I am often asked whether I’ve read a particular book, and I usually haven’t because there are a gazillion new books published every year. Here’s what I say: “No, I haven’t read THAT book. Thank you for your suggestion.” Here’s what I think: Please quit acting as though I haven’t been doing any serious reading just because I haven’t read the book that YOU just told me to read.

For the past 20 years, I have been on a quest to grasp a somewhat detailed understanding of human animals. This has been a rather intense pursuit, jump-started (for about 5 years beginning in 2006) by my auditing of more than 30 hours of graduate level cognitive science courses at nearby Washington University in St. Louis. During the past 20 years, I have read almost entirely non-fiction, and I’ve been rather careful to limit my topics mostly to the topics represented by the books below. Recently, I decided to inventory what I have been reading. I’m not entirely sure why I did this. Perhaps it is because the end of the year is approaching, which tends to be a time for reflection regarding who we are and where we are headed. What better way for a writer to determine his direction based upon the books he has especially admired for the past two decades?

Thus I took an inventory of the non-fiction books I have read that have significantly influenced me. I tend to make many notes on the books I own (I haven’t started into electronic books yet), and I retain them in my “library,” which is actually a storage room that contain lots of other household items. Yesterday, I ventured into my library with the intent of documenting the books that have especially impressed and challenged me. I ended up selecting less than 20% of the books I own for this honor. What follows below is a list of such books, all of which I have read over the past 20 years.

It is not a perfect list. I am sure that there are many dozens of other books that I have overlooked. I probably own 500 books that I have only browsed so far, or not even begun, yet look promising. I’m more and more convinced that I will never read most of my unread books unless I win the lottery and retire. I try to not keep a steady course, though my quest seems hopeless. I’m reminded of this hopelessness every time I stumble on a pile of 30 unread and partially read books by the side of my bed.

In my list below, I have only included those books that I have actually read. I would highly recommend any of them. I have not included in many other books I have read that I would consider merely been useful or “good.” As I made my list, it occurred to me that I have been greatly influenced by more than books. I have read far more pages of online or in paper magazine articles than book pages. More recently, I’ve been impressed by many video and in-person presentations/lectures. I have also corresponded with many people over the years on these topics, including many of the authors of the books in my list. I’ve poured immense time into my reading and writing. It surprised me how much material I have reviewed in 20 years, considering that I also have a day job as a consumer lawyer and also try to spend time with my family.

It occurs to me that I am extremely lucky to be living in a time and place where I can benefit from so many incredible ideas developed be others. Each of these authors spends his or her entire life working hard, and then I simply scoop up the their life’s work by investing a mere day or two or reading. I have mentioned many of these books and authors in the five years that I’ve been writing at this website; I find that writing comments about these book helps me to absorb the material better.

It also occurs to me that I would not be at all who I am had I not seriously read the books in my list. I make reference to many of these ideas many times each day. To the extent that I have been able to come up with interesting ideas, it is quite likely that “my” ideas came, directly or indirectly, from these books, and that I am thus standing on the shoulders of giants (there I go again with the borrowing). Without further ado, here many of my favorite non-fiction books, broken into a few general categories:

