(no subject)

[aliseadae]

Please recommend good non-fiction!

I like books like Victoria Finlay's Color: A Brief History of the Palette. I like learning about culture throughout history. I like archaeology and anthropology. I like history. I also like science. One of my favorite books is Hans Magnus Enzenberger's The Number Devil, which discusses math in a narrative style. I also like Oliver Sack's book Uncle Tungsten, which is about his childhood and chemistry.

Eventually I will have a real post. This doesn't seem nearly as interesting to anyone whose friends page this appears on. Here is a bit about my day, then. I went on a walk today and stopped in at a local coffee shop to have a mocha spiced with cinnamon and chili powder. Adding cinnamon and chili powder is my favorite way to have chocolate. I sat there and figured out more about some of the characters in a story I'm writing. (This is now going much better. It is not the pomegranates story, though.)

This evening, I went to a friend's house for dinner and we then sat and talked for a while.

ETA: This is a very worthwhile read. It touches on some things related to my fear of losing track of who I am and forgetting what is important to me. (Spoiler warning: The Graveyard Book, Up, Season 4 of Doctor Who, and the Prospero's Children books)

Don't forget to recommend good non-fiction if you know of some. Thank you!

Comments

[mischief03.livejournal.com]

"Collapse" by Jared Diamond is an interesting look on civilizations and how ecology effects them and vice versa. Actually, anything by Jared Diamond is going to be interesting.

I'm currently reading and really enjoying "The Mother Tongue: English and How it got that Way" by Bill Bryson. It's clearly about English from a historical linguistic perspective and Bill Bryson is another all around interesting author.

[bu-sama.livejournal.com]

This might be sort of cheating as its sort of half memoir and half fictional story, but The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien is a really good read. It's about soldiers in the Vietnam war, but it's really about the power of storytelling. It questions the importance of truth in relation to story and blurs the line between fact and fiction. It's a great book, but do remember that it's a story about men in a brutal war.

[lerite.livejournal.com]

You might follow TTTC with "After Sorrow," which is about Vietnamese women in the American war, but really about the power of friendship (written by a Quaker). I expect it would be a much less intense look at some of the same ground.

[lerite.livejournal.com]

It might be a little heavy, but "Family Properties" is a damn fine book.

And if you haven't read "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman" at least twice, go read it (again). Just do it. It won't take that long.

[jenett]

I love microhistories (one of the technical terms for 'follow a single subject through a whole bunch of different approaches/times/etc.) Snagged the following list I wrote up elsewhere, in case any of them are of interest.

Abbott, Elizabeth. A History of Celibacy. New York: Da Capo, 2001.
Yes, an odd topic – but it’s a look at the power of relationships in history, oddly enough: for a lot of recorded time, celibacy gave people options in their lives that they wouldn’t otherwise have had. That’s particularly true for women, but also in other settings. This is one of those books where every 2-3 pages is a different topic, and I continue to dive deeper into other areas as I get a chance.

Almond, Steve. Candyfreak: A Journey through the Chocolate Underbelly of America (Harvest Book). New York: Harvest Books, 2005.
A great look at a bunch of mostly-forgotten or highly-regional candies: funny, thoughtful, and fascinating.

Bishop, Holley. Robbing the Bees: A Biography of Honey–The Sweet Liquid Gold that Seduced the World. New York City: Free Press, 2006.
All about honey.

Brenner, Joël Glenn. The Emperors of Chocolate: Inside the Secret World of Hershey and Mars. New York City: Broadway, 2000.
A fascinating look at the two largest US chocolate companies at the time. Willy Wonka is not as far off (in terms of industrial spying, etc.) as you’d think – and some of the other factors in companies run by founders with extremely strong personalities and desires make this a fascinating read.

Finlay, Victoria. Color: A Natural History of the Palette. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2003.
One of my favorites on this list, this is a look at color. Finlay divides the book up into chapter by color, starting with black and brown, and working through red, green, yellow, and so on. She goes from the lapis lazuli mines of Afghanistan to the question of arsenic green (and whether it’s what caused Napoleon’s death.) Lots of fun and also very informative.

Gladwell, Malcolm. Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking.New York: Back Bay Books, 2007.
Maybe not technically a microhistory, but it reads a lot like one. Gladwell always gets me thinking, too.

Kurlansky, Mark. Salt: A World History. Boston: Penguin (Non-Classics), 2003. One of the earliest and best-known microhistories (also, a great audio book), Kurlansky has also written about cod, and the Basque history of the world (among others.)

Lee, Jennifer 8. The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food. New York: Twelve, 2009. I haven’t actually read all of this one yet, just the first chapter, but it’s a funny and thoughtful look at the history of Chinese food in America.

Roach, Mary. Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2002. All about what happens to people’s bodies after they die and donate their bodies to science – there are a lot more options than you think. What made Roach’s book a best-seller is that despite the topic, she’s caring, and thoughtful about what she finds out, and shares it in a spirit of learning and understanding, rather than poking fun or in horror.

[aedifica]

You both (aliseadae and jenett) might enjoy Reay Tannahill's Food In History. Skip her Sex In History, though--it's less well researched, less well written, and has bits of racial prejudice showing here and there. FIH is great, though.

aliseadae, I also really like Barbara Kingsolver's collection of essays, High Tide in Tucson.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Fred Anderson's Crucible of War is about what you learn in school as "the French and Indian War," and it makes all sorts of things about the American Revolution make so much more sense, even while you're shaking your head and going, "They what? That's so crazy and/or stupid!"

Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin did a good bio of J. Robert Oppenheimer called American Prometheus. Or for a more general approach to the physics community in that era, I can't recommend Richard Rhodes's The Making of the Atomic Bomb highly enough. Or, from the other side, Thomas Powers's Heisenberg's War.

Chandler Burr's The Emperor of Scent is fascinating but a bit one-sided.

Jesse Byock does lovely, lovely stuff about Iceland.

Jung Chang's Wild Swans is, if I recall correctly, sad but very much worth the time.

Samuel R. Delany's autobiography, The Motion of Light on Water, is good, too--possibly the best autobiography of a science fiction writer. I can't think of a better one, in fact. Judith Merril's is sort of unfocused, and once you read hers, you want to go back and kick Fred Pohl for all the stuff he glossed over or left out of his.

Ken Dryden's The Game is about one Stanley Cup championship he was in, and also about hockey and sport and learning and life and everything. Even if you don't like hockey, as long as you don't hate hockey, The Game is interesting.

I love Gretel Ehrlich's This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland.

Zakaria Erzinclioglu's Maggots, Murder, and Men is also very well done.

Tim Flannery's The Future Eaters: An Ecological History of the Australasian Lands and People.

Joel Garreau's The Nine Nations of North America will be dated by now--it was dated when I read it--but still has some ideas that sparked other ideas for me.

Laurie Garrett's The Coming Plague, holy crud. Terrifying.

Atul Gawande's books and essays. Anything. Mark Kurlansky, same deal. Also Bernd Heinrich.

You might like Primo Levi's The Periodic Table. Everyone I've given Uncle Tungsten to had read the Levi first, so it'd be interesting to hear how it went the other way around (if, in fact, you haven't already read the Levi). And if you like Dr. Sacks, his intellectual predecessor in some regards is A. R. Luria. (I recommend more of Dr. Sacks, if Uncle Tungsten is all you've read.)

Suzanne Massie's Land of the Firebird is an artistic/cultural history of Russia. Lots in there.

John McPhee's Annals of the Former World. Such nice rockses.

Steven Ozment is absolutely my favorite historian of Germany. He does standard macro stuff but also some beautiful microhistories. And along those lines, I really loved Wunderli's Peasant Fires when I read it.

[shenth.livejournal.com]

On the subject of The Coming Plague: If you read it, keep in mind that disease has always been a part of history. Just looking at infectious disease mortality rates over time is enough evidence that horror is nothing new. Furthermore, some of the subjects covered are there exclusively to show how panic can build. Toxic shock syndrome was given much more exposure than was warranted - same with Legionnaire's. There is some evidence that terrors like ebola have been around for quite some time, but were never noticed by Western scientists, and so were not recorded in the records you or I might access. Furthermore, the book makes little or no mention of non-fatal plagues like guinea worms that have been plagues forever, or even fatal ones like malaria.

It's not a bad book by any means. The facts it presents are true, and it makes for a good overview of emerging and reemerging infection disease. However, it's easy to panic when panic is not necessary. Yes, these diseases are a problem. Yes, we have to deal with them. But are we really so much worse off than we were a few hundred years ago? Older problems like TB and malaria still kill far more people than, say, machupo virus (at least as far as we have on record).

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

True, although larger cities and mass transportation do play a role in spreading viruses, and their potential role is even larger. For me one of the most terrifying parts of it, though, was that I read it when I had a friend living and working in Africa, and it seemed like every other chapter started, "So-and-so was working peacefully in her office. Little did she know that she was about to start projectile bleeding out her eyes and kidneys."

[shenth.livejournal.com]

Sure. But I've seen so much overreaction. Take "swine flu." It's seasonal flu! That's all it is! Any flu virus could mutate and become nasty, but we have better tools to deal with it now, and there's no evidence that H1N1 is going to destroy the world. That's the same panic that drives much of The Coming Plague. And people have been projectile bleeding out of their eyes and kidneys forever. Viruses come and go.

[wirewalking.livejournal.com]

I only read a little bit of nonfiction last year but I recommend most of it:

P.V. Glob, The Bog People

Martin Booth, Opium: A History

Carole G. Silver, Strange & Secret Peoples: Fairies and the Victorian Consciousness

John Boswell, The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance

Yup, that's a lamentably short little listie. Sigh.

Oh and. If you haven't tried chipotle & cinnamon in chocolate .. um. Run don't walk. Just sayin'.

[snugbug42.livejournal.com]

anything by Steven Pinker, if you happen to enjoy words. I'm reading The Stuff of Thought, currently in a chapter where he refers to verbs as "my little friends". Also, Lies My Teacher Told Me is a really neat look at cool history facts and the problems with the american education system.

[mlt23.livejournal.com]

Hons and Rebels by Jessica Mitford. (it's Daughters and Rebels for some of the US copies.) It's an autobiography and it's really interesting because the author had a really unusual family life but it's also about WWII.

Mustang Ranch and its Women by Alexa Albert. It's about brothels in Nevada.

And seconding the recommendation for Bill Bryson. I really enjoyed his Short History of Nearly Everything.

[ceci121.livejournal.com]

Bill Bryson is hilarious, and a genius. A Walk in the Woods in particular.
Senior year, Ms. Landreau gave me Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder-it's a biography of Paul Farmer and is all about disease and health care in the developing world. It got me really interested in epidemiology and public health and such.
Another science book that I'm reading right now (or was over break...hopefully I'll pick it back up) is Hope for a Heated Planet by Bob Musil, who gave some talks at my school last spring. It's a good summary of global climate change and he takes a really interesting perspective on it.