1. Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race
Reni Eddo-Lodge
In recent years, we’ve read excellent nonfiction on race in the US, courtesy of writers such as Ta-Nehisi Coates, Claudia Rankine and Jesmyn Ward. Reni Eddo-Lodge’s superbly accessible book was a great addition to the British canon. It is impressively intersectional in its approach, talking about class and gender as well as reframing the conversation to be Britain-focused. The title alone is arresting, and can sort out those who judge a book by its cover from those willing to interrogate and investigate their own privilege. While it does look at whiteness as a concept and the very notion of privilege, it acts as a comfort read for British people of colour, who will see themselves and arguments they’ve made in the past in those pages. And because Reni’s style is unfussy, pragmatic and confident, it is one of the most important books about the subject in the country at the moment.
Nikesh Shukla
Author of The Good Immigrant
Further reading…
Between the World and Me
Ta-Nehisi Coates
A memoir in the form of a letter to the author’s 14-year-old son, recalling experiences from Coates’s Baltimore youth and showing how the brutalisation of black men is intricately woven into American society.
Citizen
Claudia Rankine
A powerful hybrid of poetry and prose that explores everyday discrimination – personal, political and cultural – giving a lie to the notion that western society is post-racial.
Brit(ish)
Afua Hirsch
As a biracial child, Hirsch was often asked where she was from – the assumption being not Britain. In her debut, she questions Britain’s own roots, observing that this country built on conquest has no “white history”.
2. Sapiens
Yuval Noah Harari
It’s nearly a century since HG Wells published The Outline of History – a book that offered a panoramic perspective of how civilisations emerged. It went through many editions, sold in the millions, and was repeatedly revised (even in the 1960s, after its author’s death). Sapiens is a modern-day counterpart to Wells’s book. It’s another “epic” broad-brush history – tracing humanity’s origins back more than a million years. It succeeds through its eclectic scope, its readability, and its author’s willingness to offer ethical judgments.
Sapiens has been highly praised by the gurus of Silicon Valley, and read by geeks whose culture usually centres on fantasy movies, computer games, etc – even though Harari himself is far from that world. His life seems austere and he avoids social media. It’s usually TV spin-offs and books by or about celebrities that have a headstart in the bestseller list. So it’s especially gratifying to acclaim the global success of a book written (originally in Hebrew) by a young Israeli lecturer in military history who had no prior public profile. Sapiens has widened the world view of millions of readers other whistorians cannot reach – and next month Harari may have three books simultaneously in the bestseller lists.
Martin Rees
Astronomer royal and author of On the Future (out in September)
Further reading…
The Patterning Instinct
Jeremy Lent
Pioneering a field he describes as “cognitive history”, Lent explores the patterns of meaning embedded in different human cultures to understand how we might avoid planetary collapse. George Monbiot called it “the most profound and far-reaching book I have ever read”.
Prisoners of Geography
Tim Marshall
Marshall, a British journalist, uses maps, essays and his own experiences as a foreign correspondent to explore how the physical geography of different regions – China, Latin America, the Middle East – has shaped major world events.
The Better Angels of Our Nature
Steven Pinker
Contrary to popular belief, society is becoming less violent, according to the renowned Harvard psychologist, who deploys an arsenal of stats and historical and anthropological research to tell us how humanity became more peaceful, and why.
3. Thinking, Fast and Slow
Daniel Kahneman
Much as I loved this book I would never have guessed it would be a bestseller. Yes, it’s written by a Nobel-prize winning psychologist and yes, it’s an extremely comprehensive pull-together of decades of research in behavioural economics, but it’s not an easy read. There are puzzles you can try out on yourself, but there are also plenty of dense explanations of experimental design that few of us dare give when writing for a general audience. But Kahneman’s sales figures show he was right not to underestimate his readers. Whether or not people did read every one of the more than 400 pages plus 60-odd pages of appendices and endnotes, the book appeals because it allows us to recognise in ourselves the predictable mistakes we frequently make in our thinking. Yet Kahneman has resisted the temptation to pretend that it’s easy to stop taking these mental shortcuts. The book’s success has demonstrated that although our thinking isn’t perfect in these days of supposedly short attention spans, many people are prepared to think slow and to read a serious treatment of a serious topic.
Claudia Hammond
Broadcaster and author of Mind Over Money
Further reading…
Misbehaving
Richard Thaler
Economists believe logic shapes human decisions, but what if humans are driven by their faults, as well as their rationality? Nobel prize winner Thaler explores what really motivates people to spend.
Risk Savvy
Gerd Gigerenzer
Don’t automatically expect doctors and financial advisers to make the right decisions for us, suggests Gigerenzer, a director at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin. His book provides simple tools to assess risk in our lives more accurately and avoid unrealistic hopes and fears.
The Power of Habit
Charles Duhigg
This fascinating book by a New York Times journalist explores how people get stuck in a rut and delves into psychological and neuroscientific research to find out what it takes to change our most deeply ingrained habits.
