Best Non-Fiction book you've read?

dr gonzo

Im usually dont read non-fiction for some reason but im reading one at the moment called Lost City of Z which is fantastic so far, very well written and best of all a very exciting read.

So i thought i'd throw this question out. What NF gems have other people come across?

Eliot Rosewater

Reflections on the Revolution in France by Edmund Burke. It's a criticism of the French Revolution and violence as a political means in general. It's also a defence of the constitutional monarchy, which is really interesting. The main theme is of conservatism: slow gradual change rather than upheavals. An excellently argued doctrine, but one which does not sit well with the 800-years 1916-risers-are-heroes school of thought.

Burke was born and raised in Ireland, and became an MP for Bristol.

rubabbel

Ryszard Kapuscinski is definitely one to check out. His most critically acclaimed work is The Emperor, but I was absolutely blown away by Shah of Shahs. I haven't read his one called The Soccer War, but sounds interesting (two Latin American countries go to war after a football match). Increasingly getting criticism over how 'true' the incidents in his books are, but I have no idea whether these criticisms are accurate or not.

Sophie Scholl and The White Rose is an amazing book (by Dumball, and someone else, I think). If you don't know the story, get this immediately.

Bill Bryson I personally love. His two books on language (I think he may have more) Mother Tongue and the one on how the American way of speaking developed are both fascinating and very easy to read, with a great sense of humour you don't find in many books touching on linguistics.

Jon Ronson's Them is great for a light but scary read.

And finally, David Sedaris: Check out Me Talk Pretty One Day, Santaland Diaries or Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. Laugh-out-Loud funny in the literal sense.

rubabbel

Eliot Rosewater wrote: »

Reflections on the Revolution in France by Edmund Burke. It's a criticism of the French Revolution and violence as a political means in general. It's also a defence of the constitutional monarchy, which is really interesting. The main theme is of conservatism: slow gradual change rather than upheavals. An excellently argued doctrine, but one which does not sit well with the 800-years 1916-risers-are-heroes school of thought.

Burke was born and raised in Ireland, and became an MP for Bristol.

Or Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man. Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Men is quite good too. Less emphasis on the gradual change, but more on democracy and rights.

Tesco Massacre

Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell.

Consider the Lobster and A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace are both excellent as well.

dr gonzo

Tesco Massacre wrote: »

Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell.

Yeh im a massive Orwell fan so i definitely concur on this suggestion... even if you were suggesting it to me

Eliot Rosewater

Homage To Catalonia is good, but I much prefer Orwell's essays. Looking Back on the Spanish War examines the Spanish War from a more theoretical political perspective, and clearly shows the link between his experiences in Spain and his later work like 1984.

Sergeant

Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 - Tony Judt.

Enkidu

rubabbel wrote: »

Bill Bryson I personally love. His two books on language (I think he may have more) Mother Tongue ..... fascinating and very easy to read, with a great sense of humour you don't find in many books touching on linguistics.

Mother Tongue is an awful book in my opinion. It's full of gross factual errors, urban myths and exaggerations. It's as if he wrote down a bunch of half remembered "facts" he heard from other people. A much better book on linguistics is Nicholas Ostler's Empires of the Word.

rubabbel

Enkidu wrote: »

Mother Tongue is an awful book in my opinion. It's full of gross factual errors, urban myths and exaggerations. It's as if he wrote down a bunch of half remembered "facts" he heard from other people. A much better book on linguistics is Nicholas Ostler's Empires of the Word.

I have the Ostler book, and it's very interesting, I would say more as an academic text than an enjoyable read. It sometimes seemed that he spent time and effort trying to make a simple sentence more obtuse and complex than it needed to be. I've no degree in linguistics, so I wouldn't have been able to pinpoint errors in Bryson's book, but I do remember some reviews of Ostler's book in 2005 (or whenever) suggesting similar things. I think linguistics, like the Middle East, is one of those areas where consensus is thin on the ground.

hatful

'The man who mistook his wife for a hat' - Oliver Wolf Sacks, a series of unusual case studies detailing Dr. Sacks interaction with patients who have different types of neurological diseases.

