Non-fiction favorites for a wandering intellectual
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The Possessor and the Possessed
by Peter Kivy
The concept of genius intrigues us. Artistic geniuses have something other people don’t have. In some cases that something seems to be a remarkable kind …
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Napoleon's Buttons
by Penny Le Couteur
Napoleon's Buttons is the fascinating account of seventeen groups of molecules that have greatly influenced the course of history. These molecules provided the impetus for …
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How the Irish Saved Civilization
by Thomas Cahill
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A book in the best tradition of popular history—the untold story of Ireland's role in maintaining Western culture while the Dark Ages …
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The Alphabet Versus the Goddess
by Leonard Shlain
This groundbreaking book proposes that the rise of alphabetic literacy reconfigured the human brain and brought about profound changes in history, religion, and gender relations. …
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The Lives of the Artists
by Giorgio Vasari
Packed with facts, attributions, and entertaining anecdotes about his contemporaries, Vasari's collection of biographical accounts also presents a highly influential theory of the development of …
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Man and His Symbols
by Carl G. Jung
Man and His Symbols owes its existence to one of Jung's own dreams. The great psychologist dreamed that his work was understood by a wide …
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Dark Age Ahead
by Jane Jacobs
A dark age is a culture's dead end. In North America, for example, we live in a virtual graveyard of lost and destroyed aboriginal cultures. …
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Critical Mass
by Philip Ball
"In searching for answers, the science writer Philip Ball argues that we can enlist help from a seemingly unlikely source: physics. The first person to …