Recommended General Non-fiction Kindle Books (not Jewish studies)
Books I've read and recommend on Optimism, Progress & Society; General History & Anthropology; Psychology & Cognitive Science; Philosophy of Mind & Future Technologies; Evolutionary Biology; and more
Part of a series, on recommended books available on Kindle. See previous here: “Jewish Studies books on Amazon Kindle: A Discussion” (Jul 7, 2023).
As in the previous installment in this series of blogposts: I have read all of these books, and highly recommend them. Where available, I've included links to the author’s entry in Wikipedia.
I’ve split the books into the following sections, which also reveal my major intellectual interests:
Optimism, Progress & Society
General History & Anthropology
Psychology & Cognitive Science
Philosophy of Mind & Future Technologies
Evolutionary Biology
Economics & Technological History
History & Evolution of Printing and Books
Linguistics & Language Evolution
Ethics, Politics, and Religion
Philosophy & Epistemology
Self-Improvement & Productivity
Optimism, Progress & Society
Steven Pinker, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters (2020)
Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (2018)
Hans Rosling, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think (2018)
Matt Ridley, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom (2020)
Matt Ridley, The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge (2015)
Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
Philip E. Tetlock et. al., Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction
General History & Anthropology
Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1997)
Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003)
Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (2011)
Charles C. Mann, The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World (2018)
Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (2005)
Bart D. Ehrman, The Triumph of Christianity: How a Forbidden Religion Swept the World (2018)
Adam Rutherford, Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics
Psychology & Cognitive Science
Paul Bloom, Psych: The Story of the Human Mind (2021)
Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002)
Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human (2012)
Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life
Bobby Duffy, Why We're Wrong About Nearly Everything: A Theory of Human Misunderstanding (2018)
Oliver Sacks, Hallucinations
Sam Harris, Free Will (2012)
Philosophy of Mind & Future Technologies
David J. Chalmers, Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy (2021)
Meghan O'Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning (2021)
Adrienne Mayor, Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology (2018)
Kate Darling, The New Breed: What Our History with Animals Reveals about Our Future with Robots (2021)
Evolutionary Biology
Rob Dunn, The Wild Life of Our Bodies: Predators, Parasites, and Partners That Shape Who We Are Today (2011)
Daniel J. Fairbanks, Relics of Eden: The Powerful Evidence of Evolution in Human DNA (2007)
Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution (2009)
Economics & Technological History
Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War (2016)
Stanley Lebergott, Pursuing Happiness: American Consumers in the Twentieth Century (1993)
Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (2009)
Tim Harford, Fifty Inventions That Shaped the Modern Economy (2017)
Bryan Douglas Caplan, The Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money (2018)
History & Evolution of Printing and Books
Keith Houston, Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks (2013)
Sarah Werner, Studying Early Printed Books, 1450-1800: A Practical Guide
Irene Vallejo, Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World
Linguistics & Language Evolution
Nicholas Ostler, Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (2005)
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (1980)
Guy Deutscher, The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention (2005)
Ethics, Politics, and Religion
William James, Varieties of Religious Experience, a Study in Human Nature (1902)
Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012)
Philosophy & Epistemology
Jim Holt, Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story (2012)
Michael Huemer, Knowledge, Reality, and Value: A Mostly Common Sense Guide to Philosophy (2021)
Self-Improvement & Productivity
Oliver Burkeman, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking (2012)
Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World (2016)
Looking foward to that. Wade addresses Diamond in detail in Ch. 9.
but I do think this article debunks Diamond because as Levine says;
“Prof. Diamond …. assumes virtually without argument that all human groups are of identical average intelligence. The trouble with this environmentalist boilerplate about IQ is not just that it is wrong….. This boilerplate is also incoherent. If there is no such thing as innate intelligence, one cannot venture the deliciously scandalous suggestion that headhunters possess more of it than white Americans. Most damaging of all, for Prof. Diamond’s purposes, this suggestion inadvertently recognizes that social environments themselves exert selectional pressure. Prof. Diamond does not notice that, even if the first settled Eurasian societies differed from those of genetically similar Africans and Mesoamericans only because of environmental reasons, the individual traits favored within these societies might over time have pushed their populations onto divergent genetic tracks.”
Gotta disagree with the reccomendation of Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond, this is a hill I will die on. Lol. Far more plausible explanations of human biodiversity can be found in the books 10,000 Year Explosion by Harpending and Cochran and Troublesome Inheritence by N. Wade. Check out this article debunking Diamond’s theory. https://www.amren.com/news/2008/06/squaring_the_ci/