If you liked
Books like Modern Japan
Loved Modern Japan by Elise Tipton? 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
A Short History of Nearly Everything
How we figured out the universe, the Earth and ourselves; vast, funny and wonderfully clear.
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2
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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3
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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4
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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5
Cosmos
A poetic tour of the universe and our place in it; science writing with a sense of wonder.
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6
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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7
Stiff
The surprising afterlives of human cadavers; morbidly funny and genuinely fascinating.
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8
Body Image
Body Image provides a comprehensive summary of research on body image in men, women, and children drawing together research findings from the fields of psychology, sociology, clothing, and gender stud
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9
Fast Food Nation
To a degree both engrossing and alarming, the story of fast food is the story of postwar Amerca. Though created by a handful of mavericks, the fast food industry has triggered the homogenization of ou
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10
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