The Best Popular Books on Every Subject

Meta: Should we be encouraging people to read popular books? Popular books have their place, but there is a common failure mode where people read popularizations, get their daily fix of insight porn, and go away without having learned anything substantial.

Reading popular books on the same subject have sharply decreasing marginal utility, and I'm guessing that the kind of person who reads LW is the kind of person who has already read enough popularizations that reading another is probably a waste of time.

Technical books about the intellectual history/evolution of ideas in a technical area make for nice general reading, and I think help give the intellectual big picture that most technical text books do not.

The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas about Probability, Induction and Statistical Inference (Cambridge Series on Statistical & Probabilistic Mathematics) Paperback – July 31, 2006 by Ian Hacking

The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century Paperback – May 1, 2002 by David Salsburg

I find Jaynes very readable and useful in the big picture way.

On parenting:

The Everyday Parenting Toolkit: The Kazdin Method for Easy, Step-by-Step, Lasting Change for You and Your Child

I already reviewed it here.

Better than numerous books on the issue that I and my wife have read over the years - among them

• Jesper Juul's 'Your Competent Child: Toward A New Paradigm In Parenting And Education'

• Tom Hodgkinson's 'The Idle Parent: Why Laid-Back Parents Raise Happier and Healthier Kid'

which are also good and have different focus but which didn't as significantly alter my behavior in response to reading them.

Does not require the reader to write anything (e.g., practice problems) or do anything beyond just reading and thinking, except perhaps on very rare occasions.

You should drop this criterion, because it excludes recreational mathematics books, such as those by Martin Gardner (who is perhaps the most famous popularizer of mathematics). Most popular mathematics and popular science books seem to cover history of mathematics and science and biographies of mathematicians and scientists and pay much less attention to mathematics and science themselves. Thus recreational mathematics books are better example of what I think should be classified as popular mathematics. Besides recreational mathematics, an example of a popular author whose books are about science (rather than scientists) is Yakov Perelman, though his books are quite old.

How are we operationalising "best" here? The purpose of textbooks is to efficiently impart material. Popular books have a wide variety of purposes (to inform, inspire, entertain, polemicise, etc.), so by what standard are we holding one popular book to be superior to another?

So now that I've relaxed my own criteria, here's my list:

World History

• Atlas of World History by John Haywood (unfortunately out of print): Really excellent for getting a detailed balanced understanding of world history. Also excellent at pointing out causes and effects. Good coverage of political, demographic, and economic history, but very poor for cultural and intellectual history.
• Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari (LW summary): Some controversial positions presented as accepted fact, but otherwise very good overview of the social science aspects of the history of humanity.

Biology

• The Machinery of Life: Hand-drawn pictures gives an excellent sense of how the cell operates.
• Life Unfolding: How the Human Body Creates Itself
• Your Inner Fish: Good introduction to evolution. Also available as DVD from PBS.

Physics: See here

If you relax the the rules, I'll bring up David Attenborough. (I haven't read any other books than his Life on Earth, The Living Planet about the same subject (showing a zoomed-out view of the plant and animal life on the whole planet) but they absolutely dominated this type of market in the 1980's, I don't think there were even many alternatives published. Later on my interests turned away from zoology and botany.)

Can anyone recommend good books on teaching (preferrably not kids, but adults) ?

Meta: You might want to suggest special voting conventions, e.g. to generally upvote any post that provides a book and meets the criteria above.

Popular books? Go to Amazon/Ebay's top 10 sellers or something.

As for your criteria:

Written very well and clearly, preferably even entertaining.

That's pretty much what every good book would have.

Does not require the reader to write anything (e.g., practice problems) or do anything beyond just reading and thinking, except perhaps on very rare occasions.

I find this criteria to be of dubious merit. But perhaps it's because I'm not a native English speaker and I'm used to checking up words or phrases that aren't intuitively clear to me even after I tried to analyse a few sentence back and forwards.

Cannot be "heavy" reading that requires the reader to proceed slowly and carefully and/or do lots of heavy thinking.

Like GEB?

Can be understood by anyone with a decent high school education (not including calculus). However, sometimes this requirement can be circumvented, if the following additional criteria are met

You'd probably need a specialized book in order for that to apply.

We'll need to know what a "decent high school education" is, though. Humourously, of course.

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