4. Seven Brief Lessons on Physics
Carlo Rovelli
Of the myriad books about the heavenly firmament none is particularly easy, because space is hard. The fusion of the astronomically big with the imperceptibly small world of quantum physics has generated the toughest but most fundamental ideas that humans have yet considered – relativity, gravity, time. The grandness to the consideration of spacetime in the works of Sagan, Feynman, Hawking and other stars sometimes masks the fact that the ideas within are barely comprehensible – we experience gravity all the time, but understand little of how it actually works. Rovelli’s sumptuous translated words are in this tradition, with even more poetry and opera than his forebears, but with one key difference: brevity defines Seven Brief Lessons on Physics – it’s not much more than a pamphlet. Instead, this is a kind of an amuse bouche for some of the ideas that are wrapped up in 20th-century astrophysics where it borders on philosophy. Millions have digested this little treat, and plenty will have gone on for a meatier second course.
Adam Rutherford
Author of The Book of Humans (out 13 September)
Further reading…
The Particle at the End of the Universe
Sean Carroll
This prize-winning book describes the search for the Higgs boson and examines how society benefits from the vast sums invested in the ambitious and complex attempts to observe subatomic particles at facilities such as the Large Hadron Collider at Cern.
A Universe from Nothing
Lawrence Krauss
The cosmologist’s masterful attempt at deconstructing the theological retort “why is there something rather than nothing?” The answer, he says, can be found in quantum mechanics.
The Beginning of Infinity
David Deutsch
The Oxford physicist’s hugely ambitious and eloquent attempt to explain the life, universe and everything – and guess what, the answer isn’t 42. The good news for humanity is that he believes in “infinite progress”.
5. The Sixth Extinction
Elizabeth Kolbert
There is something compelling about stories about neighbours from hell. What makes Kolbert’s version particularly chilling is the identity of those villains next door: Homo sapiens. Human beings, she emphasises with disquieting clarity, turn out to be appalling planetary co-residents, having already wiped out creatures from mastodons to Neanderthals and dodos to passenger pigeons. Nor do we show signs of stopping. “One-third of all reef-building corals, a third of all freshwater molluscs, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles, and a sixth of all birds are now headed towards oblivion,” she tells us. This is a book written with rigour and restraint. It may be low on prescriptive action but its rich range of subject matter and its cool, unemotional prose make it a gripping narrative and a powerful warning of the biological danger we face today.
Robin McKie
Observer science editor
Further reading…
This Changes Everything
Naomi Klein
The No Logo author turns her attention to climate change, exploring how it has been fuelled by capitalism. To save the planet, she argues, we must throw away the free-market rule book, and follow the optimistic examples of communities who are already doing so.
Homo Deus
Yuval Noah Harari
Harari’s bestselling follow-up to Sapiens purports to be a “history of tomorrow”, forecasting how the technology that humans have created will shape our future in dramatic and terrifying ways.
Factfulness
Hans Rosling
The late Swedish physician and statistician argues that things are getting better, attempting to understand why people find progress hard to perceive. Bill Gates called it “one of the most important books I’ve ever read”.
6. Capital in the Twenty-First Century
Thomas Piketty
The appeal of Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century is clear. Here is an economist from the mainstream, not the heterodox fringe, who can not just assert but demonstrate that free-market capitalism makes the rich richer and the poor, in the developed world at least, doomed to levels of economic and social exclusion bordering on those described in Dickens or, for the French, Henri Mürger. Book industry folklore, surely apocryphal, says that most people don’t read beyond page 29, but that does not matter. Piketty shows in a financialised world how the rich get ever richer and the incomes of the poor stagnate. Unfortunately his main policy proposal, a global wealth tax, was presented on the eve of the collapse of the global system. There is more chance of the Earth being hit by an asteroid than a global wealth tax happening. Looking back on the heady days when Piketty was a rock-star economist who had discovered the magic potion that would cure capitalism, they seem from another era.
Paul Mason
Author of Postcapitalism
Further reading…
The Price of Inequality
Joseph Stiglitz
The former World Bank chief economist makes a convincing argument as to why the 1% should care about inequality – their fate and prosperity is threatened by it.
23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism
Ha-Joon Chang
The prize-winning economist challenges neoliberal orthodoxies – for example, that globalisation is making the world richer – and assesses the harm that economics as practised over the past three decades has wrought.
The Big Short
Michael Lewis
In this No 1 bestseller, journalist Michael Lewis tracks down the mavericks and misfits who saw the world’s biggest financial crash coming, and decided to make a profit from it.
7. We Should All Be Feminists
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
“My own definition of feminist,” writes the author at the end of this pithy, punchy book, “is a man or a woman who says, yes, there’s a problem with gender as it is today, and we must fix it. We must do better.” The award-winning Nigerian author then anoints a man – her brother Kene – as the best feminist she knows.
That flourish is typical of Adichie’s talent for finely calibrated provocations, and also reveals the ambition of this short book to trace the outlines of a truly universal movement. She explicitly reclaims feminism for African women, arguing that it isn’t a western imposition, and grounds her argument throughout in stories from her own life. Above all, Adichie has the intellectual confidence to speak plainly. No wonder the TED talk on which the book was based has 4.9m views, and in 2013 an extract was sampled by Beyoncé on Flawless.