Amazotheamazing

rubabbel wrote: »

Ryszard Kapuscinski is definitely one to check out. His most critically acclaimed work is The Emperor, but I was absolutely blown away by Shah of Shahs. I haven't read his one called The Soccer War, but sounds interesting (two Latin American countries go to war after a football match). Increasingly getting criticism over how 'true' the incidents in his books are, but I have no idea whether these criticisms are accurate or not.

If you think those two are good, check out his African memoir, "In the Shadow of the Sun". I frequently give copies of it to friends and have never had any of them come back without high praise. All his books are worth reading, a true great.

SuperInfinity

I would recommend this book to anyone!!! The best I've ever read.

Enkidu

rubabbel wrote: »

I have the Ostler book, and it's very interesting, I would say more as an academic text than an enjoyable read. It sometimes seemed that he spent time and effort trying to make a simple sentence more obtuse and complex than it needed to be. I've no degree in linguistics, so I wouldn't have been able to pinpoint errors in Bryson's book, but I do remember some reviews of Ostler's book in 2005 (or whenever) suggesting similar things. I think linguistics, like the Middle East, is one of those areas where consensus is thin on the ground.

I don't think so, unless you're in proto-language research there isn't really a lack of consensus in linguistics and proto-language is something Ostler doesn't touch (note the avoidance of Indo-European). Ostler's book has some arguable errors of perspective, i.e. choosing to highlight some features and not others.

Bryson's book on the other hand contains outright falsehoods and ludicrous urban myths on every single page.

For example Ostler might say "rt -> tr was a more distinctive feature of Celtic than the loss of p", which is arguable but not outright false and he only pulls a few of these in 688 pages.
Bryson on the other hand will say something stupid like "the Finnish have no word for toilet and no swear words, the French have no words for house, 92% of words in Albanian are not native". Stuff that's just outright false.

Anyway I just wanted to point it out because Bryson spreads some serious misinformation, just like his "A Short History of Nearly Everything".

LadyW

I recently finished reading The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. It is an astonishing book and I would highly recommend it.

Dades

Carl Sagan's Cosmos.

AntiMatter

Robert Anton Wilson's 'Prometheus Rising'.

rubabbel

Enkidu wrote: »

Bryson on the other hand will say something stupid like "the Finnish have no word for toilet and no swear words, the French have no words for house, 92% of words in Albanian are not native". Stuff that are just outright false.

I thought he said they couldn't distinguish between house and home? Which from my limited knowledge of French is true (chez moi being used to say something akin to at my house, but maison being the only other use). But, yeah, I get your point, however my specific knowledge of Finnish is so limited that I wouldn't know whether he's being accurate or not.

SuperInfinity

rubabbel wrote: »

I thought he said they couldn't distinguish between house and home? Which from my limited knowledge of French is true (chez moi being used to say something akin to at my house, but maison being the only other use). But, yeah, I get your point, however my specific knowledge of Finnish is so limited that I wouldn't know whether he's being accurate or not.

Your specific knowledge of Finnish? Are you having a laugh? :rolleyes:

It sounds a bit like the idea that there are 100 words for snow in the language of the Inuit. This is totally false... http://www.mendosa.com/snow.html

I think all supposed "quirks" of others languages like this that we're supposed to find interesting are either untrue/inaccurate or are unremarkable.

dr gonzo

LadyW wrote: »

I recently finished reading The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. It is an astonishing book and I would highly recommend it.

I'd love to read this myself but i'd say it would get my blood boiling

gaf1983

rubabbel wrote: »

Ryszard Kapuscinski is definitely one to check out. His most critically acclaimed work is The Emperor, but I was absolutely blown away by Shah of Shahs. I haven't read his one called The Soccer War, but sounds interesting (two Latin American countries go to war after a football match). Increasingly getting criticism over how 'true' the incidents in his books are, but I have no idea whether these criticisms are accurate or not.

