Just search on Amazon…

The Alchemist

Paulo Coelho

A wonderful allegorical novel that I don’t want to tell you anything about… just read it.

The Rational Optimist

Matt Ridley
I’ve read all of Matt Ridley’s books. This is his latest, and I give it my highest recommendation.

From Amazon:
Ideas have sex, in Ridley’s schema; they follow a process of natural selection of their own, and as long as they continue to do so, there is reason to retire apocalyptic pessimism about the future of our species. Erstwhile zoologist, conservationist, and journalist, Ridley (The Red Queen) posits that as long as civilization engages in exchange and specialization, we will be able to reinvent ourselves and responsibly use earthly resources ad infinitum. Humanity’s collective intelligence will save the day, just as it has over the centuries. Ridley puts current perceptions about violence, wealth, and the environment into historical perspective, reaching back thousands of years to advocate global free trade, smaller government, and the use of fossil fuels. He confidently takes on the experts, from modern sociologists who fret over the current level of violence in the world to environmentalists who disdain genetically modified crops. An ambitious and sunny paean to human ingenuity, this is an argument for why ambitious optimism is morally mandatory.

listen to it on  Audible.com

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

Richard Feynman
This is one of the best books I’ve ever read. Not only is Feynman a great physicist, but he is a completely unique thinker. This books is not about physics — it’s about thinking.

From Amazon:
A Nobel-winning physicist, inveterate prankster and gifted teacher, Feynman (1918-1988) charmed plenty of contemporary and future scientists with accounts of his misadventures in the bestselling Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! and explained the fundamentals of physics in (among other books) Six Easy Pieces. Editor Jeffrey Robbins’s assemblage of 13 essays, interviews and addresses (only one of them new to print) will satisfy admirers of those books and other fans of the brilliant and colorful scientist. Best known among the selections here is certainly Feynman’s “Minority Report to the Challenger Inquiry,” in which the physicist explained to an anxious nation why the Space Shuttle exploded. The title piece transcribes a wide-ranging, often-autobiographical interview Feynman gave in 1981; an earlier talk with Omni magazine has the author explaining his prize-winning work on quantum electrodynamics, then fixing the interviewer’s tape recorder. Other pieces address the field of nanotechnology, “The Relation of Science and Religion” and Feynman’s experience at Los Alamos, where he helped create the A-bomb (and, in his spare time, cracked safes). Much of the work here was originally meant for oral delivery, as speeches or lectures: Feynman’s talky informality can seduce, but some of the pieces read more like unedited tape transcripts than like science writing. Most often, however, Feynman remains fun and informative. Here are yet more comments, anecdotes and overviews from a charismatic rulebreaker with his own, sometimes compelling, views about what science is and how it can be done.

The Rational Optimist

Matt Ridley
I’ve read all of Matt Ridley’s books. This is his latest, and I give it my highest recommendation.

From Amazon:
Ideas have sex, in Ridley’s schema; they follow a process of natural selection of their own, and as long as they continue to do so, there is reason to retire apocalyptic pessimism about the future of our species. Erstwhile zoologist, conservationist, and journalist, Ridley (The Red Queen) posits that as long as civilization engages in exchange and specialization, we will be able to reinvent ourselves and responsibly use earthly resources ad infinitum. Humanity’s collective intelligence will save the day, just as it has over the centuries. Ridley puts current perceptions about violence, wealth, and the environment into historical perspective, reaching back thousands of years to advocate global free trade, smaller government, and the use of fossil fuels. He confidently takes on the experts, from modern sociologists who fret over the current level of violence in the world to environmentalists who disdain genetically modified crops. An ambitious and sunny paean to human ingenuity, this is an argument for why ambitious optimism is morally mandatory.

The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation

by Matt Ridley
I think Matt Ridley is one of the most awesome people on Earth. I really do. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting him and even got some quotes from him for my book, which you may have noticed. Of his many books, which are all awesome, please start on this one!

From Amazon:
Human life, scientific journalist Matt Ridley suggests, is a complex balancing act: we behave with self-interest foremost in mind, but also in ways that do not harm, and sometimes even benefit, others. This behavior, in a strange way, makes us good. It also makes us unique in the animal world, where self-interest is far more pronounced. “The essential virtuousness of human beings is proved not by parallels in the animal kingdom, but by the very lack of convincing animal parallels,” Ridley writes. How we got to be so virtuous over millions of years of evolution is the theme of this entertaining book of popular science, which will be of interest to any student of human nature.

