A Short History of Nearly Everything – Bill Bryson
The Stars – H. A. Rey
Your Inner Fish – Neil Shubin
The Blind Watchmaker – Richard Dawkins
The Eighth Day of Creation – Horace Judson
The Double Helix – Watson
Chaos – Jame Gleick
The Map that Changed the World – Simon Winchester
Einstein’s Cosmos – Michio Kaku
The Ancestor’s Tale – Richard Dawkins
Why Big Fierce Animal are Rare – Colinaux
Animals without Backbones – Ralph Buxbaum
On Human Nature – E. O. Wilson
E=mc^2 – David Bodanis
The Edge of the Sea – Rachel Carson
The Year of the Gorilla – George Schaller
The Beak of the Finch – Jonathan Weiner
Endless Forms most Beautiful – Sean Carroll
One, Two, Three, … Infinity – George Gamow

I grew up on Asimov, but find him dated and dull now. I find Darwin’s Origin dull stuff, too, but his later books on plants are great.

I am interested in the suggestion that Climbing Mount Improbable might not be an ideal title. Interested, because I regard it as the most under-rated of my books. It sells FAR fewer copies than The Blind Watchmaker although I think it is a better book. Perhaps the reason is that the title is not so good. It covers some of the same ground as The Blind Watchmaker, but — even though it is not really for me to say — I like to think the two chapters called ‘The Museum of all Shells’ and ‘Kaleidoscopic Embryos’ are genuinely novel and original, where The Blind Watchmaker is mostly popularizing stuff that is already well known to professionals. Well, as I say, it is not really for me to judge. But my own opinion is that, if anybody is thinking of reading The Blind Watchmaker, they might do better to read Climbing Mount Improbable instead. Of course, I wouldn’t want to STOP anyone reading BOTH!

It should be on the list. Then again so shoud The Blind Watchmaker and The Selfish Gene. But then The Ancestor’s Tale is a true masterpiece and cannot be left out. Well, why don’t we just write “see Dawkins” to the list?

And Jerry P. King’s The Art of Mathematics was what got my maths enthusiasm going.

You can’t beat Asimov’s Lucky Starr seires for a tour of the solar system.

Mendelssohn – The Quest for Absolute Zero

The book that made me want to be a physicist was The Nature of Matter by Otto Frisch.

The original – Relativity by Einstein hasn’t been bettered

Other non-physics ones; The Ancestors Tale is my favourite Dawkins and for maths I’d second the Music of the Primes and add The Equation That Couldn’t Be Solved.

phew.

“Chaos” by James Gleick.

Personally I preferred Richard Dawkins’s “Climbing Mount Improbable” to “The Blind Watchmaker”.

older ‘classics’

‘Of Stars and Men’ by Harlow Shapley (1959)

‘The Universe and Dr. Einstein’ by Lincoln Barnett (1962)

‘The ABC of Relativity’ by Bertrand Russell (1962)

‘Profiles of the Future’ by Arthur C. Clarke (1963)

‘Intelligent Life in the Universe’ by Sagan and Shklovskii (1966)

‘Red Giants and White Dwarfs, The Evolution of Stars, Planets and Life’
by Robert Jastrow (1967)

‘Men Who Made a New Physics : Physicists and the Quantum Theory’
by Barbara Lovett Cline (1969)

‘The Ascent of Man’ by Jacob Bronowski (1973)

more recent goodies :

‘The Quark and the Jaguar’ by Murray Gell-Mann (1994)

‘Atom’ by Lawrence Krauss (2001)

‘Our Cosmic Habitat’ by Martin Rees (2001)

‘Life on a Young Planet’ by Andrew Knoll (2003)
.