Actually the soccer war in "The Soccer War" only takes up one chapter, it's really a compendium of his experiences across the developing world, I found some of the ones set in West Africa really interesting, it's a great read.

I'd say that non-fiction make up the majority of what I do read when I have the time. Some of my favourites are:

"The Logic of Life: The Undercover Economist Explains Everything" - Tim Harford - an economist with the Financial Times, writes about the law of unintended consequences and how they effect everyday life. This was published pre-recession.

"Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar" - Simon Sebag Montefiore - gripping account of what life was like for the family, friends and associates of Stalin during his reign of tyranny, a fascinating insight into his what made him tick.

"Information is Beautiful" - Simon McCandless - got this one for Christmas. Basically a coffee table book of graphs and charts illustrating fascinating trivia, including such items as the most controversial Wikipedia entries, the parts of the body that cost most to insure, the similarities between dictators' wives and the most common times of the year for breaking up, taken from a study of Facebook statuses. Enthralling stuff. Check out his website here: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/

"The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West" - Niall Ferguson - describes how the globalisation and interconnectedness of the early 1900s world descended into brutality, and a lot more besides. Enthralling.

"Hidden Agendas" - John Pilger - read this when I was a teenager, found it very inspiring. Basically a series of reports from different parts of the world from the 1970s up to the 1990s showing how the movements of the great powers played havoc in the lives of people living among the pawns.

"The State of Africa" - Martin Meredith - depressing account of post-colonial African misrule.

"Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" - Jared Diamond - wide-sweeping, and I mean wide-sweeping, account of how geographical and natural forces shaped different paces of human development around the world.

"Down and Out in Paris and London" - George Orwell - ok I think this was only semi-autobiographical, but it's a really well written account of what it must be like to be down and out in either of those two cities.

gaf1983

SuperInfinity wrote: »

Your specific knowledge of Finnish? Are you having a laugh? :rolleyes:

It sounds a bit like the idea that there are 100 words for snow in the language of the Inuit. This is totally false... http://www.mendosa.com/snow.html

I think all supposed "quirks" of others languages like this that we're supposed to find interesting are either untrue/inaccurate or are unremarkable.

The 100 words for snow argument was very well refuted recently by Mark Liberman in a debate hosted on The Economist's website:

So in its common interpretation, which sees a list of dictionary entries as determining the set of available thoughts, this proposition is false. Furthermore, this false interpretation attracts other falsehoods and exaggerations, such as the pop-sociological notion that it reveals something about a culture to observe that its language has "no word for X". This is weak as logic even when true as lexicography: English has no (single) word for unemployment rate, payroll taxes, or need-blind admissions, to list three familiar concepts featured in today's newspaper. But logic aside, the "no word for X" meme is usually false as a matter of simple lexicographical fact.

In the classic western "Hondo", John Wayne tells us that "the Apaches have no word for lie". But there is an Apache verb meaning specifically "to lie", as well as an expression meaning "to deceive [someone]". Not long ago, a self-appointed cultural expert told the Christian Science Monitor that corruption is "ingrained deeply into modern Bulgarian society" because the Bulgarian language has no word for "integrity", and the newspaper quoted him approvingly. But ten seconds with a Bulgarian dictionary turns up several plausible candidates. International banking officials and business consultants are fond of complaining that some language or another has no word for "accountability. I have found reports asserting this about French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Hebrew, Russian and Japanese. In every case, the assertion is either false (because a single word does exist) or misleading (because there is a short phrase with the same meaning).

Often, we are told that something important about a culture is revealed by words or expressions its language has that other languages lack. In general, these assertions are no more reliable than the "no word for X" reports. Thus Ayn Rand wrote in "Atlas Shrugged":

"If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose … the fact that they were the people who created the phrase 'to make money.' No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity—to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words 'to make money' hold the essence of human morality."