Helen Lewis
Deputy editor of the New Statesman
Further reading…
Everyday Sexism
Laura Bates
Bates’s award-winning Everyday Sexism internet project documented the daily experience of misogyny from women all over the world. Put together in this book, Bates shows how individual incidents that women perhaps once worried were invidious or unimportant are in fact all connected – and suggests what we can do about it.
Women & Power
Mary Beard
Mary Beard attempts to explain, rather than call out, misogyny, by tracing back to its roots in ancient Athens and Rome. Retracing how powerful women have been muted, Beard suggests how women can now find their voice.
Bad Feminist
Roxane Gay
The prominent American author and essayist explains why she is proud to be a “bad feminist” in this nuanced account which lets women off the hook for being “flawed and human” – something Gay admits to being herself.
8. Quiet: The Power of Introverts
Susan Cain
For me, this book was a cry of pain from the hidden camp of introverts against the extrovert culture that we live in. Suddenly someone was standing up and saying, we’re not freaks or weirdos. In fact some of the most – if not most of – the creative people in society are introverts: they sit around and chew things over at length and don’t want to talk about the football. Cain talks about how some introverts live their lives acting out extroversion, which isn’t them at all, and that was certainly my experience. By the time I came to my 30s I had a nervous breakdown from keeping the mask up so long. What’s surprising to me was that no one had written this book before. It’s so obvious. Because somehow extroverts have seized the agenda and this huge chunk of us have been stigmatised. The book did give me a growing sense of self confidence that I was one among many, and not a freak or weirdo, which I always felt like.
Tim Lott
Author and journalist
Further reading…
The Examined Life
Stephen Grosz
Drawing from more than 25 years of practice, psychoanalyst Grosz uses intimate accounts to showcase how the much-maligned therapeutic practice can actually change lives.
The Happiness Project
Gretchen Rubin
Rubin’s year-long expedition in search of happiness sees her cleaning out closets and focusing more on her marriage. The book pairs this with scientific research and lessons from popular culture to ask what it truly means to be happy.
How Emotions Are Made
Lisa Feldman Barrett
The science of emotion has experienced a cultural shift, and neuroscientist Barrett is one of the researchers at the forefront. Rather than being hardwired, Barrett believes that emotions are momentary things, developed over a lifetime – and her findings have repercussions for child psychology and even law.
9. The Emperor of All Maladies
Siddhartha Mukherjee
There’s no better guide to cancer than Mukherjee, doctor, oncologist and “lab rat”. Shocking, humane and brilliantly framed, The Emperor of All Maladies provides a riveting glimpse of a battle that has raged since ancient times against the most insidious enemy of all: our own cells, when they rebel against the body. Mukherjee is a masterly storyteller who takes us from the aggressive surgery of George Pack (“Pack the Knife”) to the campaigning American socialite Mary Lasker, who unlocked so much funding for medical research, to Bert Vogelstein, who tackled the genetics of cancer. Using his own leukaemia patient, Carla Long, as a touchstone, Mukherjee’s epic biography is as much about hubris, hype and arrogance as ingenuity and compassion.
Roger Highfield
Author and director of external affairs at the Science Museum, London
Further reading…
Do No Harm
Henry Marsh
An NHS brain surgeon casts a sharp, unfailingly honest light back over his career, mulling over the operations that went catastrophically wrong as well as the many lives saved.
When Breath Becomes Air
Paul Kalanithi
Published posthumously, this memoir of a young American neurosurgeon dying of lung cancer traces the difficult journey from doctor to patient and asks: “What makes life worth living in the face of death?”
Bad Pharma
Ben Goldacre
A serious investigation into the medical industry by the author of Bad Science, laying bare the connections between the profit‑driven pharmaceutical industry and the medical profession.
10. Being Mortal
Atul Gawande
I was given Atul Gawande’s first book about 20 years ago and waited with bated breath for the next one. Luckily it was even better. In Being Mortal, Gawande writes about the cost of medical intervention in the end of life, and how we throw money at keeping people alive rather than paying attention to what it is to be human.
He’s a fantastic writer, and this book is written with a combination of humility, the ability to admit to failure, and he weaves in the science effortlessly throughout.
Death is such a universal topic, but Gawande writes about it in a way that isn’t at all scary. He brings in personal insights about his mother and father, the patients he’s had and the mistakes he’s made.
Reading it came at an important time for me, a few years after my own father’s death. I have my own very personal fear of losing autonomy in my old age, and this book seriously makes you reflect on how you want yourself and others around you to die. It’s, sadly, a topic that rarely gets discussed.
We all die and that’s one of the lessons of the book, but whether we decide to let people die well or badly is a good question to ask.
Michael Mosley
Author and broadcaster
Further reading…
Why We Sleep
Matthew Walker
A rousing exploration of the science of sleep which comes with a terrifying warning: if you don’t get enough of it, you increase your chances of illness (diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer’s have a strong causal link to deficient sleep) and risk shortening your lifespan.
I Contain Multitudes
Ed Yong
A deep dive into the thriving ecosystems that exist inside you and every other creature on the planet. Yong’s compelling “microbe’s-eye view” of the world shows just how interconnected we are by bacteria with all other living things.
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