Evolution and Nature

• Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine (1996), by Randolph M. Nesse and George C. Williams,
• The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution, By Richard Dawkins (2004)
• The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design (1996)
• A Devil’s Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love, by Richard Dawkins (2004);
• The Human Story, by Dunbar, Robin (2005)
• The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (P.S.) by Jared Diamond (Jan 3, 2006)
• The Panda’s Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History (1992) Stephen Jay Gould
• Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History (1992) Stephen Jay Gould
• Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, Edward O. Wilson (2000)
• Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America’s Soul, Kenneth Miller (2010).
• The Evolution of Culture: An Interdisciplinary View, Edited by Robin Dunbar (1999).
• Human Evolutionary Psychology, by Louise Barrett, Robin Dunbar (2002)
• Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language, by Robin Dunbar (1997)
• The Handicap Principle: A Missing Piece of Darwin’s Puzzle by Amotz Zahavi, et al (1997)
• What Evolution Is, by Ernst Mayr (2002)
• The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature, by Geoffrey F. Miller (2001)
• Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin’s Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives by David Sloan Wilson (Dec 26, 2007)
• Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society by David Sloan Wilson (Oct 1, 2003)
• Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior by Prof. Elliott Sober, Prof. David Sloan Wilson and David Sloan Wilson (Oct 1, 1999)
• Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and The Meanings Of Life, by Daniel C. Dennett (Jun 12, 1996)
• Evolution vs. Creationism: An Introduction, 2nd Edition by Eugenie Carol Scott (Aug 3, 2009)
• The Way of the Cell: Molecules, Organisms, and the Order of Life – Frank Harold (2003)
• Climbing Mount Improbable-Richard Dawkins (1997)
• The Evolution of Desire-David Buss (2003)
• Liaisons of Life: From Hornworts to Hippos, How the Unassuming Microbe Has Driven Evolution-Tom Wakeford (2002)
• The Origin of Species, 1876 by Charles Darwin
• Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex among Apes by Frans de de Waal (Aug 30, 2007)
• Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior by Geoffrey Miller (May 25, 2010)
• The Triumph of Sociobiology by John Alcock (May 1, 2003)
• Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings Of Life, by Daniel C. Dennett (Jun 12, 1996)
• Ants at Work: How an Insect Society is Organized by Deborah Gordon (Oct 2000)
• Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind (4th Edition) by David M. Buss (2011)
• The Book of Life: An Illustrated History of the Evolution of Life on Earth, Second Edition by Stephen Jay Gould (2001)

History & Culture

• A People’s History of the United States, by Howard Zinn,
• Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James W. Loewen (Oct 16, 2007)
• Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond (Jul 11, 2005)

Religion

• The Bible According to Mark Twain: Irreverent Writings on Eden, Heaven, and the Flood (1996)
• Critique of Religion and Philosophy by Walter A. Kaufmann (Paperback – Apr 1, 1979)
• Religion Explained by Pascal Boyer (Paperback – Apr 30, 2002)
• Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up by John Allen Paulos (Kindle Edition – Apr 1, 2010)
• The Religions of Man-Houston Smith
• Lost Scriptures: Books that Did Not Make It into the New Testament by Bart D. Ehrman (Sep 15, 2005)
• Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (Plus) by Bart D. Ehrman (Feb 6, 2007)
• Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don’t Know About Them) by Bart D. Ehrman (Feb 2, 2010)
• The Jesus Puzzle: Did Christianity Begin with a Mythical Christ? Challenging the Existence of an Historical Jesus by Earl Doherty (Jan 1, 2005)
• The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins (Jan 16, 2008)
• Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris (Jan 8, 2008)
• Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by Daniel C. Dennett (Feb 6, 2007)

