Search the Books you are Reading thread in The Lounge for that book, there are a couple good posts about it and some interesting discussion.

The Sphere and Duties of Government - Wilhelm von Humboldt
Political Philosophy book.

http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=c...hp%3Ftitle=589

The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rodes (received the Pulitzer Prize and justly so):

http://www.amazon.com/Making-Atomic-...1116601&sr=8-1


-Zeno

Einstein's Dreams By Alan Lightman

I randomly picked up this book up one day and finished in one setting out in my yard. After finishing I couldn't stop thinking about it for days. Awesome, awesome, book.

One I've always found fascinating, and quite a bit softer science wise, is Oliver Sacks' The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: And Other Clinical Tales. Neurology primarily. It's a quick and fascinating read.

An old school epidemiology classic is Berton Roueche's The Medical Detectives. Not as highbrow as many other books listed here, but as it's certainly a "gem" it's worth mentioning.

This morning I started 'On Writing Well' by William Zinssera-- a 300 page book on nonfiction writing. I have set this book down twice since I opened it and and I'm now half way done. I have never read a book so packed with information that was this easy to read.
Chapter 14 is on Science and Technology and is a great introduction on how to write about science. I would definitely recommend this to anyone who likes to write, and more specifically anyone who wants to write about science related subjects for a general audience.

I'm not finished with this book but it is one of the better I have read in a while. If you are interested in the history of Atheism this is a must read.

Christianity Unveiled by Baron d'Holbach

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/boo...216835-_-&IF=N

Nietzsche: Also sprach Zarathustra

What do you guys think about Stephen Jay Gould? And his best books iyo?

update: I finished this book last night and it was amazing at least for me. Not only does it provide the most recent English translation of this text in over 200 years, the intro (kinda long) is all about d'Holbach and really gets you into the time period and what he was like as well as what being an Atheist was like in France at that time. It also includes a rebuttal that was done by a Catholic that was quite famous at the time, and at the very back of the book is a mini-encyclopedia for words in the book (bolded first time used) which you might not know much about. /my 2c

Here's a funny excerpt of Gould... Fwiw, I haven't read any of his books. I recall hearing his books on evolution aren't for the lay person and can be tough to get through.

Stephan Jay Gould, the famous evolutionist, recounts a meeting with a group of Jesuit priests who were scientists in 1984. He writes:
http://www.stephenjaygould.org/library/gould_noma.html

Incongruous places often inspire anomalous stories. In early 1984, I spent several nights at the Vatican housed in a hotel built for itinerant priests... Our crowd (present in Rome for a meeting on nuclear winter sponsored by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences) shared the hotel with a group of French and Italian Jesuit priests who were also professional scientists.

At lunch, the priests called me over to their table to pose a problem that had been troubling them. What, they wanted to know, was going on in America with all this talk about "scientific creationism"? One asked me: "Is evolution really in some kind of trouble. and if so, what could such trouble be? I have always been taught that no doctrinal conflict exists between evolution and Catholic faith, and the evidence for evolution seems both entirely satisfactory and utterly overwhelming. Have I missed something?"

A lively pastiche of French, Italian, and English conversation then ensued for half an hour or so, but the priests all seemed reassured by my general answer: Evolution has encountered no intellectual trouble; no new arguments have been offered. Creationism is a homegrown phenomenon of American sociocultural history—a splinter movement (unfortunately rather more of a beam these days) of Protestant fundamentalists who believe that every word of the Bible must be literally true, whatever such a claim might mean. We all left satisfied, but I certainly felt bemused by the anomaly of my role as a Jewish agnostic, trying to reassure a group of Catholic priests that evolution remained both true and entirely consistent with religious belief.

I haz The Greatest Show on Earth, Dawkins's latest book. It's the audio book read by Richard and his wife Lala Ward.

I'm about 3/4 of the way through and love it so far. I've always been a big Dawkins fan though, so no surprise here.

I'm willing to upload and share with anyone interested in listening to the first few chapters before deciding on buying the book. PM me.

Taleb's Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in the Markets and in Life (2001) is very readable and presents the idea that outliers ("black swans") happen a lot more often in markets than the experts think, mainly due to investor psychology.

In 2007 he published The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007) which covers some of the same ground. "Fooled by Randomness" is better written, better edited and less self-indulgent, but both books are definitely worthwhile.

Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder. Great intro to philosophy (how I got started), and a decent story as well.

The Elegant Universe by Brian Green

Darwin's Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennett
Breaking the Spell by Daniel Dennett

Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond. Intersections of anthropology, linguistics, and history in an easy to read format.

The following titles by John Gray (completely revolutionized my thinking about ideas and basically transformed me into an intellectual historian):
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals
Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions
Al Qaeda and What It Means to be Modern
Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia
(There are others, but those are the titles I've read)

Why People Believe Weird Things by Michael Shermer. Great book about the merits of science, the folly of pseudoscience, and how to tell the difference, with great topics like: how to debunk common creationist arguments, how we know the Holocaust happened, how "weird" ideas emerge, the cult of Ayn Rand, and why smart people believe weird things.

Also excellent is Oliver Sacks' An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales (1995). Sacks is a brilliant writer, a brilliant man and at once a scientist and a humanist.