But this cute theory runs aground on the shoals of fact. If we look up pecunia in Lewis and Short's Latin dictionary, we find the gloss "property, riches, wealth", and a reference to Cicero's use of the phrase "pecuniam facere", which deploys pecunia as the object of the verb facere (to make).

The most familiar victims of the "words for X" trope are the Eskimos and their variously multitudinous words for snow. As Laura Martin, an anthropologist, has documented, this all started in 1911 when Franz Boas (who knew quite a bit about the subject) remarked in passing that there are four lexically unrelated words for snow in Eskimo. In his 1940 popular article "Science and Linguistics", Benjamin Lee Whorf (who knew only what he had read in Boas) expressed this idea in a way that seized the popular imagination:

"The Hopi actually call insect, airplane, and aviator all by the same word, and feel no difficulty about it … This class seems to us too large and inclusive, but so would our class 'snow' to an Eskimo. We have the same word for falling snow, snow on the ground, snow packed hard like ice, slushy snow, wind-driven flying snow—whatever the situation may be. To an Eskimo, this all-inclusive word would be almost unthinkable; he would say that falling snow, slushy snow, and so on, are sensuously and operationally different, different things to contend with; he uses different words for them and for other kinds of snow."

Whorf gave no count; but before long, popular writers had inflated the number of Eskimo snow words to 9, 27, "several dozen", 50, 70, "hundreds", 500. Tony Woodbury, a linguist, recently tried to bring these fancies down to earth by documenting 15 "snow lexemes" in Central Alaskan Yupik, compared with a list of 20-odd comparable terms in English. But the amiable idea that language shapes thought has become disconnected, in our popular culture, from any consideration of mere fact; and as a result, nearly every instance of this idea in the mass media is false or seriously misleading.

http://www.economist.com/debate/days/view/626

Carawaystick

gaf1983 wrote: »

"Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" - Jared Diamond - wide-sweeping, and I mean wide-sweeping, account of how geographical and natural forces shaped different paces of human development around the world.

And Collapse by the same author

Dylans Autobiography "Chronicles"

And an Iain Banks book Raw Spirit about visiting and drinking scottish whisky

Bobby42

Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets by David Simon.

I just could not put that book down.

Amazotheamazing

Enkidu wrote: »

Bryson's book on the other hand contains outright falsehoods and ludicrous urban myths on every single page.

Anyway I just wanted to point it out because Bryson spreads some serious misinformation, just like his "A Short History of Nearly Everything".

Just taking these lines, hopefully not too out of context, to agree with. For some reason, Bryson is above ordinary criticism, everything he writes is lauded far beyond it's merits. If you point out he makes numerous mistakes in his books you are told it's supposed to be an amateur's humorous approach and not to expect perfection but on the otherhand people repeat his mistakes and give them such wide currency they become commonly accepted truths.

He's a writer who's better avoided, imo.

rubabbel

SuperInfinity wrote: »

Your specific knowledge of Finnish? Are you having a laugh? :rolleyes:

I have no knowledge of Finnish, so it's limited. So, I can't say anything about their language. I guess now would be the time for the rolleyes: :rolleyes:

fisgon

Barbara Demick's 'Nothing to Envy' about life in North Korea. Just published this year, (sorry, last year) great book, would really recommend it, tells the story of the country through defectors she talked to in South Korea. Gives a picture of a country that is a combination of a prison and a cult. Bizarre and enthralling.

toomevara

The Buried Soul: How Humans invented Death. Utterly brilliant, uncategorisable analysis of death and our relationship to it from an anthropological perspective.

Travels with a Tangerine by Tim Mackintosh Smith, the travels of Ibn Battutah, an amazing character.

Mellor

101 People you won't meet in Heaven

elizaphilip

i like harry potter

crummymummy

AntiMatter wrote: »

Robert Anton Wilson's 'Prometheus Rising'.

Or the 'Cosmic Trigger' Triology. Especially the second part which I read in one go 'coz I couldn't put it down!