Nonfiction by authors who know what they're writing about

June 30, 2024 6:45 PM

Recommendationfilter: nonfiction to read for pleasure, where the information is (reasonably) accurate.

I enjoy reading nonfiction aimed at a general audience.

I really hate when I'm reading nonfiction and start finding enough inaccuracies that I start questioning the author's knowledge.

I really, really hate reading and absorbing an entire nonfiction book, only to find out months or years later that large parts or the entire book are just wrong.

Unfortunately, when I look at recommendations out on the web and at major booksellers, I find a lot of books near the top that I already know are tripe, so I'm having trouble finding new books. I'm looking for:

• nonfiction
• aimed at a lay audience
• that is accurate, preferably written by people who understand the subject, preferably experts or advanced practitioners
• and meant to be read for pleasure (e.g., not textbooks, how-to guides, instruction manuals, etc. — not The Art of Electronics or Learning Java 4th Edition)
• not memoirs (since memoirists presumably know their subject, i.e., themselves)
• not biographies (personal preference)
• not histories of events (also personal preference — "the history of macrame" is fine as a subject; "the history of World War II" is not)

A couple of books that (I think) fit the request:

• The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) by Katie Mack
• The Ghosts Of Evolution: Nonsensical Fruit, Missing Partners, and Other Ecological Anachronisms by Connie Barlow
• You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It's Making the World a Weirder Place by Janelle Shane (though admittedly, if memory serves, a bit out of date now)
• The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman

I'm a little loathe to call out anti-examples here, but most books that feature on If Books Could Kill would probably fit that description — entertaining, intriguing, but inaccurate enough that you're worse off after reading them. Unfortunately, a lot of those books end up highly recommended in most places.

posted by reventlov to Media & Arts (43 answers total)

The Very Short Introduction collection from Oxford will keep you busy for, roughly, the rest of your life.

Here’s a list.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 7:16 PM on June 30 [7 favorites]

Best answer: Because Internet, Gretchen McCulloch

(And yeah, I hear you, please never read anything by Bill Bryson about language.)
posted by wintersweet at 7:16 PM on June 30 [5 favorites]

Best answer: Oliver Sacks and VS Ramachandran on neurology and neuroscience.
posted by supercres at 7:25 PM on June 30 [4 favorites]

Best answer: Mary Roach excellent work in her research and writes across a range of subjects. Her voice as a layperson is present, and while she's not an expert in the subject her books read as a journey of learning that you are invited to attend.
posted by Jilder at 7:28 PM on June 30 [13 favorites]

Best answer: Robert Sapolsky’s Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst is a tour de force on human evolutionary biology by a guy who Knows His Stuff.

It is an updated version of the topics from his Stanford course.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 7:30 PM on June 30 [3 favorites]

Best answer: Ed Yong!
posted by babelfish at 7:55 PM on June 30 [7 favorites]

Jon Krakauer
Erik Larson
Bill Bryson
Jill Lepore
Elizabeth Kolbert
posted by Dashy at 8:43 PM on June 30

Best answer: Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan seem to fit the bill (from my experience), but of course their non-fiction is somewhat out-dated.

I try to steer clear of Neil DeGrasse Tyson because I find him to be more facile than accurate.

The What If series of books by Randall Munroe seems to be well researched as well as entertaining.

Ryan Holiday seems to do good research and present valid advice in the realm of personal effectiveness.

FWIW. YMMV.
posted by forthright at 9:07 PM on June 30 [1 favorite]

Best answer: if you liked The Design of Everyday Things, i'd definitely recommend The Evolution of Useful Things (& most of Henry Petroski's writing)
posted by HearHere at 9:50 PM on June 30 [3 favorites]

Best answer: Another anti-recommendation for any of Bill Bryson's books on language, which are frequently recommended because he's an entertaining writer, but are full of extremely basic errors.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 10:11 PM on June 30 [5 favorites]

Best answer: The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

What If?

How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems
posted by SweetLiesOfBokonon at 11:44 PM on June 30 [2 favorites]

Best answer: I'm having slight difficulty with the "meant to be read for pleasure" criterion. But in terms of pleasurable reads, you could try Ruth Goodman's books. Here is a review of The Domestic Revolution. You might try Judith Flanders too. Her latest is on death and mourning in Victorian Britain. And Victoria Finlay's Fabric: The Hidden History of the Material World. Some of the previous questions about thematic history might be relevant to you too, though I guess you'd have to do your own digging about accuracy.
posted by paduasoy at 12:55 AM on July 1

Abraham Verghese's My Own Country (about being a doctor in Tennessee during the AIDS crisis) and The Tennis Partner (about a friend's struggle with addiction) are more memoir than informative non-fiction, but both are pleasurable to read. I find his prose deliciously lyrical, even when he's writing non-fiction.
posted by terretu at 2:16 AM on July 1

Glad to see Bill Bryson called out!

