What is an Index? A Few Notes on Indexes and Indexers, 1879

Laurie Bauer, Peter Trudgill • Language Myths
John McWhorter • The Power of Babel
Stephen Pinker
Geoffrey Pullum • The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax
Susan Schaller • A Man without Words
Lynne Truss • Eats, Shoots & Leaves
Joseph M. Williams • Style
Arnold M. Zwicky et al • Studies Out in Left Field

Robert P. Abelson • Statistics as Principled Argument
Jon Barwise, John Etchemendy • The Liar
Gregory Chaitin • The Limits of Mathematics
John H. Conway, Richard K. Guy • The Book of Numbers
Edward Kasner, James Newman • Mathematics and the Imagination
George Lakoff, Rafael Núñez • Where Mathematics Comes From
Ivars Peterson • The Mathematical Tourist • Newton's Clock
Karl Sabbagh • Dr. Riemann's Zeros
Marcus du Sautoy • The Music of the Primes
Simon Singh • Fermat's Last Theorem
Ian Stewart • Life's Other Secret
Leonard M. Wapner • The Pea and the Sun

Paul Davies • The Last Three Minutes -- the End of the Universe
David Deutsch • The Fabric of Reality -- quantum theory, evolution, epistemology and computation
Robert Forward • Indistinguishable from Magic -- anti-gravity, time travel, space warps: all with current physics!
Brian Greene • The Elegant Universe • The Fabric of the Cosmos
Alan Guth • The Inflationary Universe -- cosmology and the Big Bang
David Lindley • Where Does the Weirdness Go?
Ed Regis • Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition
Lee Smolin • The Life of the Cosmos • Three Roads to Quantum Gravity

[Hay on Wye] has tens of bookstores, ranging from the 'what kind of mold infection is moving into my lungs?' to 'Instant Bankruptcy Through Book Purchase'.

-- James Nicoll

David Brin • The Transparent Society -- privacy
Jack Cohen • The Privileged Ape -- cultural capital
Frederick C. Crews • Postmodern Pooh
Atul Gawande • Better • Complications
Malcolm Gladwell • Blink • Outliers • The Tipping Point
Jonathan Glover • Causing Death and Saving Lives -- a philosophical look at abortion, euthanasia, assassination, and medical intervention
Dee Hock • Birth of the Chaordic Age
Onora O'Neill • A Question of Trust
Tom Peters • management ideas
Karl Popper • The Open Society and Its Enemies
Carl Sagan • The Demon-Haunted World
Robert L Weber • A Random Walk in Science

God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.

-- Dame Rebecca West

Non-fiction book recommendations