Best Books: Nonfiction, Journalism, and Science

Continuing to list the Best Books and breaking it up by genre, we have now made our way to nonfiction and journalism. (Then later I added science, because honestly I love to read in this nonfiction category more than most the others.) Actually, I compiled this one long ago, but the length of the list intimidated me into procrastinating on it. Plus, I would much rather be reading fiction, right? Maybe not. I have read some really awesome nonfiction books, and some that have changed my life.

Please excuse any repeats (or just let me know in the comments), and also note that this list is very American-centric, by no design of my own. Feel free to make more global suggestions.

The Elements of Style, William Strunk Jr.
In Cold Blood, Truman Capote *
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou
Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser
The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan
Maus, Art Spiegelman
On Writing, Stephen King ***
Silent Spring, Rachel Carson
Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared DiamondHiroshima, John Hersey
A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson
The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Malcolm X
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers
Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenrich
A Room of Ones Own, Virginia Woolf
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Dee Brown
A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking
Out of Africa, Karen Blixen
All the President’s Men, Carl Bernstein
A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn
Our Bodies, Ourselves
Black Boy, Richard Wright
The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan
The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins
And the Band Played On, Randy Shilts
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William L. Shirer
What Color Is Your Parachute?, Richard N. Bolles
A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway
The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell
Dreams from My Father, Barak Obama
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe
Mastering the Art of French Coking, Julia Child
The Joy of Sex, Alex Comfort
The Gnostic Gospels, Elaine PagelThe Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolfe
The Double Helix, James D. Watson
How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie
Homeage to Catalonia, George Orwell
Baby and Childcare, Benjamin Spock
The Fatal Shore, Robert Hughes
No Logo, Naomi Klein
The Executioner’s Song, Normal Mailer
Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book
Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Ages
The Making of the President 1960, Theodore H. White
The Power Broker, Robert A. Caro
Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nobokov
The Naked Ape, Desmond Morris
Notes of a Native Son, James Baldwin
Working, Studs Terkel
The Lives of a Cell, Lewis Thomas
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein
The Best and the Brightest, David Halberstam
The Civil War, Shelby Foote
An Eternal Golden Braid, Douglas R. Hofstadter
Coming of Age in Somoa, Margaret Meade
Capitalism and Freedom, Milton Friedman
Manchild in the Promised Land, Claude Brown
Emporer of All Maladies, Siddhartha Mukherjee
A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, David Foster Wallace
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas S. Kuhn
The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright
Why We Can’t Wait, Martin Luther King Jr.
Ball Four, Jim Bouton
Unsafe at Any Speed, Ralph Nader
Animal Liberation, Peter Singer
Orientalism, Edward W. Said
The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, John Maynard Keyes
The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom
God and Man at Yale, Buckley
The Other America, Michael Harrington
The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt
Dispatches, Michael Herr
The American Way of Death Revisited, Jessica Mitford
The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order, Samuel P. Huntingdon
The Last Lion, William R. Manchester
The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama
Syntactic Structures, Noam Chomsky
On Human Nature, Edward O. Wilson
The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays, Richard Hofstadter
The Conscience of a Conservative, Barry M. Goldwater
The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs
Carry Me Home, Dianne McWhorter
The Nature and Destiny of Man, Volume 1, Reinhold Neibur
The Story of Art, E.H. Gombrich
How to Cook a Wolf, M.F.K. Fisher
A Theory of Justice, John Rawls
The American Cinema, Andrew Sarris
A Child of the Century, Ben Hecht
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, Alfred Kinsey
What It Takes, Richard Ben Kramer
Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan
Within the Context of No Context, George W.S. Trow
Mystery Train, Griel Marcus
The Sweet Science, A.J. Liebling
The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell
Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson
The Education of Henry Adams, Henry Adams
The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James
Up from Slavery, Booker T. Washington
A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf
The Sea Around Us (and rest of trilogy?), Rachel Carson
Selected Essays 1917-1932, T.S. Eliot
The American Language, H.L. Mencken
The Frontier in American History, Frederick Jackson Turner
Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster
The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman
The Proper Study of Mankind, Isaiah Berlin
The Nature and Destiny of Man, Reinhold Niebuhr
Notes of a Native Son, James Baldwin
The Elements of Style, Strunk and White
An American Dilemma, Gunnar Myrdal
Principia Mathematica, North and Russell
The Mismeasure of Man, Stephen Jay Gould
The Mirror and the Lamp, Meyer Howard Abrams
The Art of the Soluble, Peter B. Medawar
The Ants, Bert Hoelldobler
A Theory of Justice, John Rawls
Art and Illusion, Ernest H. Gombrich
The Making of the English Working Class, E.P. Thompson
The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois
Principia Ethica, G.E. Moore
Philosophy and Civilization, John Dewey
On Growth and Form, D’Arcy Thompson
Ideas and Opinions, Albert Einstein
The Age of Jackson, Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Rebecca West
Autobiographies, W.B. Yeats
Science and Civilization in China, Joseph Needham
Goodbye to All That, Robert Graves
The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Mark Twain
Children of Crisis, Robert Coles
A Study of History, Arnold J. Toynbee
The Affluent Society, John Kenneth Galbraith
Present at the Creation, Dean Acheson
The Great Bridge, David McCullough
Patriotic Gore, Edmund Wilson
Samuel Johnson, Walter Jackson Bate
The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Alex Haley
The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe
Eminent Victorians, Lytton Strachey
Working, Studs Terkel
Darkness Visible, William Stryon
The Liberal Imagination, Lionel Trilling
The Second World War, Winston Churchill
Out of Africa, Isak Dinesen
Jefferson and His Times, Dumus Malone
In the American Grain, William Carlos Williams
Cadillac Desert, Marc Reisner
The House of Morgan, Ron Chernow
The Sweet Science, A.J. Liebling
The Open Society and Its Enemies, Karl Popper
The Art of Memory, Frances A. Yates
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, R.H. Tawney
A Preface to Morals, Walter Lippman
The Gate of Heavenly Peace, Jonathan D. Spence
The Strange Career of Jim Crow, Vann Woodward
The Rise of the West, William H. McNeill
James Joyce, Richard Ellmann
Florence Nightengale, Cecil Woodham-Smith
The City in History, Lewis Mumford
Battle Cry of Freedom, James M. McPherson
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, Edmund Morris
Studies in Iconology, Erwin Panofsky
The Face of Battle, John Keegan
The Strange Death of Liberal England, George Dangerfield
Vermeer, Lawrence Going
A Bright Shining Lie, Neil Sheehan
West with the Night, Beryl Markham
This Boy’s Life, Tobias Wolff
A Mathematician’s Apology, G.H. Hardy
Six Easy Pieces, Richard P. Feynman
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard
The Golden Bough, James George Frazer
Shadow and Act, Ralph Ellison
The Power Broker, Robert A. Caro
The Contours of American History, William Appleman Williams
The Promise of American Life, Herbert Croly
The Journalist and the Murderer, Janet Malcolm
The Taming of Chance, by Ian Hacking
Operating Instructions, Anne Lamott
Melbourne, Lord David Cecil
The Shock of the New, Robert Hughes
The Story of Art, Ernst Gombrich
Ways of Seeing, John Berger
Notes on Camp, Susan Sontag
Mythologies, Roland Barthes
The Revenge of Gaia, James Lovelock
The Journalist and the Murderer, Janet Malcolm
Dispatches, Michael Herr
The Lives of the Poets, Samuel Johnson
An Image of Africa, Chinua Achebe
The Uses of Enchantment, Bruno Bettelheim
Confessions, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass
De Profundis, Oscar Wilde
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T.E. Lawrence
The Story of My Experience with Truth, Mahatma Gandhi
The Man Died, Wole Soyinka
The Periodic Table, Primo Levi
Bad Blood, Lorna Sage
The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud
The Romantic Generation, Charles Rosen
The Symposium, Plato
Meditations, Marcus Aurelius
Essays, Michel de Montaigne
The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton
Meditations on First Philosophy, Rene Descartes
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, David Hume
Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant
Phenomenology of Mind, G.W.F. Hegel
Walden, H.D. Thoreau
On Liberty, John Stuart Mill
Thus Spake Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzshe
The Art of War, Sun Tzu
The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli
Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes
The Rights of Man, Thomas Paine
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft
The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marxx
The Second Sex, Simone de Bouviour
The Wretched of the Earth, Franz Fanon
The Medium is the Message, Marshall McLuhan
The Female Eunuch, Germaine Greer
Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky
Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky
The Golden Bough, James George Frazer
The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James
On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin
The Character of Physical Law, Richard Feynmann
The Double Helix, James Watson
The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins
A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking
The Book of the City of Ladies, Christine de Pisan
Praise of Folly, Erasmus
Letters Concerning the English Nation, Voltaire
Suicide, Emile Durkheim
Economy and Society, Max Weber
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee
The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan
The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault
News of a Kidnapping, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Columbine, Dave Cullen
The American Paradox, David G. Myers