This isn't an indicator for readable, engaging prose, but on the accuracy front I'm biased towards academics or other experts writing specifically within the narrow field of their expertise, and away from Bryson-type writers who don't have their own expertise but do some relatively surface-level research on a subject for a while and then package that up for export. The academics or experts should be well-known and respected in their field (and with a reputation for quality to uphold among peers in that field), primarily active in those fields (as opposed to having moved the bulk of their activity to popular writing or being a minor celebrity), and still up-to-date on the conversations and developments in that field.
posted by trig at 2:22 AM on July 1 [4 favorites]

(Apologies, I missed the 'not memoir' stipulation, but thought it worth mentioning that both of Verghese's "memoirs" focus more on other people - his patients, his tennis partner - than himself.)
posted by terretu at 2:49 AM on July 1

Best answer: Robert Sapolsky is an intellectual giant, yes; but he's wrong about free-will. For an opposite view try Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will (2023) by Kevin "Neurogeneticist" Mitchell. It's a conscious, freely-chosen hat-tip to Robert Heinlein when Mitchell outlines the huge range of things a primate [such as yourself] could do after breakfast. It could climb a tree, search for grubs, scratch itself, groom another monkey, look for a mate, go to sleep, bang some rocks together, jump up and down, poke itself in the eye, urinate, start a fight, wave its arms around, stick a pebbles up its nose, eat some dirt, screech . . .
Else:
The Edge of the Plain: How Borders Make and Break Our World (2022) by James Crawford.

Short Life in a Strange World Birth to Death in 42 Panels (2020) by Toby Ferris is a pilgrimage / road-trip to all the publicly available works of Pieter Breugel de Oude.

Mudlarking Lost and Found on the River Thames (2108) by Lara Maiklem.
posted by BobTheScientist at 3:18 AM on July 1 [4 favorites]

Best answer: Umberto Eco “Mouse or Rat” and “In search of the perfect language”, also his correspondence in “what do nonbelievers believe in” (or something like that) although if you can read it in Spanish it is MUCH better.
posted by alchemist at 4:01 AM on July 1 [1 favorite]

Best answer: +1 elizabeth kolbert -- "the sixth extinction" is very good.

siddhartha mukherjee, especially "the emperor of all maladies". his other books—"the gene", "the song of the cell"—look promising as well, but i haven't read them.

"say nothing" by patrick radden keefe. he also wrote a book about the sacklers i've been meaning to read.

edited to add: "the anatomy of fascism" by robert paxton.
posted by guybrush_threepwood at 5:38 AM on July 1 [2 favorites]

Best answer: A City on Mars by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith. Entertaining, informative, and very well researched.
posted by indexy at 6:16 AM on July 1 [1 favorite]

Best answer: +1 to Mary Roach, specifically Stiff (if you're ok with reading about various things done to bodies after death).

Also on my top ten list is The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot.

For something a bit different, The Library Book by Susan Orlean gives a history of libraries.

Questlove's Music is History is a lovely dive into music

It got a bit long, but I did enjoy--and have retained some great info about-- Salt (by Mark Kurlansky).
posted by hydra77 at 7:08 AM on July 1 [3 favorites]

Best answer: 100% recommend Patrick O'Keefe's Empire of Pain, which is a tour de force exposé of the Sackler family's involvement in America's opioid crisis. It's scrupulously and meticulously fact-checked and his disclosure at the end about how he went about doing the research without ever getting an interview with the Sacklers themselves is eye-opening.
posted by idlethink at 7:32 AM on July 1 [2 favorites]

Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman, on cognitive psychology. Step 1: Spend decades researching and in many ways creating a field, winning a Nobel along the way. Step 2: Write an accessible book summarizing what you've learned. Caveat: The book is from 2011; since then, some of the finding have been found to be incorrect. Still, it's a truly great book.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 7:32 AM on July 1 [2 favorites]

And another hearty anti-recommendation for Gavin Menzies' 1421: The year China discovered America, which should really be classed as fiction. What's more fun is reading stuff about how bad a piece of non-fiction Menzies's 1421 is! On this, Robert Finlay's takedown; a critique of the faked world map which constitutes a key piece of Menzies' primary evidence; more discussion of his book as "codswallop", etc.
posted by idlethink at 7:37 AM on July 1 [1 favorite]

John McPhee John McPhee John McPhee. One of the premiere prose stylists in non-fiction in our age. Legendary.
posted by suelac at 8:55 AM on July 1 [5 favorites]

Atul Gawande's Being Mortal is an important exploration of our society's phobic and unhelpful approach to end of life decisions, and how we can approach this unavoidable event more compassionately and logically.