The Medici Effect: Breakthrough Insights at the Intersection of Ideas, Concepts, and Cultures

also: Medici Effect: What You Can Learn from Elephants and Epidemics
Frans Johannson, 2004, 206
Johansson, founder and former CEO of an enterprise software company, argues that innovations occur when people see beyond their expertise and approach situations actively, with an eye toward putting available materials together in new combinations. Because of ions, “the movement of people, the convergence of science, and the leap of computation,” a wide range of materials available for new, recontextualized uses is becoming a norm rather than an exception, much as the Medici family of Renaissance Italy’s patronage helped develop European arts and culture. For cases in point, Johansson profiles, among others, Marcus Samuelsson, the acclaimed chef at New York’s Aquavit. An Ethiopian orphan, Samuelsson was adopted by a Swedish family, with whom he traveled widely, enabling him to develop the restaurant’s unique and innovative menu. (Less familiar innovators include a medical resident who, nearly assaulted by an emergency room patient she was treating, developed outreach programs designed to prevent teen violence.) Chapters admonish readers to “Randomly Combine Concepts” and “Ignite an Explosion of Ideas.” Less focused on innovations within a corporate setting than on individual achievements, and more concerned with self-starting and goal-setting than teamwork, Johansson’s book offers a clear enough set of concepts for plugging in the specifics of one’s own setting and expertise. But don’t expect the book to tell you where to get the money for prototypes or production.

Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World

Tracey Kidder, 2004
At the center of Mountains Beyond Mountains stands Paul Farmer. Doctor, Harvard professor, renowned infectious-disease specialist, anthropologist, the recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant, world-class Robin Hood, Farmer was brought up in a bus and on a boat, and in medical school found his life’s calling: to diagnose and cure infectious diseases and to bring the lifesaving tools of modern medicine to those who need them most. This magnificent book shows how radical change can be fostered in situations that seem insurmountable, and it also shows how a meaningful life can be created, as Farmer—brilliant, charismatic, charming, both a leader in international health and a doctor who finds time to make house calls in Boston and the mountains of Haiti—blasts through convention to get results. Mountains Beyond Mountains takes us from Harvard to Haiti, Peru, Cuba, and Russia as Farmer changes minds and practices through his dedication to the philosophy that “the only real nation is humanity” – a philosophy that is embodied in the small public charity he founded, Partners In Health. He enlists the help of the Gates Foundation, George Soros, the U.N.’s World Health Organization, and others in his quest to cure the world. At the heart of this book is the example of a life based on hope, and on an understanding of the truth of the Haitian proverb “Beyond mountains there are mountains”: as you solve one problem, another problem presents itself, and so you go on and try to solve that one too.

Human biology, genetics and evolution

Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters
Matt Ridley, 1999
Science writer Matt Ridley has found a way to tell someone else’s story without being accused of plagiarism. Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters delves deep within your body (and, to be fair, Ridley’s too) looking for dirt dug up by the Human Genome Project. Each chapter pries one gene out of its chromosome and focuses on its role in our development and adult life, but also goes further, exploring the implications of genetic research and our quickly changing social attitudes toward this information. Genome shies away from the “tedious biochemical middle managers” that only a nerd could love and instead goes for the A-material: genes associated with cancer, intelligence, sex (of course), and more.

The Agile Gene: How Nature Turns on Nurture also in USA has title Nature via Nurture

Matt Ridley, 2003
In the follow-up to his bestseller, Genome, Matt Ridley takes on a centuries-old question: is it nature or nurture that makes us who we are? Ridley asserts that the question itself is a “false dichotomy.” Using copious examples from human and animal behavior, he presents the notion that our environment affects the way our genes express themselves.

Ridley writes that the switches controlling our 30,000 or so genes not only form the structures of our brains but do so in such a way as to cue off the outside environment in a tidy feedback loop of body and behavior. In fact, it seems clear that we have genetic “thermostats” that are turned up and down by environmental factors. He challenges both scientific and folk concepts, from assumptions of what’s malleable in a person to sociobiological theories based solely on the “selfish gene.”

Ridley’s proof is in the pudding for such touchy subjects as monogamy, aggression, and parenting, which we now understand have some genetic controls. Nevertheless, “the more we understand both our genes and our instincts, the less inevitable they seem.” A consummate popularizer of science, Ridley once again provides a perfect mix of history, genetics, and sociology for readers hungry to understand the implications of the human genome sequence.

Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors

Nicholas Wade, 2006
Genetics has been intruding on human origins research, long the domain of archaeology and paleoanthropology. Veteran science journalist Wade applies the insights of genetics to every intriguing question about the appearance and global dispersal of our species. The result is Wade’s recounting of “a new narrative,” which also has elements of a turf war between geneticists and their established colleagues. He efficiently explains how an evolutionary event (e.g., hairlessness) is recorded in DNA, and how rates of mutation can set boundary dates for it. For the story, Wade opens with a geneticist’s estimate that modern (distinct from “archaic”) Homo sapiens arose in northeast Africa 59,000 years ago, with a tiny population of only a few thousand, and was homogenous in appearance and language. Tracking the ensuing expansion and evolutionary pressures on humans, Wade covers the genetic evidence bearing on Neanderthals, race, language, social behaviors such as male-female pair bonding, and cultural practices such as religion. Wade presents the science skillfully, with detail and complexity and without compromising clarity.

The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey

Spencer Wells, 2004
In this surprisingly accessible book, British geneticist Wells sets out to answer long-standing anthropological questions of where humans came from, how we migrated and when we arrived in such places as Europe and North America. To trace the migration of human beings from our earliest homes in Africa to the farthest reaches of the globe, Wells calls on recent DNA research for support. Clues in the blood of present groups such as eastern Russia’s Chukchi, as well as the biological remnants of long-extinct human clans, allow Wells to follow the Y chromosome as a relatively unaltered marker of human heritage. Eventually, working backward through time, he finds that the earliest common “ingredient” in males’ genetic soup was found in a man Wells calls the “Eurasian Adam,” who lived in Africa between 31,000 and 79,000 years ago. Each subsequent population, isolated from its fellows, gained new genetic markers, creating a map in time and space. Wells writes that the first modern humans “left Africa only 2,000 generations ago” and quickly fanned out across Asia, into Europe, and across the then-extant land bridge into the Americas. Using the same markers, he debunks the notion that Neanderthals were our ancestors, finds odd links between faraway peoples, and-most startlingly-discovers that all Native Americans can be traced to a group of perhaps a dozen people. By explaining his terminology and methods throughout the book, instead of in a chunk, Wells makes following the branches of the human tree seem easy.

Genes, Peoples and Languages

Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, 2001
Jared Diamond says, “It would be a slight exaggeration to say that LL Cavalli-Sforza studies everything about everybody, because actually he is “only” interested in what genes, languages, archaeology, and culture can teach us about the history and migrations of everybody for the last several hundred thousand years”. Cavalli-Sforza has been the leading architect of a revolution (even a paradigm shift) in human genetics since the 1960s. Because of his work, geneticists no longer think that the human species is divided into colour-coded races. Cavalli-Sforza’s studies of the transmission of family names in Italy, of the relationship between human genes and languages, of migration and marriage, are the benchmarks of our biological self-understanding.

Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Science of Networks

Mark Buchanan, reprint Jan. 2000
Will a network science emerge that helps us understand a variety of complex organizational systems by describing the puzzles of human behavior and connections in mathematical terms? So argues Buchanan, former editor of Nature and New Scientist. Buchanan, who holds a Ph.D. in physics, delivers a good introduction to theoretical physics and the “small worlds” theory of networks. He sees biology, computer science, physics, and sociology as intimately connected. Buchanan illustrates social and physical networks with examples ranging from the infamous “six degrees of separation” theories, to the spread of the AIDS virus, to the mapping of the nervous system of the nematode worm. Are the similarities among these networks merely a coincidence or the result of some underlying physics? Only further research will tell, but in the meantime this book is a good primer to basic network concepts and contains references to key journal articles and studies for further reading. The subject will be of particular interest to mathematicians, physicists, and computer scientists and of general interest to those in most other disciplines.

Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen

Mark Buchanan, reprint Nov. 2002
“There are many subtleties and twists in the story to which we shall come later in this book, but the basic message, roughly speaking, is simple: The peculiar and exceptionally unstable organization of the critical state does indeed seem to be ubiquitous in our world. Researchers in the past few years have found its mathematical fingerprints in the workings of all the upheavals I’ve mentioned so far, as well as in the spreading of epidemics, the flaring of traffic jams, the patterns by which instructions trickle down from managers to workers in an office, and in many other things. At the heart of our story, then, lies the discovery that networks of things of all kinds—atoms, molecules, species, people, and even ideas—have a marked tendency to organize themselves along similar lines. On the basis of this insight, scientists are finally beginning to fathom what lies behind tumultuous events of all sorts, and to see patterns at work where they have never seen them before.” —from the Introduction

A Short History of Nearly Everything

Bill Bryson, 2004
From primordial nothingness to this very moment, A Short History of Nearly Everything reports what happened and how humans figured it out. To accomplish this daunting literary task, Bill Bryson uses hundreds of sources, from popular science books to interviews with luminaries in various fields. His aim is to help people like him, who rejected stale school textbooks and dry explanations, to appreciate how we have used science to understand the smallest particles and the unimaginably vast expanses of space. With his distinctive prose style and wit, Bryson succeeds admirably. Though A Short History clocks in at a daunting 500-plus pages and covers the same material as every science book before it, it reads something like a particularly detailed novel (albeit without a plot). Each longish chapter is devoted to a topic like the age of our planet or how cells work, and these chapters are grouped into larger sections such as “The Size of the Earth” and “Life Itself.” Bryson chats with experts like Richard Fortey (author of Life and Trilobite) and these interviews are charming. But it’s when Bryson dives into some of science’s best and most embarrassing fights–Cope vs. Marsh, Conway Morris vs. Gould–that he finds literary gold.

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

Jared Diamond, 2004
In his Pulitzer Prize–winning bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel, geographer Diamond laid out a grand view of the organic roots of human civilizations in flora, fauna, climate and geology. That vision takes on apocalyptic overtones in this fascinating comparative study of societies that have, sometimes fatally, undermined their own ecological foundations. Diamond examines storied examples of human economic and social collapse, and even extinction, including Easter Island, classical Mayan civilization and the Greenland Norse. He explores patterns of population growth, overfarming, overgrazing and overhunting, often abetted by drought, cold, rigid social mores and warfare, that lead inexorably to vicious circles of deforestation, erosion and starvation prompted by the disappearance of plant and animal food sources. Extending his treatment to contemporary environmental trouble spots, from Montana to China to Australia, he finds today’s global, technologically advanced civilization very far from solving the problems that plagued primitive, isolated communities in the remote past. At times Diamond comes close to a counsel of despair when contemplating the environmental havoc engulfing our rapidly industrializing planet, but he holds out hope at examples of sustainability from highland New Guinea’s age-old but highly diverse and efficient agriculture to Japan’s rigorous program of forest protection and, less convincingly, in recent green consumerism initiatives. Diamond is a brilliant expositor of everything from anthropology to zoology, providing a lucid background of scientific lore to support a stimulating, incisive historical account of these many declines and falls. Readers will find his book an enthralling, and disturbing, reminder of the indissoluble links that bind humans to nature.

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

Jared Diamond, 1999
Explaining what William McNeill called The Rise of the West has become the central problem in the study of global history. In Guns, Germs, and Steel Jared Diamond presents the biologist’s answer: geography, demography, and ecological happenstance. Diamond evenhandedly reviews human history on every continent since the Ice Age at a rate that emphasizes only the broadest movements of peoples and ideas. Yet his survey is binocular: one eye has the rather distant vision of the evolutionary biologist, while the other eye–and his heart–belongs to the people of New Guinea, where he has done field work for more than 30 years.

Jacobson’s Organ: And the Remarkable Nature of Smell

Lyall Watson, 2001
There’s little doubt that smell plays a significant role in the lives of humans. Watson (Beyond Supernature), like many before him, argues convincingly that odors are superb at rekindling lost memories. He is also in good company when he asserts that some smells and some pheromones often have consequential but unconscious effects on humans. Beyond rehashing what has become widely accepted, Watson attempts to discuss the importance of Jacobson’s Organ, the “unconscious partner to the nose.” Jacobson’s Organ, also called the vomeronasal organ, consists of two small pits in front of the nasal septum with nerves feeding directly to the most primitive, limbic area of the brain. Scientists believe that the vomeronasal organ in humans, as in reptiles, can sense large molecules that have no impact on our ordinary sense of smell. Watson claims that it is “a chemical clearing house for subliminal impressions, for… bad vibes, warm fuzzies, instant dislikes and irresistible attractions. Just the sort of will-o’-the-wisps with which any decent sixth sense ought to be concerned.” Perhaps there is a sixth sense mediated by Jacobson’s Organ. The problem, however, is that Watson spends virtually all of his time providing eclectic information on the traditional sense of smell, only alluding to Jacobson’s Organ. Only in his final chapter does he focus on it directly; and there, to his credit, he writes, “everything that follows here is pure speculation on my behalf.” As with his earlier work, Watson provides tantalizing conjectures, but his uncritical acceptance of the paranormal reduces his credibility.

