Science Books You Should Read William Dement's The Promise of Sleep is an excellent introduction to the science of sleep research and sleep medecine. I also recommend it to people who know a fair amount about sleep research, but who don't have a general background. Suprisingly, this is an easy to read book, thanks to the good writing and also the passion of Dement's beliefs: that sleep is the most neglected area of research and public interest that has such a major effect on humanities' happiness. Very highly recommended! George Gamow's Mr. Tompkins short story series taught me to love physics. Each chapter is a short story concerning a dimwitted character who attends physics lectures, falls asleep, and then dreams about the topic of the lecture. The dreams offer "alternative worlds" where some small rule of physics changes (such as the curvature of space, or the speed of light) so that the world is greatly changed, and the dream explains the physics concepts in an easily grasped manner. George Gamow's The Creation of the Universe attempts to explain to laypeople what scientists (of the 1960s) know about how the universe was created. Quite readable, and interesting. A great deal of this book is still relevant, despite its dating, largely because Gamow takes pains to separate fairly well-established beliefs from the current beliefs. Think of this as an antecedent to A Brief History of Time. Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking is a layperson's guide to food chemistry and food science. I found it engrossing. To the right of the book image, I include a typical inside photograph: an electron microscope scan of two different kinds of cheese. Claudio Stampi is the editor of Why We Nap, a collection of research papers on polyphasic sleeping. I am especially interested in research on alternative sleep schedules, increased sleep efficiency and decreased sleep inertia, and this is the major book on the topic. After the early 1990s, this research topic fell out of favor, and not much was published about it. However, you can find a fair amount of research at the Naval Health Research Center , where a good amount of sleep research takes places, and the research papers are available at no cost, for the asking. Particularly interesting is Stampi's research into a sleep schedule arranged around a 4-hour "day", as well as the effectiveness of people who adopt polyphasic sleep schedules (such as long distance sail-boat racers). E.O. Wilson's and Bert Holldobler's Journey to the Ants is their layperson's version of their pulitzer-prize winning book on ant culture and civilization. This book contains a great many insights on Darwinism, genetics, evolution and (surprise!) human behavior. Greatly recommended (my wife loved it too!). I had high hopes for Paulos' A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper, but was sorely disappointed. Simply, this book is written at too dumb a level, and so there is little information to glean, except for a few cute stories. Stauber and Rampton's Toxic Sludge is Good for You! (lies, damn lies and the public relations industry) is a classic of journalism and of skeptic literature. A wonderful expose of how our minds are manipulated (usually, to great success). Did you know that the advertising campaign to "put trash in its place" (in the garbage can) is a PR campaign conducted by the biggest polluters in an effort to shift the responsibility for pollution onto the consumer rather than the creator of the stuff we have to throw out? That, any many more useful facts await you... I felt that James Maas' Power Sleep was an acceptable introduction to sleep research, but was perhaps dumbed down more than it needed to be (I assume the publisher wanted a "pop" book). Given that there are so few non-scientific books on sleep research, this book (even with its flaws) is a welcome addition. Dement's The Promise of Sleep is a much better book with similar goals. I enjoyed Gleick's biography of physicist Richard Feynman entitled Genius. However, a great deal of the same material is found in Feynman's two books What do you care what other people think? and Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman. All these books are a treat, being virtually "difficult knowledge" free, in the style of a pop biography. Still, I had fun reading them, as Feynman is just a treat to read about. Carl Sagan's The Demon Haunted World is his rant against superstition in the world. It could have been cut by 50% (there is a great deal of repetition). If you are familiar with traditional skeptic's peeves, you've read most of the book already. However, if you aren't familiar with the topics most skeptics rant about, then this is considered by many an excellent introduction. I struggled through Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach because it is a difficult book written for several different audiences. On the one hand, there are interesting fairly-easy-to-read treatises on philosophy, logic, genetics while other sections are extremely technical, requiring advanced mathematics to read. The proof of Gödel's theorem was especially painful. However, I greatly enjoyed the sections on Bach and Escher, and the playfulness of the Alice-in-Wonderland-meets-Aristotle sections was wonderful. If you can persevere, I think you'll find this book worthwhile. Larry Gonick's and Woollcott Smith's Cartoon Guide to Statistics is one way to bootstrap yourself into a basic understanding of statistical methods. The book unfortunately cannot make up its mind about who its audience is. About half the book is oriented toward the beginner in statistics (that's my level) who simple want to learn about statistics, while the other half seems geared toward students of statistics classes who are having a hard time, and need it all explained to them with pretty little pictures. As such, straightforward explanations are comingled with pages of statistical math, without an explanation of why we should care about the math at all (a proof of so and so's law is not illuminating in and of itself). There probably are better introductory guides to statistics, and if someone can recommend one, I'd be grateful. George Gamow's One, Two, Three... Infinity is a good introduction to several fields of science. He covers problems in mathematics, biology, genetics, physics and cosmology. A fairly easy to read book, though tedious at times, I still enjoyed his explanations of certain issues, such as how an atomic bomb works and can be built. However, the first edition of this book was in 1947, and it was updated in 1961, and a great deal has occured in science in the intervening years, so many of his discussions that were cutting edge back then, have now undergone much change (for example, the section about how atoms work is very out of date). Gamow's drawings, as usual, are excellent, and help clarify difficult concepts. He spends quite a bit of time explaining how discoveries were made, and how the tools were built to make that discovery, and this is probably where his writing and drawing is his strongest contribution. James Randi's The Faith Healers is an uncompromising rant against religious faith healers. Great fun, but 100% content free. I had fun while I read it, but afterward felt that it was a waste of my time, and that I shouldn't have bothered. Other book categories: History, Science fiction, Ayn Rand, Salman Rushdie, Buckminster Fuller, Business