How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer

Combining neuroscience and entertaining writing, Lehrer describes how the best decisions are a combination of rational and emotional decision-making processes. Fascinating and very easy to read.

Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert

Our imaginations are what distinguish people from other animals and enable us to create visions/predictions for our futures, and what we think would make us happy. Gilbert describes how our minds work - and how incredibly bad our accuracy is in these predictions. This is a fascinating, very easy read.

The Star Thrower by Loren Eiseley

I picked up this book because I liked the title, and decided to buy it as soon as I saw the intro was written by W.H. Auden. Excellent decision… I was blown away by this book. Eiseley is a naturalist, anthropologist, scientist, environmentalist, historian, poet (and more), and his writing is fantastic! This is a collection of his favorite essays (and a few poems). He describes the natural world with wonder, beauty and spirituality. I read this book slowly, savoring every sentence.

The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan

This book has been on every “Best of 2006” list I’ve seen, and it’s worth all the hype it’s getting. It’s fantastic. The book is about 4 meals and the food chains that supply those meals. The 4 meals are from McDonalds, from Whole Foods, from a local, “sustainable organic” farm, and a meal that the author hunted & gathered himself. Parts of this book are astounding – like the extent to which corn and petrochemicals create the foundation for most of the US’s food supply, (Yup – you read that right) incentivized, of course, by inane government policies lobbied for by big agribusiness, the petrochemical industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the soft drink industry, and others. (You read that right, too.) And in today’s news, the FDA gave preliminary approval for meat and milk from cloned animals – and is ‘unlikely’ to require labelling of these foods (I kid you not. See FDA OK's food from cloned animals.)
The book also offers interesting insights into the complexities of sustainable farming and the interactions between various aspects of the farm (and the natural world in general). There’s a fascinating section about mushrooms – about which we know surprisingly little.
This book is very well-written and engaging. I guarantee you’ll think about food differently after reading it. (And you’ll find me at the local farmer’s market when I do my shopping on saturday morning :-)

To Conquer the Air by James Tobin

About the race to fly. Everyone knows the Wright Brothers won, but the story is fantastic. The brothers took a very meticulous approach and were competing against contemporary luminaries like the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution (who spent >$70k on his attempts vs. the Wright Brothers’ expenses of <$1k), and Alexander Graham Bell, as well as a bunch of French competitors. Even after the Wright Bros’ successful flights at Kitty Hawk, it was years before they got the recognition they deserved. Really great story.

109 East Palace by Jennet Connant

About day-to-day life at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project, told from the perspective of Dorothy McKibben, the woman who ran the "front office" for Los Alamos in a storefront in Santa Fe. Despite the seriousness of the work being done, the absurdities of life in this remote and highly secret campus were often funny. Eg, a wedding in which only the first names of the bride and groom could be used in the vows because of the required secrecy surrounding the project (Well-known scientists had aliases to use in Santa Fe or when traveling); or the 12 feet of mattresses that were piled under the first nuclear bomb as it was raised up to the platform for the test at Trinity (in case the hoist broke and the bomb fell, it would have a "soft landing".) Though the author is often somewhat overly-reverential about Oppenheimer, that doesn't diminish the nightmare she describes Oppenheimer going through as a result of McCarthy's witch hunt after the war. An interesting and light perspective on the Manhattan Project. (For a fantastic book on the scientists and science of the Manhattan Project, read Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb. See my blurb in 2002.)

Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene

Offers a great explanation of cutting-edge cosmology for non-physicists. Greene goes through the history of cosmology and quantum physics as background for his explanation of string-theory/M-theory, 10-dimensional space, etc. Excellent use of analogies and unexpectedly sprinkled with humor and fun pop-culture references. I already have his other book (The Elegant Universe) in my pile of books to read.

Apollo: The Race to the Moon by Charles Murray & Catherine Bly Cox

This book is the amazing story of the people who actually made Apollo happen. While most books about Apollo focus on the astronauts and high-level figures at NASA, this book (based on interviews and documents,) tells the story of the managers and engineers who achieved fantastic feats of systems engineering and technological development and integration to make Apollo possible. Fantastic book.

Mind Wide Open by Steven Johnson

A personal account of neurobiology that’s very engaging and extremely easy to read. Johnson tries several of the latest techniques in neurobiological testing, and discusses the geography and chemistry of the brain – and the implications for our behavior and emotions. Fascinating read.

Longitude by Dava Sobel

Fascinating book about the problem of figuring out longitude while at sea, and the guy who successfully built clocks that would keep time on board ships to solve this problemt. Read the book to understand why clocks mattered :-)

Mauve by Simon Garfield

Excellent story of William Perkin, who invented mauve, which was the first synthetic color, and which took the fashion world by storm. (Until that time, dyes were made from various natural sources – roots, leaves, insects, etc. – and were often expensive to get and produced inconsistent colors.) By demonstrating a very practical (and very profitable for him) use of chemistry, Perkin essentially created the field of industrial chemistry.

Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea by Gary Kinder

True story about the search for a ship that sank somewhere off the East Coast in 1857 with 21 tons(!) of gold on board. It's about an entrepreneur/scientist who puts together the venture for this search (including inventing all sorts of new technology, private funding, building his team, etc.) and how they found the ship in 1989. Fascinating story, well written. I couldn't put it down.

The Making of Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes

Excellent pulitzer prize-winning book. Heavy stuff (figuratively and literally; it’s 800 pages!), but an amazing story about extraordinary people. Well-written, and remarkably easy to read.

Genome by Matt Ridley

Fascinating, easy-to-read story about the human genome and the impact of mutations.

Failure is Not an Option by Gene Kranz

About the space program by one of the earliest mission control flight directors (Gene Kranz was played by Ed Harris in the Apollo 13 movie... He was the guy who wore a white vest in mission control.) Not very well written, nor particularly insightful, and I would've liked more detail in several places (but I'm a space junkie, so I'm not representative of the broader audience this was obviously written for.) Nonetheless, interesting reading about very young, very smart guys, who carried enormous responsibilities while constantly working on the bleeding edge of technology...and obviously performed amazing feats. Imagine NASA as a start-up.

How the Mind Works by Stephen Pinker

Explains the complexity of the mind and why it's so incredibly hard to make a computer do what your mind does.