NON-Fiction Recs

[minoanmiss]

Oh my goodness, you've given me a wonderful abundance of fiction recs to get into! Thank you all so much!

Now I'm asking for nonfiction recs. Fascinating books, magazines, websites, so on. I really value my online Smithsonian subscription -- more like that that you particularly like?

Thank you a lot!

Comments

[contrarywise]

If you're up for YouTube videos, I can recommend Objectivity, which focuses on items of scientific significance in the archives of the Royal Society. They have some very interesting things.

If you enjoy watching people create historically accurate clothing and explore issues around our modern understanding and misunderstandings of a particular period, you will probably like Bernadette Banner's YouTube channel. Her year-in-review videos about costuming in historical films are long and snarky and fun.

I also find Ariel Bissett's channel to be delightful. She's a young Canadian woman who bought an 1850s house in Nova Scotia and has been renovating it ever since and documenting the process on YouTube. She also has a book podcast with her best friend called "Books Unbound" that I also enjoy.

Hope this helps!

[flamingsword]

https://www.atlasobscura.com/ has a book out, or soon will, I think?

Um. If you have HBO Max, the miniseries for the book Atlas of The Heart? It’s about the feelings and experiences that humans seem to share, the ones that we don’t share and their social constructions, and the fact that so many things look and feel similarly that unless you ask someone, you really don’t know what they’re feeling. Humans make really bad mind readers. Like, really really bad.

[julian]

Most of my recent non-fiction reading's either been grad school stuff (I do still think Jon Kabat-Zinn's books are useful) or popular history. (I'm listening to David McCullough's _The Pioneers_ in the car, f'rex. It's not exactly highbrow.)

[just_ann_now]

Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer. A bit slow to start, but stay with it!
Also anything at all by Sy Montgomery.

categories?

[dialecticdreamer]

I read a lot of nonfiction, so I'm just taking a guess at the favorites of the last few months:

Words Can Change Your Brain by Andrew Newberg, MD
Wild Fermentation Sandor Ellix Kats
Ageing Agelessly by Tony Buzan & Raymond Keene
Change Your Brain Every Day by Daniel G. Amen, M.D.
and (very challenging emotionally)
Moral Disengagement by Albert Bandura

Re: categories?

[lb_lee]

Ooh, seconding Wild Fermentation! It’s neat.

Re: categories?

[dialecticdreamer]

For those who enjoy cooking, the book is at least a good explanation of where certain fermented foods come from and how they are made.

For anyone willing to step a toe into basic fermentation (sourdough starter), the instructions are clear and well-written.

He has at least two more books that I am working down my reading list toward.

Food and Wine!

[ororo]

Two titles on my shelf, that I've also given as gifts:

The Billionaire's Vinegar https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2706168-the-billionaire-s-vinegar

Cheese, Sex, Death https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56969520-cheese-sex-death

Re: Food and Wine!

[minoanmiss]

omg hat second title bwee

[drglam]

If you haven't read Endless Forms Most Beautiful by Sean Carroll, you're in for a treat.

[minoanmiss]

oooh I've been wanting to brush up on this very subject! Thank you :)

[musyc]

A few NF books that are in my 'have read' spreadsheet with 8s or 9s - I can't speak to anything but enjoyment of the reading as none of these are areas of my expertise.
Aja Raden, Stoned - history of jewelry and gemstones
Christopher Stevens, Written in Stone - development of language
Simon Garfield, Just My Type - history of fonts
Craig Childs, Finders Keepers - ethics and looting in archaeology

And I subscribe to Archaeology magazine https://archaeology.org/past-issues/ - which is every two months, and pretty good value for the subscription cost

[lb_lee]

I have a mondo stack of various religion books and comics I like and queer history but not sure you want those. Uh... Master Slave Husband Wife by Ilyon Woo is great, about a husband and wife who escaped slavery by the wife posing as a disabled wealthy white man and the husband as his devoted helper. But before you read it, I really recommend the short book the husband William Craft wrote in 1860, Running a Thousand Miles For Freedom, because it’s really good, freely available on archive.org, and is a much trimmer, simpler story with fewer names and moving parts to keep track of.

Also that stupid ancient Greco-Roman penile beauty standards thing. https://www.cirp.org/library/history/hodges2/

[magid]

Ooh, thanks for the rec; I really enjoyed Master Slave Husband Wife.

[musesfool]

The Emperor of Maladies was great, if sad in parts (it's about the history of cancer from an oncologist's POV). The Ghost Map is a good read about the 1854 cholera epidemic and the beginning of public health.

About books: The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu and Their Race to Save the World's Most Precious Manuscripts, Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books, and When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II were all interesting and informative.

Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad by MT Anderson was fantastic.

If you are interested in less well-known parts of WWII, anything by Ben Macintyre is a good read. Also, Leo Marks's Between Silk and Cyanide about the spies and codebreakers of the SOE.

If you haven't read it already, I highly recommend The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo, about Alex Dumas, pere.

[magid]

Seconding The Ghost Map.

[gingicat]

I like Sky and Telescope.

[flamingsword]

Oh yeah! And another thing! https://culturaltutor.com/folio The Areopagitica newsletters are pretty informative, if you like ancient stuff.

[mific]

Colour by Victoria Finlay - a history of pigments. Really good!

Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery by Henry Marsh, his first memoir. He worked in England and did outreach in Ukraine (still does despite the war). The Economist review: "This memoir is so elegantly written it is little wonder some say that in Mr Marsh neurosurgery has found its Boswell". Also excellent. He's written two later books as well.

Ed Yong's An Immense World is fascinating (about the senses of living things).

The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs by Steve Brusatte, because, dinosaurs!

SAS: Rogue Heroes, by Ben McIntyre - entertaining !

[anna_wing]

I've been reading the collected aphorisms of the 18th-century German scientist and writer Georg Christoph Lichtenberg translated into English, which I find extremely interesting, and repaying consideration. Some are just sharp and funny, and others need thought. The ones that are about specific-to-Christianity philosophical issues I bypass. The edition I have is "The Waste Books" published in paperback by NYRB, and translated and introduced by R Hollingdale.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/101375/the-waste-books-by-georg-christoph-lichtenberg-introduction-by-r-j-hollingdale/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Christoph_Lichtenberg

[minoanmiss]

This sound Amazing. Thank you :)

[hitchhiker]

i've been meaning to reread lewis thomas's "lives of a cell", i remember really liking it the first time around. also "where wizards stay up late", about the history of the early internet, is superb if you like that general class of topic.