If you liked
Books like How computers work
Loved How computers work by Ron White? 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 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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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
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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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
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
Eight Little Piggies
Contemplative essays speaking often of the importance of the unbroken connection of modern man and our ancestors.
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8
On becoming babywise
Scientists can put a man on the moon, but they cannot answer the most basic question of early parenting: how to have a happy and contented baby, who sleeps continually through the night like the rest
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9
Bully for Brontosaurus
Essays from the author's column This view of life, published in Natural history.
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10
The Demon-Haunted World
A prescient warning of a future we now inhabit, where fake news stories and Internet conspiracy theories play to a disaffected American populace “A glorious book . . . A spirited defense of science .