If you liked
Books like A Short History of Nearly Everything
Loved A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson? Here are 10 books with a similar appeal — drawn mostly from popular science, ranked by how confidently we'd recommend them next.
10 books · ranked
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1
The Tipping Point
Gladwell asks why some ideas, products and behaviours spread like viruses while others die quietly. His answer involves three types of people (Connectors, Mavens and Salesmen), the stickiness of messages, and the importance of context. The Tipping Point introduced a vocabulary — tipping point, connectors, mavens — that became part of how we discuss social change.
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2
Braiding Sweetgrass
A botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation weaves together Indigenous plant knowledge, scientific botany and memoir to argue that plants are not passive objects but beings with gifts to offer, and that reciprocity — not extraction — is the proper relationship between humans and the living world. One of the most-read works of nature writing in recent years.
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3
A Brief History of Time
Black holes, the Big Bang and the shape of the cosmos for the general reader; the bestseller that made physics fashionable.
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4
Cosmos
A poetic tour of the universe and our place in it; science writing with a sense of wonder.
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5
On the Origin of Species
Darwin presents his evidence for natural selection — the mechanism by which species evolve through variation and survival of the fittest — drawn from his voyage on the Beagle and years of observation. The most consequential scientific book of the 19th century, it permanently changed how humans understand their place in nature.
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6
Stiff
The surprising afterlives of human cadavers; morbidly funny and genuinely fascinating.
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7
Blink
Intuition is not some magical property that arises unbidden from the depths of our mind. It is a product of long hours and intelligent design, of meaningful work environments and particular rules and
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8
Modern Japan
"This comprehensive textbook provides a concise and fascinating introduction to the social, cultural and political history of modern Japan. Ranging from the Tokugawa period to the present day, Modern
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9
The Fabric of the Cosmos
A magnificent challenge to conventional ideas' Financial Times'I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It manages to be both challenging and entertaining: it is highly recommended' the Independent'(Greene) se
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10
The Road to Reality
Un libro definitivo e imprescindible para tener en la mano, en un solo volumen, todo el saber acumulado hasta la actualidad sobre el universo, el espacio, las leyes que lo rigen y los conceptos esenci