Books To Read - NON-FICTION

NON-FICTION
The Possessed - Elif Batuman

Mentors, Muses & Monsters - Elizabeth Benedict

Changing My Mind - Zadie Smith


Little Black Book of Entrepreneurship - Fernando Trias De Bes

Censoring an Iranian Love Story - Shahriar Mandanipour
The Point Is To Change It - Jerome McGann

Worlds at War - Anthony Pagden
Peoples and Empires - Anthony Pagden
A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles by Thomas Sowell
"One of the curious things about political opinions is how often the same people line up on opposite sides of different issues..."
The Library Journal blurb at amazon.com says: "two competing visions which shape our debates about the nature of reason, justice, equality, and power. These visions are the "constrained" vision, which sees human nature as unchanging and selfish, and the "unconstrained" vision, in which human nature is malleable and perfectible. The book builds a convincing case that ethical and policy disputes are ultimately based on the differences in these visions."
Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? by Harold Bloom
Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds by Harold Bloom
The Structures of Everyday Life: The Limits of the Possible by Fernand Braudel
How the mind works by Stephen Pinker - Started this book in December 2004 but did not really get into the meat of it. based on my initial perusal, it should make for some interesting reading...
Pinker, one of the world's leading cognitive scientists, does for the rest of the mind what he did for language in his 1994 book, The Language Instinct. He explains what the mind is, how it evolved, and how it allows us to see, think, feel, laugh, interact, enjoy the arts, and ponder the mysteries of life.
Also read: The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker
The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (Perennial Classics) by Steven Pinker
Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language by Steven Pinker
The Science of Gender Science. A debate by Pinker vs. Spelke on the research on mind, brain, and behavior that may be relevant to gender disparities in the sciences, including the studies of bias, discrimination and innate and acquired difference between the sexes. - via Linkfilter
Theology for a Nuclear Age by Gordon D. Kaufman
Theology for Skeptics: Reflections on God by Dorothee Soelle
Nature Via Nurture by Matt Ridley
A Devil's Chaplain by Richard Dawkins
The Ancestor's Tale by Richard Dawkins
Unweaving the Rainbow by Richard Dawkins
The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins
Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life by Daniel C. Dennett
Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design by Michael Shermer
Darwin by Niles Eldredge
The Trial of God by Elie Wiesel
The End of Faith by Sam Harris 
God Against the Gods - Jonathan Kirsch

The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins
Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris
Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by Daniel C. Dennett
The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason by Sam Harris
Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think: Reflections by Scientists, Writers, and Philosophers by Alan Grafen
A Sense of the Mysterious: Science and the Human Spirit by Alan Lightman
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins (more details here.)
Breaking the Spell by Daniel C. Dennett
The Paradox of God and the Science of Omniscience by Cliff Pickover
The High Price of Materialism by Tim Kasser
The Machinery of Freedom (a wonderful book) by David Friedman
Identity and Violence by Amartya Sen
Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World by Nicholas Ostler
The Librarian by Larry Beinhart (whose last book American Hero was made into the film, Wag the Dog) - "Takes a worst-case scenario conceived by leftist conspiracy theorists and runs riotously rampant with it."
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson (winner of the prestigious 2004 Aventis Prize for science writing)
The Adventure of English by Melvyn Bragg (later link is an interview about his BBC show, IN OUR TIME, where Bragg and three guests explore the history of ideas)
The Great Beyond: Higher Dimensions, Parallel Universes and the Extraordinary Search for a Theory of Everything by Paul Halpern
Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes On the Cosmos by Seth Lloyd
This Land Is Their Land - Barbara Ehrenreich

Ill Fares the Land - Tony Judt
 
A Magnificent Catastrophe - Edward J. Larson
  
 
The Sun, the Genome, and the Internet: Tools of Scientific Revolutions by Freeman Dyson
History of Beauty by Umberto Eco
Why Beauty Is Truth - Ian Stewart

Prime Obsession - John Derbyshire

The Naked Brain - Richard Md Restak

Considering Genius - Stanley Crouch

The Political Brain - Drew Westen
Einstein's Heroes - Robyn Arianrhod
The World Is Flat - Thomas Friedman (I have read the first couple chapters or so)
Maximum City by Suketu Mehta
Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts
Two Lives by Vikram Seth
Kafka by Reiner Stach (Shelley Frisch: Translator) - Should be fascinating reading - considering that despite all the posthumous reverence for this tormented writer, an authorative biography has been missing. German editor and author Stach fills this void with the first volume of a planned trilogy.
Embroideries, by Marjane Satrapi, translated by Anjali Singh.
State of War - The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration, by James Risen: Spies and Spymasters. Read a Review in NYT by Walter Isaacson
Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum by William F. Ruddiman
The Gecko's Foot by Peter Forbes
Extinction by Douglas H. Erwin
The Heartless Stone by Tom Zoellner
Iraq - The Logic of Withdrawal by Anthony Arnove
I, Nadia, Wife of a Terrorist by Baya Gacemi
Trickster Travels : A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds by Natalie Zemon Davis
110 Stories by Ulrich Baer
A Sense of the World : How a Blind Man Became History's Greatest Traveler -- by Jason Roberts
A World Of Light -- by Floyd Skloot
In The Shadow Of Memory -- by Floyd Skloot
The End of Dreams: Poems by Floyd Skloot
Approximately Paradise: Poems by Floyd Skloot
Human Accomplishment by Charles Murray
Flaubert : A Biography by Frederick Brown
To Begin Where I Am by Czeslaw Milosz
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell (Rachel Donadio in the NYT asks, ' The Tipping Point and Blink have made the author a global phenomenon, but are these new ideas, or the self-help shelf revised for Generation iPod?')
Earth - Miriam Horn, Fred Krupp

Censoring Science - Mark Bowen
A Question of Balance - William D. Nordhaus
Where We Stand - Seymour Garte

Obama's Challenge - Robert Kuttner
Identity and Violence - Amartya Sen (Have read about 25% of this book)

Good Dog. Stay - Anna Quindlen (Essays)

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