If you liked
Books like The Disappearing Spoon
Loved The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean? 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
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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2
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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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 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
The Emperor of All Maladies
A 'biography' of cancer across centuries of struggle to understand it; a Pulitzer-winning epic of medicine.
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8
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
The woman whose cells transformed medicine without her consent; science, ethics and a family's story.
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9
At Home
At Home: A Short History of Private Life is a history of domestic life written by Bill Bryson. It was published in May 2010. The book covers topics of the commerce, architecture, technology and geogra
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10
Data Collection in Sociolinguistics
"This edited volume provides up-to-date, succinct, relevant, and informative discussion about methods of data collection in sociolinguistic research. It covers the main areas of research design, condu