Ackerman, Dianne, A Natural History of the Senses. Vintage, 1991.
A lush, lyrical, scholarly, intimate, exuberant exploration of our five sensory portals to reality by the gifted poet and nature writer Ackerman. Through science, Ackerman helps us rediscover the mystery of our selves.
Angier, Natalie, Woman: An Intimate Geography. Houghton Mifflin, 1999.
Female physiology is the ideal topic for this smart, tough, funny, sexy (I hope it’s not sexist to say) writer, who puts more effort into a single sentence than many of us put into whole articles.
Austin, James, Zen and the Brain. MIT Press, 1998.
Too long (844 pages), fragmented, freighted with detail, this book by a neurologist and Zen practitioner contradicts its own dictum that wisdom lies in simplification. Zen and the Brain nonetheless evokes Varieties of Religious Experience (see below) in its effort to comprehend mystical experiences sympathetically and scientifically.
Blackmore, Susan, In Search of the Light. Prometheus, 1986.
A spectacular marijuana-propelled out-of-body experience during college at Oxford propelled Blackmore into a career as a parapsychology believer and researcher. This memoir relates how the British psychologist gradually, painfully became a psi skeptic—albeit one who still pursues and finds meaning in altered states.
Bohm, David, Wholeness and the Implicate Order. Routledge, 1983.
Skip the New Agey film What the Bleep Do We Know About Quantum Mechanics and read Bohm. Sadly, this tortured quantum seer never found the wholeness he envisions in this book, which offers an intriguing albeit confusing alternative to the Copenhagen interpretation.
Bush, Vannevar, Science, The Endless Frontier. 1945 (originally written as a report to President Harry Truman). Physicist, prophet of the worldwide web, founder of the National Science Foundation, Bush asserts that science is an inexhaustible source of insight into and power over nature. He’s wrong, of course, but his grand vision spurred America’s massive post-war investment in science.
Carson, Rachel, Silent Spring. Houghton Mifflin, 1962.
The chemical industry and its government allies were still attacking Carson as a deluded alarmist when she died in 1964, two years after exposing the devastating consequences of pesticides on birds, fish and other creatures. Carson posthumously got DDT banned and helped launch the environmental movement.
Chagnon, Napoleon, Yanamomo: The Fierce People. Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, 1968.
Among the bestselling anthropology books of all time, Chagnon’s first-hand account of a violent Amazonian tribe challenges, to put it mildly, romantic notions of the peaceful, noble savage. Contrary to what his allies and enemies alike often claim—and to his credit--Chagnon resists simple Darwinian explanations of Yanomamo violence.
Chomsky, Noam, Language and Problems of Knowledge. MIT Press, 1988.
This is less a book than a grabbag of lectures, transcripts, odds and ends, and Chomsky could not care less about being writerly, entertaining, eloquent in any conventional sense. Language and Problems nonetheless yields insights into one of the most original, uncompromising thinkers of our age.
Crews, Frederick, The Memory Wars. New York Review of Books, 1995.
In the 1980s, Crews morphed from a psychoanalytically oriented literary critic into a leading Freud-basher. This book consists of two devastating assaults on Freud’s ethics and science published in the New York Review of Books, together with letters from outraged Freudians and Crews’s withering rejoinders.
Crick, Francis, The Astonishing Hypothesis. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1994.
The co-discoverer of the double helix outlines a plan for reducing consciousness, science’s great bugaboo, to physical processes in the brain. Just as only the commie-basher Richard Nixon could re-establish relations with communist China, so only the arch-rationalist Crick could make consciousness a respectable scientific subject.
Davis, Wade, One River. Touchstone, 1996.
A specialist in psychotropic plants, Davis retraces the Amazonian explorations of his mentor, the swashbuckling Harvard botanist Richard Evans Shultes. The result is an enthralling scientific adventure story—Indiana Jones on acid, or ayahuasca.
Dawkins, Richard, The Selfish Gene. Oxford University Press, 1976.
