My Book Wish List

Anthropology:

  1. The Tree Where Man Was Born by Peter Matthiessen
  2. The Survival of the Bark Canoe by John McPhee
  3. The Pine Barrens by John McPhee
  4. The Crofter and the Laird by John McPhee
  5. Close Encounters with Humankind: A Paleoanthropologist Investigates Our Evolving Species by Sang-Hee Lee
  6. The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century by Ian Mortimer

Astronomy:

  1. Sun, Moon, Earth: The History of Solar Eclipses, from Omens of Doom to Einstein and Exoplanets by Tyler Nordgren
  2. How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming by Mike Brown
  3. Losing the Nobel Prize: A Story of Cosmology, Ambition, and the Perils of Science’s Highest Honor by Brian Keating

Biology:

  1. Every Living Thing: Man’s Obsessive Quest to Catalog Life, from Nanobacteria to New Monkeys by Rob Dunn
  2. Arrival of the Fittest: How Nature Innovates by Andreas Wagner
  3. She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity by Carl Zimmer
  4. The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life by avid Quammen
  5. Darwin Comes to Town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution by Menno Schilthuizen
  6. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
  7. The Violinist’s Thumb: And Other Lost Tales of Love, War, and Genius, as Written by Our Genetic Code by Sam Kean
  8. Microbe Hunters by Paul deKruif
  9. The Hot Zone: A Terrifying True Story by Richard Preston

Biography:

  1. Headstrong: 52 Women Who Changed Science – and the World by Rachel Swaby
  2. Brand Luther: How an Unheralded Monk Turned His Small Town into a Center of Publishing, Made Himself the Most Famous Man in Europe — and Started the Protestant Reformation by Andrew Pettegree
  3. Dragon Lady: The Life and Legend of the Last Empress of China by Sterling Seagrave
  4. The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo by Tom Reiss
  5. Encounters with the Archdruid: Narratives About a Conservationist and Three of His Natural Enemies by John McPhee
  6. The Curve of Binding Energy: A Journey into the Awesome and Alarming World of Theodore B. Taylor by John McPhee
  7. The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester
  8. Under a Lucky Star by Roy Chapman Andrews
  9. The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA by James Watson
  10. Lab Girl by Hope Jahren
  11. Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood by Oliver Sacks
  12. Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory by Caitlin Doughty
  13. An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth by Chris Hatfield
  14. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass

Botany:

  1. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer
  2. The Tree: A Natural History of What Trees Are, How They Live & Why They Matter by Colin Tudge
  3. Weeds: How Vagabond plants Gatecrashed Civilization and Changed the Way We Think About Nature by Richard Mabey
  4. The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s Eye View of the World by Michael Pollan
  5. Apples by Frank Browning
  6. The Cabaret of Plants: Forty Thousand Years of Plant Life and the Human Imagination by Richard Mabey
  7. The Triumph of Seeds: How Grains, Nuts, Kernels, Pulses, and Pips Conquered the Plant Kingdom and Shaped Human History by Thor Hanson
  8. Seeds of Change: Six Plants That Transformed Mankind by Henry Hobhouse
  9. Oranges by John McPhee
  10. In Search of the Canary Tree: The Story of a Scientist, a Cypress, and a Changing World by Lauren E. Oakes
  11. Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses by Robin Wall Kimmerer
  12. The Revolutionary Genius of Plants: A New Understanding of Plant Intelligence and Behavior by Stefano Mancuso
  13. The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession by Susan Orlean
  14. The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate – Discoveries from a Secret World by Peter Wohlleben

Chemistry:

  1. Caesar’s Last Breath: Decoding the Secrets of the Air Around Us by Sam Kean
  2. The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York by Deborah Blum
  3. Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World by Mark Miodownik
  4. The Poison Squad: One Chemist’s Single-Minded Crusade for Food Safety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century by Deborah Blum
  5. Napoleon’s Buttons: How 17 Molecules Changed History by Penny Le Couteur, Jay Burreson
  6. The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements by Sam Kean
  7. Culinary Reactions: The Everyday Chemistry of Cooking by Simon Quellen Field
  8. The Man in the Glass House: Philip Johnson, Architect of the Modern Century by Mark Lamster
  9. The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women by Kate Moore

Computers:

  1. The Model Thinker: What You Need to Know to Make Data Work for You by Scott E. Page

Design:

  1. Just My Type: A Book About Fonts by Simon Garfield

Ecology:

  1. The Tide: The Science and Stories Behind the Greatest Force on Earth by Hugh Aldersey-Williams
  2. California Forests and Woodlands: A Natural History by Verna R. Johnston
  3. The Eye of the Sandpiper: Stories from the Living World by Brandon Keim
  4. Grassland: The History, Biology, Politics and Promise of the American Prairie by Richard Manning
  5. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert
  6. Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change by Elizabeth Kolbert
  7. Wilding: The Return Nature to a British Farm by Isabella Tree
  8. Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
  9. Rain: A Natural and Cultural History by Cynthia Barnett
  10. The Diversity of Life by Edward O. Wilson

Economics:

  1. The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance by Henry Petroski
  2. Jewels: A Secret History by Victoria Finlay
  3. Coal: A Human History by Barbara Freese
  4. Spirals in Time: The Secret Life and Curious Afterlife of Seashells by Helen Scales
  5. The Perfection of the Paper Clip: Curious Tales of Invention, Accidental Genius, and Stationary Obsession by James Ward
  6. Stoned: Jewelry, Obsession, and How Desire Shapes the World by Aja Raden
  7. Color: A Natural History of the Palette by Victoria Finlay
  8. The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson
  9. Empire of Cotton: A Global History by Sven Beckert
  10. Tobacco: A Cultural History of How an Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization by Iain Gately
  11. Wood: Craft, Culture, History by Harvey Green
  12. The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan
  13. Uncommon Carriers by John McPhee
  14. Looking for a Ship by John McPhee
  15. The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger by Marc Levinson
  16. Ninety Percent of Everything: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry That Puts Clothes on Your Back, Gas in Your Car, and Food on Your Plate by Rose George
  17. Blue Skies over Beijing: Economic Growth and the Environment in China by Matthew E. Kahn, Siqi Zheng

Engineering:

  1. Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto by Alan Stern, David Grinspoon
  2. The Control of Nature by John McPhee
  3. The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed by John McPhee
  4. How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler by Ryan North
  5. The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World by Simon Winchester
  6. Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race by Margot Lee Shetterly

Film:

  1. As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of the Princess Bride by Cary Elwes

Food:

  1. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan
  2. The Zen of Fish: The Story of Sushi, from Samurai to Supermarket by Trevor Corson
  3. Milk!: A 10,000-Year Food Fracas by Mark Kurlansky
  4. Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil by Tom Mueller
  5. Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat by Bee Wilson
  6. In the Devil’s Garden: A Sinful History of Forbidden Food by Stewart Lee Allen
  7. Vanilla: The Cultural History of the World’s Favorite Flavor and Fragrance by Patricia Rain
  8. Beans: A History by Ken Albala
  9. The True History of Chocolate by Sophie D. Coe
  10. Milk: The Surprising Story of Milk Through the Ages by Anne Mendelson
  11. The Potato: How the Humble Spud Rescued the Western World by Larry Zuckerman
  12. Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food by Paul Greenberg
  13. This Common Ground: Seasons on an Organic Farm by Scott Chaskey
  14. The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South by John T. Edge
  15. Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World by Dan Koeppel
  16. The Beekeeper’s Lament: How One Man and Half a Billion Honey Bees Help Feed America by Hannah Nordhaus
  17. The Book of Yields: Accuracy in Food Costing and Purchasing by Francis T. Lynch
  18. How Baking Works: Exploring the Fundamentals of Baking Science by Paula Figoni
  19. Tea: The Drink that Changed the World by Laura C. Martin
  20. Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How it Transformed the World by Mark Pendergrast
  21. Spice: The History of a Temptation by Jack Turner
  22. Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation by Michael Pollan

Geography:

  1. The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape by James Howard Kunstler
  2. The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime by Miles Harvey
  3. The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic – and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World by Steven Johnson
  4. Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks by Ken Jennings
  5. You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination by Katharine Harmon
  6. Earning the Rockies: How Geography Shapes America’s Role in the World by Robert D. Kaplan
  7. On the Map: A Mind-Expanding Exploration of the Way the World Looks by Simon Garfield
  8. Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World by Tim Marshall

Geology:

  1. The Map That Changed the World by Simon Winchester
  2. Basin and Range by John McPhee
  3. Rising from the Plains by John McPhee
  4. In Suspect Terrain by John McPhee
  5. Assembling California by John McPhee
  6. Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World by Marcia Bjornerud
  7. Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883 by Simon Winchester
  8. A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906 by Simon Winchester
  9. The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization by Vince Beiser
  10. The Emerald Planet: How Plants Changed Earth’s History by David Beerling

History:

  1. Four Queens: The Provençal Sisters Who Ruled Europe by Nancy Goldstone
  2. Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe by Simon Winder
  3. Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America by Nancy Isenberg
  4. White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America by Nancy Isenberg
  5. The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire by Stephen Kinzer
  6. The Secret History of the Mongol Queens: How the Daughters of Genghis Khan Rescued His Empire by Jack Weatherford
  7. A History of the Wife by Marilyn Yalom
  8. Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comaches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History by S.C. Gwynne
  9. A Short History of Canada by Desmond Morton
  10. American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America by Colin Woodard
  11. The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation by Mark Kurlansky
  12. Germania: In Wayward Pursuit of the Germans and Their History by Simon Winder
  13. Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes by Tamim Ansary
  14. Seapower States: Maritime Culture, Continental Empires and the Conflict That Made the Modern World by Andrew Lambert
  15. The Men Who United the States: America’s Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics, and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible by Simon Winchester
  16. Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators and Fading Empires by Simon Winchester
  17. Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories by Simon Winchester
  18. Outposts: Journeys to the Surviving Relics of the British Empire by Simon Winchester
  19. The River at the Center of the World: A Journey Up the Yangtze, and Back in Chinese Time by Simon Winchester
  20. The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War by Joanne B. Freeman
  21. The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic by Benjamin Carter Hett
  22. The Taste of Conquest: The Rise and Fall of the Three Great Cities of Spice by Michael Krondl
  23. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann
  24. A History of the World in 6 Glasses by Tom Standage

Language and Literature:

  1. The Hero With a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell
  2. The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester
  3. The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu: And Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts by Joshua Hammer

Mathematics:

  1. Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality by Edward Frenkel
  2. The Calculus Story: A Mathematical Adventure by David Archeson
  3. Reverse Mathematics: Proofs from the Inside Out by John Stillwell
  4. Math for the Professional Kitchen by The Culinary Institute of America
  5. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
  6. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter
  7. The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography by Simon Singh

Military:

  1. Ninja: 1,000 Years of the Shadow Warrior by John Man
  2. Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power by Rachel Maddow
  3. Animal Weapons: The Evolution of Battle by Douglas J. Emlen
  4. The Long Shadows: A Global Environmental History of the Second World War by Simo Laakkonen, Richard Tucker, Timo Vuorisalo
  5. Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War by Mary Roach

Music

  1. Folk Song in England by Steve Rould
  2. Music by the Numbers: From Pythagoras to Schoenberg by Eli Maor
  3. Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain by Oliver Sacks

Mythology:

  1. The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women Across the Ancient World by Adrienne Mayor
  2. Bear: Myth, Animal, Icon by Wolf-Deiter Storl

Paleontology:

  1. Dinosaur in a Haystack by Stephn Jay Gould
  2. A Fish Caught in Time: The Search for the Coelacanth by Samantha Weinberg
  3. Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History by Stephen Jay Gould
  4. The Dinosaur Artist: Obsession, Betrayal, and the Quest for Earth’s Ultimate Trophy by Paige Williams
  5. The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World by Steve Brusatte
  6. Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body by Neil Shubin

Philosophy:

  1. Civil Wars: A History in Ideas by David Armitage
  2. Mediations by Marcus Aurelius
  3. Utopia by Thomas More
  4. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

Physics:

  1. What Is Real?: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics by Adam Becker
  2. The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli
  3. Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli
  4. Breakfast with Einstein: The Exotic Physics of Everyday Objects by Chad Orzel
  5. Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story by Jim Holt
  6. When Einstein Walked with Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought by Jim Holt
  7. Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray by Sabine Hossenfelder
  8. E=mc2: A Biography of the World’s Most Famous Equation by David Bodanis
  9. A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

Psychology:

  1. The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil by Philip G. Zimbardo
  2. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
  3. Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath
  4. Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer

Public Policy:

  1. The Works: Anatomy of a City by Kate Ascher
  2. The High Cost of Free Parking by Donald C. Shoup
  3. Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do by Tom Vanderbilt
  4. Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal by Aviva Chomsky
  5. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein
  6. Whole Earth Discipline: Why Dense Cities, Nuclear Power, Transgenic Crops, Restored Wildlands, and Geoengineering Are Necessary by Stewart Brand
  7. Windfall: How the New Energy Abundance Upends Global Politics and Strengthens America’s Power by Meghan L. O’Sullivan
  8. The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us by Joel Kotkin

Religion:

  1. Mortal Remains: Death in Early America by Nancy Isenberg
  2. The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff

Science:

  1. What the Future Looks Like: Scientists Predict the Next Great Discoveries―and Reveal How Today’s Breakthroughs Are Already Shaping Our World by Jim Al–Khalili
  2. The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe: How to Know What’s Really Real in a World Increasingly Full of Fake by Dr. Steven Novella, Bob Novella, Cara Santa Maria, Jay Novella, and Evan Bernstein
  3. Alice and Bob Meet the Wall of Fire: The Biggest Ideas in Science from Quanta by Thomas Lin

Sociology:

  1. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond
  2. Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance
  3. Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle by Chris Hedges
  4. The Year 1000: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First Millennium by Robery Lacey, Danny Danziger
  5. Red: A History of the Redhead by Jacky Colliss Harvey
  6. Everything You Love Will Burn: Inside the Rebirth of White Nationalism in America by Vegas Tenold
  7. The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History by Katherine Ashenburg
  8. The City of Ladies by Christine de Pizan
  9. All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation by Rebecca Traister
  10. Beneath a Ruthless Sun: A True Story of Violence, Race, and Justice Lost and Found by Gilbert King
  11. Broken Lives: How Ordinary Germans Experienced the 20th Century by Konrad Jarausch

Sports:

  1. Tribal: College Football and the Secret Heart of America by Diane Roberts
  2. Fox Tossing, Octopus Wrestling and Other Forgotten Sports by Edward Brooke-Hitching
  3. Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen by Christopher McDougall

True Crime:

  1. The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century by Kirk Wallace Johnson

Water Science:

  1. Water Follies: Groundwater Pumping and the Fate of America’s Fresh Waters by Robert Glennon
  2. Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization by Steven Solomon
  3. A River Lost: The Life and Death of the Columbia by Blaine Harden
  4. The Ecology of Running Waters by H.B.N Hynes
  5. Original Highways: Travelling the Great Rivers of Canada by Roy MacGregor
  6. Black Dragon River: A Journey Down the Amur River at the Borderlands of Empires by Dominic Ziegler
  7. Where the Water Goes: Life and Death Along the Colorado River by David Owen
  8. Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water by Marc Reisner
  9. The Source: How Rivers Made America and America Remade Its Rivers by Martin Doyle
  10. Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West by Wallace Stegner
  11. High and Dry: Meeting the Challenges of the World’s Growing Dependence on Groundwater by William M. Alley, Rosemarie Alley

Zoology:

  1. Spineless: The Science of Jellyfish and the Art of Growing a Backbone by Juli Berwald
  2. Dazzled and Deceived: Mimicry and Camouflage by Peter Forbes
  3. The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration Into the Wonder of Consciousness by Sy Montgomery
  4. Eels: An Exploration, from New Zealand to the Sargasso, of the World Most Mysterious Fish by James Prosek
  5. Wicked Bugs: The Louse That Conquered Napoleon’s Army and Other Diabolical Insects by Amy Stewart, Briony Morrow-Cribbs
  6. The Extreme Life of the Sea by Stephen R. Palumbi
  7. Venom: The Secrets of Nature’s Deadliest Weapon by Ronald Jenner & Eivind Undheim
  8. Mousy Cats and Sheepish Coyotes: The Science of Animal Personalities by John Shivik
  9. Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World by Mark Kurlansky
  10. Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere with Migratory Birds by Scott Weidensaul
  11. Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter by Ben Goldfarb
  12. The Founding Fish by John McPhee
  13. Underbug: An Obsessive Tale of Termites and Technology by Lisa Margonelli
  14. Spying on Whales: The Past, Present, and Future of Earth’s Most Awesome Creatures by Nick Pyenson
  15. First in Fly: Drosophila Research and Biological Discovery by Stephanie Elizabeth Mohr
  16. A Primate’s Memoir: A Neuroscientist’s Unconventional Life Among the Baboons by Robert Sapolsky
  17. The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms by Amy Stewart
  18. Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal