Your favorite/influential non-fiction books?

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There is a thread on our favorite books which mostly leans towards the novels... here I'm asking of the readers among us, if they have a favorite non-fiction, maybe relating to their hobbies or profession, or better yet a philosophical text that shape their thinking to some degree or another form of experience as such, to share.

Rousseau's Confessions was certainly one of mine.

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HEI guys.



Some different categories!

General Recommendation: I think ALL THE TIME about Tom Vanderbilt's Traffic.

Professional: My work as a teacher was shaped in part by The Dyslexic Advantage.

Body/Health: My understanding of my experiences and the experiences of other women was really illuminated by Come As You Are (which anyone who is a woman OR romantically interested in women should absolutely read).

Culture/Justice: I'm still mulling over the ideas from James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, because I see the heart of his ideas as expanding beyond race and into gender/sexuality/ethnicity/etc.

Mental: My day-to-day life has been wonderfully impacted by The Bullet Journal Method and Atomic Habits.

And one last weird side-note: years ago (2014) I read The Empathy Exams, and one of the essays covered this fringe group of people who were convinced they had weird diseases or bugs in their bodies. And they were obsessed with dosing themselves with Ivermectin, which I was familiar with because we used it to deworm our horses. Imagine my shock (and alarm and irritation and dismay) when during the COVID outbreak people were treating themselves with Ivermectin! The mentally-ill, out-there solution was suddenly very trendy among certain groups! Utterly bizarre! I think about this all the time: how this gross, weird idea suddenly 10 years later was something being touted by people with millions of listeners/fans.



The Intel Trinity: How Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, and Andy Grove Built the World's Most Important Company

Steve Jobs ( Walter Isaacson)

Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco

When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management

Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster

Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors

The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea

In Cold Blood

Helter Skelter

The Right Stuff

Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid to the World

The Private Life of Chairman Mao

The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York



Body/Health: My understanding of my experiences and the experiences of other women was really illuminated by Come As You Are (which anyone who is a woman OR romantically interested in women should absolutely read).



A book about the fight against cancer: The Emperor of the Maladies,




Please Quote/Tag Or I'll Miss Your Responses
Last Man Standing Mort Sahl and the Birth of Modern Comedy (James Curtis)
Jim Morrison: Friends Gathered Together (Frank Lisciandro)
Heartland (Mort Sahl)
Lennon on Lennon conversations with John Lennon
The trials of Jimmy Hoffa,: An autobiography (Hoffa)
Healing The Enemy (Larry Garrett)
Cassavetes On Cassavetes (Cassavetes, Carney)
Songs My Mother Taught Me: Marlon Brando, Robert Lindsey
Bill Hicks: Agent of Evolution (Kevin Booth, Michael Bertin)
Citizen Welles A Biography of Orson Welles (Frank Brady