Ijeoma Oluo's So You Want To Talk About Race is a great primer about structual and interpersonal racism, and how to have convos about race that are actually productive.

Malcolm Gladwell's books popularize a lot of ideas for a lay audience - and more importantly, absolutely everyone should take 20 mins to read In Plain Sight, Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker essay about beloved child molester Jerry Sandusky - a very effective and compelling way to increase awareness and vigilance for the many child molesters who are hiding in every community. "A pedophile... is someone adept not just at preying on children but at confusing, deceiving, and charming the adults responsible for those children.", writes Gladwell, and then explains exactly how this happens and what to watch for.
posted by nouvelle-personne at 9:24 AM on July 1 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: I had some trouble framing this question because what I want is a bit nebulous, but I think I need to clarify with some anti-examples:

Blink, Nudge, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Predictably Irrational: all "big idea" books where the "big idea" turned out to be somewhere between "flawed" and "literally the opposite of truth." Freakonomics is similar, except that it's less "one big idea" and more "several small ideas."

Bill Bryson: not great at fact checking.

Malcolm Gladwell: exaggerates and cherry-picks evidence to such an extent that it's hard to trust anything he has written.

Artificial Unintelligence, The Things We Make, No Such Thing As a Fish: seemed fine until I got to a subject in which I am an expert, at which point I saw so many errors that I can no longer trust the authors on anything.

I'm most afraid of something like a Nudge or Blink, where I don't personally have the expertise to tell whether the author is giving me good information, is confused, or is flat out lying to me.
posted by reventlov at 10:33 AM on July 1 [5 favorites]

You could probably do worse than browsing the national book award long lists for non-fiction.

One of the winners I read many years ago was Nathaniel Philbrick's In the Heart of the Sea. Ignore the fact that it was made into a mediocre movie. Although it purports to tell the story of one specific ship (the one that inspired the novel Moby Dick), it's really a fascinating history of whaling and seafaring. The author has a background in writing, but runs a maritime institute in Nantucket.

Here's a tidy list of Pulitzer non-fiction winners and nominees.
posted by bluedaisy at 10:55 AM on July 1 [2 favorites]

Best answer: Also, have you read much Ta-Nehisi Coates? His nonfiction writing is extraordinary (and perhaps his fiction, but I haven't read it).
posted by bluedaisy at 10:57 AM on July 1 [2 favorites]

Best answer: Elisa Gabbert (Mefi's Own? She mentions Metafilter in her first book)

Brian Phillips

Mary Roach
posted by dobbs at 10:58 AM on July 1

I would recommend anything written by British evolutionary biologist/zoologist Richard Dawkins, but particularly his book, The Selfish Gene. It was originally published in 1976, but it's held up well and has gone through four revised editions. I consider it among the five best books I've ever read, fiction or non-fiction.
posted by alex1965 at 11:01 AM on July 1 [3 favorites]

Best answer: Servants: A Downstairs View of 20th Century Britain by Lucy Lethbridge.
posted by Emmy Rae at 11:21 AM on July 1 [2 favorites]

Best answer: Ian Urbina's The Outlaw Ocean looks at the problems of the areas beyond national waters from different, fascinating, angles. With the UN Law of the Sea recently renegotiated, the abuses profiled in his work (the book grew out of his NYT investigations, and there's a subsequent podcast version) might have a chance of changing.
posted by bendybendy at 11:33 AM on July 1 [2 favorites]

Best answer: Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies
Robert Salpolsky, A Primate's Memoir.
Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
posted by theora55 at 11:46 AM on July 1 [1 favorite]

Already recommended in passing, but Erik Larson does pop history on very specialized events, like the months between Lincoln’s election and the bombardment of Ft. Sumter, the serial killer at the Chicago Worlds Fair, or using early wireless to catch a trans-Atlantic murderer.
posted by lhauser at 12:03 PM on July 1

Best answer: I recently enjoyed both The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs and the more recent The Rise and Reign of the Mammals, by Stephen Brusatte.