Cognitive Science/psychology/Neuroscience/Moral Psychology

• A Clearing in the Forest: Law, Life, and Mind, by Winter, Steven L.
• Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain – Antonio Damasio (2005)
• Born to Rebel : Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives, by Frank J. Sulloway (1997)
• The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making, by Scott Plous (1993);
• Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcomings of Social Judgment, by Richard Nisbett and Lee Ross (1980);
• Neurophilosophy, by Patricia Churchland;
• Reasoning and Decision Making, ed. P.N. Johnson-Laird and E. Shafir., (1993)
• Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Penguin Classics) by Hannah Arendt and Amos Elon (Paperback – Sep 22, 2006)
• Character and Culture, by Sigmund Freud (Paperback – 1972)
• Civilization and Its Discontents by Sigmund Freud (Paperback – Sep 15, 2010)
• The Future of an Illusion by Sigmund Freud (Paperback – May 30, 2011)
• The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements by Eric Hoffer (2002)
• A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper by John Allen Paulos (Paperback – Sep 26, 1997)
• A Mathematician Plays The Stock Market by John Allen Paulos
• Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences – John Allen Paulos (2001)
• Understanding Emotions-the Ken Jenkins (2006)
• The Prehistory of the Mind-Steven Mitten (1999)
• The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology-Robert Wright (1995)
• Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals by Frans B. M. de Waal (Oct 15, 1997)
• The Ape and the Sushi Master: Cultural Reflections of a Primatologist by Franz De Waal (Dec 24, 2001)
• Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count by Richard E. Nisbett (Feb 8, 2010)
• Explaining the Brain by Carl F. Craver (Aug 17, 2009)
• That Complex Whole: Culture and The Evolution Of Human Behavior by Lee Cronk (Aug 13, 1999)
• Mindware: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Cognitive Science by Andy Clark (Dec 21, 2000)
• On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not by Robert Burton (Mar 17, 2009)
• Searching For Memory: The Brain, the Mind, and the Past by Daniel L. Schacter (May 2, 1997)
• Memory Distortion: How Minds, Brains, and Societies Reconstruct the Past by Daniel L. Schacter (Sep 30, 1997)
• Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart by Gerd Gigerenzer, Peter M. Todd and ABC Research Group (Sep 2000)
• How We Know What Isn’t So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life by Thomas Gilovich (Mar 5, 1993)
• Inevitable Illusions: How Mistakes of Reason Rule Our Minds by Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini (Nov 1996)
• Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds by Charles MacKay (Jul 23, 2011)
• Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment by Thomas Gilovich, Dale Griffin and Daniel Kahneman (Jul 8, 2002)
• The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less by Barry Schwartz (Jan 18, 2005)
• Philosophy and the Neurosciences: A Reader by William Bechtel, Robert S. Stufflebeam, Jennifer Mundale and Pete Mandik (Oct 16, 2001)
• Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence by Andy Clark (Dec 9, 2004)
• Associative Engines: Connectionism, Concepts, and Representational Change (Bradford Books) by Andy Clark (Jan 1, 2003)
• Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind by Simon Baron-Cohen, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby (Feb 1, 1997)
• The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture by Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby (Oct 19, 1995)
• How Brains Think: Evolving Intelligence, Then And Now (Science Masters Series) by William H. Calvin (Sep 6, 1997)
• The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (Philosophy of Mind Series) by David J. Chalmers (Nov 27, 1997)
• The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul: A Philosophical Journey into the Brain (Bradford Books) by Paul M. Churchland (Jul 25, 1996)
• Mind and Morals: Essays on Ethics and Cognitive Science by Larry May, Andy Clark and Marilyn Friedman (Jan 17, 1996)
• Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again by Andy Clark (Jan 9, 1998)
• The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics by Stanislas Dehaene (Dec 9, 1999)
• the Intentional Stance-Daniel Dennett
• Consciousness Explained by Daniel C. Dennett (Oct 20, 1992)
• Freedom Evolves by Daniel C. Dennett (Jan 27, 2004)
• Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting by Daniel C. Dennett (Nov 21, 1984)
• Rethinking Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective on Development (Neural Network Modeling and Connectionism) by Jeffrey L. Elman, Elizabeth A. Bates, Mark H. Johnson and Annette Karmiloff-Smith (Nov 28, 1997)
• Varieties of Moral Personality: Ethics and Psychological Realism by Owen Flanagan (Jan 1, 1993)
• Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things by George Lakoff (Apr 15, 1990)
• Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics by Mark Johnson (Nov 1, 1994)
• The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding by Mark Johnson (Nov 15, 2008)
• The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason by Mark Johnson (Apr 15, 1990)
• Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (Apr 15, 2003)
• Philosophy in the Flesh : The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (Dec 1, 1999)
• The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom by Jonathan Haidt (Dec 1, 2006)
• The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings Of Emotional Life, by Joseph Ledoux (Mar 27, 1998)
• Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are by Joseph Ledoux (Jan 28, 2003)
• The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience by Francisco J. Varela, Evan T. Thompson and Eleanor Rosch (Nov 13, 1992)
• The Person and the Situation: Perspectives of Social Psychology by Lee Ross, Richard E. Nisbett
• Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell (2007)
• The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker (Aug 26, 2003)
• How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker (Jun 22, 2009)
• The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (P.S.) by Steven Pinker (Sep 4, 2007)
• Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (Perennial Classics) by Stanley Milgram (Paperback – Jun 30, 2009)
• Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are by Frans De Waal (Paperback – Aug 1, 2006)
• Intelligence Reframed: Multiple Intelligences for the 21st Century by Howard Gardner (Paperback – Sep 18, 2000)
• Microcognition: Philosophy, Cognitive Science, and Parallel Distributed Processing by Andy Clark (1991)
• This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession by Daniel J. Levitin (2007)
• The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki (2005)

