Economics and politics

1. •Economics Unmasked. From power and greed to compassion and the common good -- Philip Smith and Manfred Max-Neef analyze the roots and history of economic theory, explaining many frustrations about the world. A difficult but highly recommended read.
   

2. •Lives Per Gallon. The true cost of our oil addiction. -- Terry Tamminen was secretary of the California EPA and advisor to Gov. Schwarzenegger, and a pretty smart guy too!
   

3. • Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War. A very revealing insight into the mindset of the working poor of this country.
   

4. •Pathologies of Power. Health, human rights, and the new war on the poor. -- Paul Farmer is an impressive scholar (Harvard Med School) and founder of Partners in Health, one of the most functional providers of health care in Haiti. His explorations of poverty are deep and profound.
   

5. •Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism -- Arguing that “social businesses” should prosper in a mixed economy with conventional capital-driven businesses and charities, one certainly can’t argue with Yunas’ successes (he also won the Nobel Peace Prize).
   

6. •Letter to a Christian Nation -- Powerful rational argument that religion causes a great deal of human misery.
   

7. • Freedom Next Time: Resisting the Empire -- Journalist and filmmaker John Pilger conveys perspectives rarely heard from the recent victims of our empire.
   

8. • Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire -- written before 9/11, this book explains in a rational way why the USA and its allies have so many enemies.
   

9. • Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor -- not an easy read, but insightful, rigorous, unconventional analysis of poverty and “structural violence” that global economics imposes on the poor.
   

10. •The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism -- a spooky analysis of politics and control
    

11. •The Secret History of the American Empire: Economic Hit Men, Jackals, and the Truth about Global Corruption -- classic tale of how government and corporations drive economic development around the world
    

12. •Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered -- an old book with some very prescient perspectives
    

13. •Diffusion of Innovations -- formal analysis of how change permeates thorough a society or group
    

14. •Out of Poverty: What works when traditional approaches fail -- why have the billions of dollars spent to alleviate poverty been largely effective? This book elaborates an unconventional approach to reduce poverty, by someone who’s been remarkably effective.
    

15. •The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot -- Many recent events have spooky parallels to Germany during the rise of Naziism. This book is an impassioned plea to learn from history.
    

16. •A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present -- a tough read but useful in balancing some American history biases my kids are learning.
    

17. •Thieves in High Places: They've Stolen Our Country and It's Time to Take It Back  -- Jim Hightower is a funny and entertaining writer (who also publishes a witty monthly newsletter on politics).
    

18. •Stupid White Men ... and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation! -- Michael Moore is hilarious in his satire. If only it were a joke ...
    

Creativity, innovation, business, management

1. • Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance -- a classic autobiography guaranteed to open your eyes. Text (minus a few diagrams) available here.
   

2. • Leaving Microsoft to Change the World: An Entrepreneur's Odyssey to Educate the World's Children -- powerful story of how one of the top ranking Microsoft leaders quit after 9 years and created one of the most successful charities, Room to Read. The book discusses what set him on his path, and the business and moral guidance that led to his successes.
   

3. •The Medici Effect -- it takes certain environments to cultivate innovation, and this easy-reading book explores and dissects the challenges. It would have saved me much frustration had I read this before leaving my prior company!
   

4. •The Soul of a New Machine -- great documentary of the processes, people, and individual sacrifices, that drove innovation and development of a new minicomputer.
   

5. •The Power of Unreasonable People: How Social Entrepreneurs Create Markets That Change the World -- “Reasonable” people don’t make change.
   

6. •The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination -- From 1978 this small book gives a sense of how these ancient questions have recently evolved.
   

7. •Oil! -- this 100 year old classic by Upton Sinclair has amazingly relevant information on how oil wells work, and the old politics of greed.
   

8. •Scattered. How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It -- lots of books are on this subject, but Gabor Maté offers some deep perspective as an MD and parent.
   

Africa

1. •The Ship’s Cat -- powerful novel about Biafra (Nigeria), and the horrors and politics of philanthropy and war. The author’s life is fascinating, as is the book.
   

2. • Blue Clay People: Seasons on Africa's Fragile Edge -- Funny and tragic read about the foreign aid gig. I found his solution of having local merchants hire the local begging kids to pick up trash in front of their shops a cleaver win-win  for a community otherwise paralyzed with dysfunctional government services.
   

Latin america

1. •1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus -- asks what the New World must have looked like the year before Columbus arrived. The presented evidence is in stark contrast to what I learned in school. The continent was teeming with people living sustainably -- which is partly why they left such little traces of their existence.
   

2. •Whispering in the Giant's Ear: A Frontline Chronicle from Bolivia's War on Globalization -- Great read on the context and challenges of saving the rain forest (and the planet).
   

3. • When the Ground Turns in Its Sleep -- poignant and clever novel about rural Guatemala during its Civil War.
   

4. •The Long Night of White Chickens -- Another great novel about Guatemala.
   

5. •The Farm on the River of Emeralds -- beautiful tale of the challenges working with the poor and the land in rural Ecuador.
   

6. •The Saddest Pleasure: A Journey on Two Rivers -- reflections on life by my favorite writer on poverty A tough read at times, but near the end gives a beautiful and concise descriptions of the fundamental problems of the people of Latin America.
   

7. •Popol Vuh: The Definitive Edition Of The Mayan Book Of The Dawn Of Life And The Glories of Gods and Kings -- this is THE oldest surviving piece of new world literature. Some call it the Mayan bible. Translated into our language, but clearly from a cultural perspective miles and eons apart from us.
   

