Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner · 320 pages

*A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything* Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? Why do drug dealers still live with their moms? How much do parents really matter? How did the legalization of abortion affect the rate of violent crime? These may not sound like typical questions for an economist to ask. But

The Straight Dope

Cecil Adams · 417 pages

"Once referred to as 'possibly the world's greatest reference librarian' (American Libraries, February 1995, page 146), Cecil Adams has been answering questions via his alternative newspaper column, 'The Straight Dope', since 1973. This online archive includes most of the questions and answers from the past quarter century. Entertaining and informative, Cecil over the years has answered questions

What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

Randall Munroe · 312 pages

Millions of people visit xkcd.com each week to read Randall Munroe's iconic webcomic. His stick-figure drawings about science, technology, language, and love have a large and passionate following. Fans of xkcd ask Munroe a lot of strange questions. What if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90 percent the speed of light? How fast can you hit a speed bump while driving and live? If there was a

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

Richard Feynman · 350 pages

The biography of the physicist and Nobel prize winner Richard P. Feynman - a collection of short stories, chapters told to and written down by Ralph Leighton. Feynman tells of his childhood and youth and goes into his adult life, both personally and professionally.

The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language

Mark Forsyth · 373 pages

Quirkology: The Curious Science Of Everyday Lives

Richard Wiseman · 312 pages

Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife

Mary Roach · 320 pages

Soccernomics

Simon Kuper, Stefan Szymanski · 448 pages

Using insights and analogies from economics, statistics, psychology, and business to cast a new and entertaining light on how the game of soccer works, "Soccernomics" reveals the often surprisingly counterintuitive truths about the world's most popular game. An essential guide for the 2010 World Cup.

I'm Just Here for the Food: Food + Heat = Cooking

Alton Brown · 287 pages

Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data

Charles Wheelan · 304 pages

The field of statistics is rapidly transforming into a discipline that Hal Varian at Google has called "sexy". And with good reason; from batting averages and political polls to game shows and medical research, the real-world application of statistics is growing by leaps and bounds. In this book the author demystifies the study of statistics by stripping away the arcane and technical details to ge

Pulphead

John Jeremiah Sullivan · 392 pages

"A sharp-eyed, uniquely humane tour of America's cultural landscape--from high to low to lower than low--by the award-winning young star of the literary nonfiction world In Pulphead, John Jeremiah Sullivan takes us on an exhilarating tour of our popular, unpopular, and at times completely forgotten culture. Simultaneously channeling the gonzo energy of Hunter S. Thompson and the wit and insight o

I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America after Twenty Years Away

Bill Bryson · 381 pages

After living in Britain for two decades, Bill Bryson recently moved back to the United States with his English wife and four children (he had read somewhere that nearly 3 million Americans believed they had been abducted by aliens--as he later put it, "it was clear my people needed me"). They were greeted by a new and improved America that boasts microwave pancakes, twenty-four-hour dental-floss

How to Lie with Statistics

Darrell Huff · 142 pages

Darrell Huff runs the gamut of every popularly used type of statistic, probes such things as the sample study, the tabulation method, the interview technique, or the way the results are derived from the figures, and points up the countless number of dodges which are used to fool rather than inform.

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Nassim Nicholas Taleb · 400 pages

The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create the World's Great Drinks

Amy Stewart · 400 pages

Sake began with a grain of rice. Scotch emerged from barley, tequila from agave, rum from sugarcane, bourbon from corn. Thirsty yet? In The Drunken Botanist, Amy Stewart explores the dizzying array of herbs, flowers, trees, fruits, and fungi that humans have, through ingenuity, inspiration, and sheer desperation, contrived to transform into alcohol over the centuries. Of all the extraordinary a

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

David Foster Wallace · 353 pages

A collection of stories from David Foster Wallace is occasion to celebrate. These stories -- which have been prominently serialized in Harper's, Esquire, the Paris Review, and elsewhere -- explore intensely immediate states of mind, with the attention to voice and the extraordinary creative daring that have won Wallace his reputation as one of the most talented fiction writer of his generation.Amo

When You Are Engulfed in Flames

David Sedaris · 321 pages

"David Sedaris's ability to transform the mortification of everyday life into wildly entertaining art," (The Christian Science Monitor) is elevated to wilder and more entertaining heights than ever in this remarkable new book. Trying to make coffee when the water is shut off, David considers using the water in a vase of flowers and his chain of associations takes him from the French countryside to

A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?

Kelly Weinersmith · 448 pages

Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

Anthony Bourdain · 320 pages

A celebrity chef shares anecdotes of his experience in the restaurant industry, and of his journey from dishwasher to a position of fame in the food industry.

The Call of the Weird: Travels in American Subcultures

Louis Theroux · 280 pages

A book that chronicles the author's travels among subcultures in america, including a man who claims to have killed 10 aliens, and a neo-Nazi whose daughters have formed a white power folk singing group.

My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands

Chelsea Handler · 213 pages

The Humor Code: A Global Search for What Makes Things Funny

Peter McGraw, Joel Warner · 254 pages

Part road-trip comedy and part social science experiment, a scientist and a journalist travel the globe to discover the secret behind what makes things funny, questioning countless experts, including Louis C.K., along the way.

Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

Joshua Foer · 307 pages

The blockbuster phenomenon that charts an amazing journey of the mind while revolutionizing our concept of memory “Highly entertaining.” —Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker “Funny, curious, erudite, and full of useful details about ancient techniques of training memory.” —The Boston Globe An instant bestseller that has now become a classic, Moonwalking with Einstein recounts Joshua Foer's yearlo

Survival of the Sickest: A Medical Maverick Discovers Why We Need Disease

Sharon Moalem · 279 pages

Survival of the Sickest: The Surprising Connections Between Disease and Longevity is a 2007 New York Times Bestselling science book by Sharon Moalem, an evolutionary biologist and neurogeneticist, and Jonathan Prince, senior advisor and speechwriter for the Clinton administration. It was originally titled, Survival of the Sickest: A Medical Maverick Discovers Why We Need Disease.