Decision-Making

• Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (Collins Business Essentials) by Robert B. Cialdini (Dec 26, 2006)
• Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases by Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic and Amos Tversky (Apr 30, 1982)
• Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman (Oct 25, 2011)
• Choices, Values, and Frames by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky (Paperback – Sep 25, 2000)

Complexity

• At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity by Stuart Kauffman (Nov 21, 1996)
• Complexity: The Emerging Science At The Edge Of Order And Chaos, by M. Mitchell Waldrop (Sep 1, 1993)
• Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick (Aug 26, 2008)
• Frontiers of Complexity: The Search for Order in a Chaotic World by Roger Highfield (Aug 27, 1996)
• Connectionism and the Mind: Parallel Processing, Dynamics, and Evolution in Networks by William Bechtel and Adele Abrahamsen (Jan 28, 2002)
• Discovering Complexity: Decomposition and Localization as Strategies in Scientific Research by William Bechtel and Robert C. Richardson (Aug 6, 2010)
• Figments of Reality: The Evolution of the Curious Mind by Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen (Oct 28, 1999)
• Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams: Explorations in Massively Parallel Microworlds (Complex Adaptive Systems) by Mitchel Resnick (Jan 10, 1997)
• How the Leopard Changed Its Spots: The Evolution of Complexity by Brian Goodwin (Mar 1, 2001)
• Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life by David D. Friedman (Jul 18, 1997)
• Cognition in the Wild (Bradford Books) by Edwin Hutchins (Sep 1, 1996)
• Complexity: The Emerging Science At The Edge Of Order And Chaos, by M. Mitchell Waldrop (Sep 1, 1993)
• Dynamic Patterns: The Self-Organization of Brain and Behavior (Complex Adaptive Systems) by J. A. Scott Kelso (Apr 27, 1995)

Traditional Philosophy

• The Gay Science – by Frederick Nietzsche
• Beyond Good and Evil; by Frederick Nietzsche
• The Life of the Mind (Combined 2 Volumes in 1) (Vols 1&2) by Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy (Paperback – Mar 16, 1981)
• The Basic Works of Aristotle, Richard McKeon, trans. (2001)
• The Fabric of Character: Aristotle’s Theory of Virtue, by Nancy Sherman (Paperback – May 9, 1991)
• The Myth of Sisyphus: And Other Essays by Albert Camus (1991)
• Human Nature and Conduct: An Introduction to Social Psychology by John Dewey (2010)
• A Treatise of Human Nature, by David Hume
• Pragmatism and Other Essays, by William James
• Kant: Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, by Immanuel Kant,
• Faith of a Heretic by Walter Arnold Kaufmann (1978)
• The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell, by Bertrand Russell
• Good and Evil, by Richard Taylor

Philosophy of Science

• The Scientific Image, by Bastiaan C. Van Fraassen (Oct 2, 1980)
• The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn (Dec 15, 1996)
• Causality and Explanation – Wesley C. Salmon (1998)
• The Trouble with Science by R. I. M. Dunbar (Oct 1, 1996)
• Causality and Explanation by Wesley C. Salmon (Paperback – Jan 22, 1998)

Social Commentary/Current Events/Misc.

• 3 x Carlin: an Orgy of George – George Carlin
• THE AGE OF WIKILEAKS: From Collateral Murder to Cablegate (and Beyond) by Greg Mitchell (Feb 4, 2011)
• Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture by Juliet B. Schor (Oct 4, 2005)
• A Mathematician Plays The Stock Market by John Allen Paulos (May 1, 2004)
• No Impact Man: The Adventures of a Guilty Liberal Who Attempts to Save the Planet, and the Discoveries He Makes About Himself and Our Way of Life in the Process by Colin Beaven (May 25, 2010)
• The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society by Frans de Waal (Sep 7, 2010)
• The Introvert Advantage-Marty Laney
• Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls by Mary Pipher and Ruth Ross (Aug 1, 2005)
• Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control America’s Media by Eric Klinenberg (Jan 8, 2008)
• The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin the World Again by Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols (Hardcover – Jan 5, 2010)
• Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge by Edward O. Wilson (Paperback – Mar 30, 1999)