If you liked
Books like The Intelligent Man's Guide to Science
Loved The Intelligent Man's Guide to Science by Isaac Asimov? 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
Cosmos
A poetic tour of the universe and our place in it; science writing with a sense of wonder.
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2
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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3
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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4
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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5
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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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
Kitsch
Gillo Dorfles offers a veritable "catalogue raisonne of reigning bad taste" in the visual arts. His purpose is not simply to entertain but rather to demonstrate the contagious and corrosive nature of
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8
The amateur astronomer
Sir Patrick Moore, CBE, FRS is without a doubt the world’s most widely known and respected of broadcasters on astronomy. His BBC-TV program, The Sky at Night, remains the longest-running TV program in
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9
The Human Use of Human Beings
"Only a few books stand as landmarks in social and scientific upheaval. Norbert Wiener's classic is one in that small company. Founder of the science of cybernetics--the study of the relationship betw
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10
Authority and the Individual
From Ancient Greek philosophy to the French Revolution to the modern welfare state, in Authority & the Individual Bertrand Russell tackles the perennial questions about the balance between authority &