8. •Maya Cosmos Three Thousand Years on the Shaman's Path -- beautiful, somewhat scholarly, thesis of what the Maya believed and how their beliefs fit together into a coherent world view or cosmovision. An amazing piece of detective work to reveal what they might have been thinking when creating their pyramids, art, writing, etc.
   

9. •Breaking the Maya Code -- amazing tale of the decipherment of Mayan hieroglyphics, which was the basis for a movie and Nova documentary viewable online.
   

10. •Savages -- sad but interesting story of oil exploration in the Amazon, and how the oil companies, governments, and indigenous people, treat each other and the environment. Joe Kane is a great adventure writer.
    

11. •The World Is As You Dream It: Teachings from the Amazon and Andes -- Patience through metaphor and metaphysics is rewarded with some interesting insights, including the comment that headhunting was a mechanism for population control.
    

12. •How to Succeed at Globalization: A Primer for Roadside Vendors -- a satirical cartoon book about Globalization in Latin America
    

13. •
    

Science

1. • Not Even Wrong. The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law. A challenging analysis of the state of modern particle physics.
   

2. •The Trouble with Physics. The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next. Like Not Even Wrong, Smolin bashes string theory and gives a flavor for the ongoing infighting in theoretical physics
   

3. • Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy. Fascinating modern history of science by Kip Thorne.
   

4. •The Moral Landscape. How Science can Determine Human Values -- Articulate Sam Harris argues that neuroscience and biology have advanced enough to enable a universal definition of morality -- based on concern for the well-being of others.
   

5. •Not Even Wrong. The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law -- an interesting contrarian take on string theory, claiming that because the predictions are so untestable, it isn’t even science.
   

6. •The Selfish Gene -- and other books by Richard Dawkins explain evolution well.
   

7. •Wonderful Life. The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History -- When discovered, these precambrian (500 million year old) fossils were shoehorned into existing groups of animals. Much later came younger minds who realized this was all wrong. These fossils represent exotic orders of animals from a time when Evolution was exploring more diverse body plans.
   

8. •The Origin of Species -- is a pretty darn good explanation of it too! And an interesting window into history 150 years ago.
   

9. • Darwin’s Dangerous Idea -- Daniel Dennett is one of the smartest living philosophers, and he sought evolution to discover insights into what is consciousness. This is one of a few excellent scholarly books.
   

10. •Seven clues to the origin of life -- how did the spark of life ignite is a deep mystery. The chances of a million DNA bases coming together to for an array of enzymes are too small even in a billion years on a big planet. This book intelligently speculates on our earliest ancestors -- clay!
    

11. •Quantum Evolution. How Physics‘ Wierdest Theory Explains Life’s Biggest Mystery -- McFadden argues that quantum coherence played a big role in early life. In spite of the high temperatures, could dimensional reductions in nano-voids of clay allowed coherence and quantum computing of molecular configurations? Catalytic or active configurations would by functionally coupling to the environment, thus collapse the coherence, leaving the system in a highly improbable but functional conformation. I don’t know enough to be critical of the details, but I think its an intriguing idea
    

12. •Why Sex is Fun?: The evolution of human sexuality -- A silly title for a great read by Jared Diamond on the evolutionary biology of sex.
    

13. •Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle -- Why is scientific literacy so low? Why is it cool to be ignorant? This book addresses such questions.
    

14. •Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind -- didn’t get too far into this one that analyzes elements of consciousness from an evolutionary biology perspective
    

15. •Science Made Stupid -- long out of print, the funniest science satire I know of (please tell me if you find a funnier one)
    

16. •The Cartoon Guide to (Non) Communication : The Use and Misuse of Information in the Modern World -- Larry Gonick is a brilliant science cartoonist, and I recommend all his books
    

17. •A Different Universe (Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down) -- Intelligent story of emergent phenomena and its applications (by a Nobel Prize winner).
    

18. •Symmetry and the Monster: The Story of One of the Greatest Quests of Mathematics -- entertaining story of some very exotic math and the people behind it.
    

19. •Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics -- This book made number theory interesting! A peek into a foreign and abstract world.
    

20. •Mathematics and the Physical World -- interesting adventures in the history of math.
    

21. •Exploring the Physics of the Unknown Universe: An Adventurers Guide -- This is a strange book, offering some of the simplest and unconventional explanations of basic physics, along with some weird new proposals. To be read with an open mind.
    

22. •Sky in a Bottle -- history of theories of why the sky is blue. Neat examples of the evolution of scientific theories.
    

23. •Eye of the Whale: A Novel -- in the style of a Michael Creighton book, with the opposite political bias. Not science but intelligent and entertaining.
    

Environment

1. •Coming Clean: Breaking America's Addiction to Oil and Coal -- Written by the head of Rainforest Action Network.
   

2. •Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet -- organized by the effects we can expect following 1, 2, 3, ... degrees of global warming.
   

3. •The World According To Pimm: A Scientist Audits the Earth -- How many fish are in the sea? How much solar energy are we using to feed humanity? Not only does this book answer basic questions like these, but it explains the science and technology to answer them.
   

4. •The Weather Makers : How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life -- very readable book on climate science.
   

5. • The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning -- Sir James Lovelock takes a rather pessimistic view of our planet. It’s too late to avoid rather catastrophic climate change, but there are ways to mitigate the impact. I don’t agree with all of his positions, the book is thought provoking.