Non-fiction book recommendations

July 6, 2019 9:40 AM

I'm interested in books that explore the place of individuals within the modern industrial world. General areas of interest include technology, nature and climate, history, capitalism and socialism, socialogy, psychology, philosophy, etc. Not interested in the majority of business, memoir, and self help style of non-fiction writing, except for the rare book that transcends the genre.

Some recent books that I enjoyed:

Desert Solitaire
The Denial of Death
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
Capitalist Realism - Is There No Alternative?
Carbon Ideologies

posted by mikek to Media & Arts (10 answers total)

Best answer: Why we get the wrong politicians by Isabelle Hardman (British)
Moneyland by Oliver Bullough
The Gendered Brain by Gina Rippon
Hello World, How to be human in the age of the machine by Hanna Fry
posted by Enid Lareg at 10:28 AM on July 6, 2019 [1 favorite]

Everyone is recommending that book Sapiens, about the history of humankind, and the same author wrote books supposedly about the future and about 21 lessons for the 21st Century. Might be up your alley.
posted by slidell at 12:08 PM on July 6, 2019

Cathy O'Neill's Weapons of Math Destruction;
Sam Stein's Capital City;
Andrea Gibbons's City of Segregation One Hundred Years of Struggle for Housing in Los Angeles;
Jake Halpern's Bad Paper: Chasing Debt from Wall Street to the Underworld;
Jane Mayer’s Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right;
Josh Lauer’s Creditworthy: A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America;
Adam Minter's Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade
Sven Beckert's Empire of Cotton;
Dale Russakoff 's The Prize: Who’s In Charge of America’s Schools

This genre is kind of my wheelhouse. Memail me if you want more tailored recs!
posted by spamandkimchi at 12:21 PM on July 6, 2019 [1 favorite]

And two more!
Risa Goluboff’s Vagrant Nation: Police Power, Constitutional Change, and the Making of the 1960s
Andrew Fisher’s Big Hunger: The Unholy Alliance Between Corporate America and Anti-Hunger Groups
posted by spamandkimchi at 12:24 PM on July 6, 2019

Best answer: How to Do Nothing recently came out and checks literally every single one of those boxes. It's my favorite book in ages.
posted by ferenjamin at 2:39 PM on July 6, 2019 [1 favorite]

Underland A Deep Time Journey by Robert MacFarlane
posted by catrae at 5:23 PM on July 6, 2019

I know you said that you don't typically like memoirs, but I have a recommendation for a memoir that "...explore[s] the place of individuals within the modern industrial world." Travels with Lizbeth: Three Years on the Road and on the Streets is a memoir written by Lars Eighner, a talented writer who spent some time being homeless. He writes about his experiences and muses about various topics related to homelessness. Here's a sample:

"The purpose of welfare systems is not to help poor people. If the object were to help poor people, then that would be most surely done by giving money to poor people. But that is not the idea, as our tax code proves. If you give twenty dollars to someone on the street, there is not a way in the world you can deduct that donation from your taxes. To claim a deducation you must give the money to an organization that employs clerks and administrators and social workers and that, more than likely, puts nothing material into the hands of the poor... When the agency makes an accounting of the good it has done the poor, it will count the money it spent on paying social workers to hold the hands of the poor the same as money, if any, spent on bread. The purpose of welfare systems is to provide jobs for social workers and bureaucrats. I told Billy he should be grateful to have a job in the poverty industry, but to ask that such a job be meaningful is to ask too much."

I found the book to be quite engrossing and eye-opening. A good review can be found here (note that there is a small, artsy nude photo on that page).
posted by alex1965 at 6:39 PM on July 6, 2019 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Using the form of a memoir to examine larger questions of society, the state, and it's relation to a man who drops out from it is exactly the kind of book that fits into my "transcends the genre" caveat - I'll have to check it out.
posted by mikek at 7:37 PM on July 6, 2019

That's a broad topic! The last two books I've read in those categories that I can recommend without any caveats are Matthew Desmond's Evicted and Tressie McMillan Cottom's Lower Ed.
posted by eotvos at 11:28 AM on July 7, 2019 [1 favorite]

Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott
posted by Lirp at 6:52 PM on July 7, 2019 [2 favorites]