If you’re into paleontology, that is.
posted by potent_cyprus at 12:16 PM on July 1

Best answer: Definitely ANTI-recommendation for anything by Jonathan Haidt. He's getting a lot of traction for his screeds on kids and screen time, but he's way out of his lane. He started with a "back in my day" sort of thesis and searches for research to support it. He thinks he succeeds (as do a lot of his readers, apparently), but people who are experts in the field (including researchers he cites) disagree.
posted by supercres at 12:59 PM on July 1 [3 favorites]

Best answer: Kory Stamper’s Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries
posted by ejs at 2:02 PM on July 1 [2 favorites]

Best answer: Nick Lane is a biochemist; his books like Life Ascending and The Vital Question are quite good, at roughly a Scientific American level of description. As a researcher he has a dog in some of the fights, but to the extent I follow the field his claims have held up pretty well.

Two histories, Mosquito Empires by JR McNeill and The Gunpowder Age by Torio Andrade come to mind as doing a good job combining some level of scientific and technical understanding from working professional historians. (Neither are histories of "events.") Andrade's book was eye opening to me, for example--some knowledge of what "gunpowder" actually is (and how manufacturing matters) combined with familiarity with Chinese records really changes the narrative on how guns and cannons spread through east and west.

The Emerald Planet by Beerling (plant evolution) is great.

Eating the Sun by Morton is also good on the research into photosynthesis and plants (though Morton is a science writer, not a scientist.) Endless Forms Most Beautiful by Caroll may be somewhat dated but was a good overview when published into HOX genes and evolution. Caroll is also not a working scientists AFAIK.

FWIW the best way I know of to find books that are solid is to read the blogs/etc. of working professionals and see what they recommend, followed by the further reading section in books that meet my criteria. This tends to be much easier for history than other fields, but for example Bret Devereux is great for this.
posted by mark k at 7:10 PM on July 1 [1 favorite]

Best answer: I listen to a lot of micro histories, for the best reliability I find that getting a mass market book by an academic who is writing about their field is a good start.

Some examples: The Cigarette by Sarah Milov (I went to her web page to see what else she's written and it's all papers surrounding topics from the book)

Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat by Hal Hertzog, who helped create the discipline in psychology of studying how humans interact with animals.

How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett. She's a professor in the field, her PhD thesis was on similar material.

This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by Drew Faust. She's a respected historian who was also the first woman to be president of Harvard University.

There are writers who specialize in this sort of thing, Mary Roach, Mark Kurlansky, Thomas Hager, Rose George, etc. Their work seems to be well researched, especially when they explain who they talked to for each piece of research. Mary Roach and Rose George are really good for that. Also in that line, I'd recommend Rust: The Longest War by Jonathan Wald man, who talks about his sources.

Finally, although he's not an academic, he's writing from within his area of expertise: Adam Mintner has two amazing books on how recycling and second hand commodities work (and don't work)
posted by Hactar at 9:59 PM on July 1 [1 favorite]

Best answer: People Like Us: Misrepresenting the Middle East by Joris Luyendijk - opened my eyes about journalism in general and Middle East in particular, and I guess these lessons might be completely irrelevant or more relevant than ever in the era of fake news.
posted by gakiko at 4:12 AM on July 2

Best answer: Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers by Robert M. Sapolsky was assigned in my PhD level trauma class by an ER trauma psychologist, I have yet to find a part of it that doesn’t hold up.

Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family by Robert Kolker is a bit biography-ish but it’s as much about the science behind schizophrenia as anything else. I work directly with this population and am familiar with the research and the science part was strong as I remember.

Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of the Neurodiversity Movement is a bit old now but is largely focusing on history of the concept of autism and the political movement of neurodiversity. Caveat that a few things are now wrong because we’ve dug up more historical documents about Hans Asperger and have evidence of more involvement with Nazi Germany than Silberman knew at the time, but the rest of it has held up.

A Short History of Fantasy by Farah Mendlesohn, to be honest I’m not enough of an expert myself to verify how accurate it is but she is a historian of the subject and is known for numerous works in the field (rather than be a generalist) which lends some credence.
posted by brook horse at 4:15 PM on July 2

Best answer: I second many of the recs above (Hidden Valley Road, anything by Jon Krakauer or Patrick Radden Keefe, Emperor of all Maladies, Caste) and add these:

Boom Town by Sam Anderson (about Oklahoma City)
The Wager by David Grann
anything by David Quammen, particularly his books about ebola, spillover, and the one about COVID's origins
Evicted by Matthew Desmond (maybe my favourite ever non-fiction book)
The Library Book by Susan Orlean
posted by hepta at 6:23 AM on July 3

Best answer: I would also recommend the Best American Science and Nature Writing series - annual collection of great science and nature essays. I always find some gems in there.
posted by hepta at 6:24 AM on July 3