If you liked
Books like Stone age economics
Loved Stone age economics by Marshall Sahlins? 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
-
1
Cosmos
A poetic tour of the universe and our place in it; science writing with a sense of wonder.
-
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.
-
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.
-
4
A Short History of Nearly Everything
How we figured out the universe, the Earth and ourselves; vast, funny and wonderfully clear.
-
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.
-
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.
-
7
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
"The real cycle you're working on is a cycle called 'yourself.'"One of the most important and influential books of the past half-century, Robert M. Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance i
-
8
The Tao of Physics
The Tao of Physics is a book about the relationship between physics and spirituality. The book explores the parallels between Eastern mysticism and modern physics. It discusses the similarities betwee
-
9
The Selfish Gene
Evolution reframed from the gene's point of view; a clear, controversial classic of biology.
-
10
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