In the most original and influential of his many books, Darwin’s icily eloquent defender and extender introduces the theory of selfish genes, which remains as compelling and disturbing as ever. Dawkins’s biggest flaw is his haughtiness; his sentences all seem implicitly prefaced with the phrase, “As any fool can see…”
Delgado, Jose, Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilized Society. Harper & Row, 1969.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the Yale neuroscientist Delgado showed that he could manipulate minds and bodies of monkeys, cats, bulls and humans by stimulating their brains with implanted electrodes. In Physical Control, Delgado details this research and ponders its philosophical, ethical and social implications. His creepily compelling book is especially relevant now, as Pentagon-funded scientists revive and refine the neurotechnologies Delgado pioneered.
Dennett, Daniel, Consciousness Explained. Little Brown, 1991.
Dennett is not as clever as he thinks he is–no one could meet that standard–and critics complain that Consciousness Explained Away would have been a more apt title. His book is nonetheless a witty, imaginative exploration of the philosophical issues raised by modern brain and cognitive research.
De Waal, Frans, Good Natured. Harvard University Press, 1996.
The eminent primatologist draws from decades of observations of chimpanzees, bonobos and other primates to make the case that compassion, justice, reconciliation, love, friendship have deep evolutionary roots. De Waal’s work represents a valuable counterpoint to scientific treatises emphasizing primate nastiness.
Diamond, Jared, Collapse. Viking, 2005.
Even more important and eloquent than Diamond’s bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel, Collapse examines a wide range of peoples, from ancient Easter Islanders to modern Montanans, and gleans lessons about why societies fail or thrive. If we still screw up the planet, we can’t claim we didn’t know any better.
Dyson, Freeman, Infinite in All Directions. Harper & Row, 1988.
The iconoclastic physicist reflects on superstring theory, God, the origin of life, the long-term prospects for intelligence and other topics that most of us last pondered in our sophomore year in college. The title is an apt description of Dyson’s imagination.
Feyerabend, Paul, Against Method. Verso, 1975.
One of the most loathed and misunderstood modern philosophers introduces his anarchic anti-philosophy, which he sums up with the phrase “anything goes.” As practiced by Feyerabend, philosophy becomes performance art.
Feynman, Richard, The Character of Physical Law. MIT Press, 1967.
Feynman was not only a giant of particle physics, architect of quantum electrodynamics, contributor to the Manhattan Project, bongo-playing wild-and-crazy guy (as James Gleick shows in his masterful biography Genius). This book shows he was also a down-to-earth, funny explicator of physics.
Freud, Sigmund, The Interpretation of Dreams. 1900 (in German).
This is the centerpiece of an oeuvre that, regardless of its scientific merits, has had an irrevocable impact on science, psychology, the arts and all of culture. Question for scientist/authors: Would you rather be influential than right?
Gardner, Martin, Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. Dover, 1957.
Gardner poses a tough choice. The mathematician, puzzler and magician is best-known as the author of Scientific American’s “Mathematical Games” column, which ran from 1956 to 1981 and inspired many future mathematicians. Collections of these columns are still in print. But Fads and Fallacies is a skeptical classic that remains all-too-relevant today (see for example Gardner on reincarnation, UFOs and Dianetics, a.k.a. Scientology).
Geertz, Clifford, The Interpretation of Cultures. Basic Books, 1973.
Geertz equates anthropologists with literary critics and cultures with “texts,” and he displays his own intensely personal style of cultural interpretation, which he calls “I-witnessing.” Should Geertz be blamed for inspiring countless pretentious, self-indulgent tracts by anthropologists lacking his literary skill?
Gleick, James, Chaos. Penguin Books, 1987.
A masterful, McPhee-ish (see below) mixture of character studies and scientific exposition, Gleick’s bestseller spawned scores of me-too books by journalists and scientists about chaos and its repackaged successor, complexity.
Gould, Stephen Jay, Wonderful Life. W.W. Norton, 1989.
In this meditation on a fossil site called the Burgess Shale, the co-author of punctuated equilibrium–which critics dubbed evolution by jerks–makes the case that contingency has played a crucial role in life’s history. As in all Gould’s writings, the florid sophistication of the prose contrasts with the simplicity of the message, which boils down to “Shit happens.”