Salt: A World History

Mark Kurlansky, 2003

Doesn’t this sound boring? IT’S NOT!

Mark Kurlansky, the bestselling author of Cod and The Basque History of the World, here turns his attention to a common household item with a long and intriguing history: salt. The only rock we eat, salt has shaped civilization from the very beginning, and its story is a glittering, often surprising part of the history of humankind. A substance so valuable it served as currency, salt has influenced the establishment of trade routes and cities, provoked and financed wars, secured empires, and inspired revolutions. Populated by colorful characters and filled with an unending series of fascinating details, Kurlansky’s kaleidoscopic history is a supremely entertaining, multi-layered masterpiece.

A Primate’s Memoir: A Neuroscientist’s Unconventional Life Among the Baboons

Robert M. Sapolsky, 2002
Few would relish a job requiring proficiency with a blowgun as well as a willingness to put up with parching heat, low pay and copious amounts of baboon shit. But for Sapolsky (The Trouble with Testosterone), a Stanford professor and MacArthur grant recipient, it was literally a dream come true. As a boy in New York City, he’d wanted to live in one of the African dioramas at the Museum of Natural History. One week after graduating from Harvard in the mid-1970s, he got his chance: he went to Kenya to study social behavior in baboons. Hilariously unprepared for the challenges of living in the bush, the naïve grad student learned to deal with supply and transportation snafus, army ants and giant cockroaches, safari tourists, dinners of canned spaghetti coated with a mixture of sugar and rancid camel’s milk, and surreal government bureaucracies. He developed great fondness for “his” baboons, whose behavior seemed uncannily like that of a bunch of quarrelsome human adolescents, and discovered that their interactions didn’t necessarily conform to accepted theories. While Sapolsky’s primate observations are always fascinating, his thoughts on Africa and Africans are even more compelling. As funny and irreverent as a good ol’ boy regaling his friends with vacation-from-hell stories, Sapolsky can also be disarmingly emotional as in his clear-headed tribute to late gorilla researcher Dian Fossey, and his final chapters, which reveal his rage and impotence as he watched his baboons succumb to a horrific plague. Filled with cynicism and awe, passion and humor, this memoir is both an absorbing account of a young man’s growing maturity and a tribute to the continent that, despite its troubles and extremes, held him in its thrall.

Daemon

by Daniel Suarez

This book Daemon is just fantastic – I recommend it to everyone! Even my wife likes it. The book is about a guy that dies and leaves some computer programs behind with a plan to take over society. This guy really knows his stuff… Both this and the sequel, Freedom TM, are remarkable and different.

The audio books are what I STRONGLY recommend. Hearing the voices, the computers, and everything is a wonderful experience all around.

Cyptonomicon

Neal Stephenson, 2002
Computer expert Randy Waterhouse spearheads a movement to create a safe haven for data in a world where information equals power and big business and government seek to control the flow of knowledge. His ambitions collide with a top-secret conspiracy with links to the encryption wars of World War II and his grandfather’s work in preventing the Nazis from discovering that the Allies had cracked their supposedly unbreakable Enigma code. The author of Snow Crash (LJ 4/1/92) focuses his eclectic vision on a story of epic proportions, encompassing both the beginnings of information technology in the 1940s and the blossoming of the present cybertech revolution. Stephenson’s freewheeling prose and ironic voice lend a sense of familiarity to a story that transcends the genre and demands a wide readership among fans of technothrillers as well as a general audience.

Ananthem – Neal Stephenson

Aztec – Gary Jennings

A great historical fiction novel about an unconventional hero. Garry Jennings is one of those guys that you just know was born to write…

The Journeyer – Gary Jennings – This book is awesome and very hard to find!

Song of Ice and Fire series – George RR. Martin

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

Atlas Shrugged (not necessarily AFTER Hitchhiker’s) – Ayn Rand

Free to Choose – Milton Friedman

Winesburg, Ohio – Sherwood Anderson