Four authors make it onto my list more than once. They are:
Derek Bickerton
- Bastard Tongues
- Adam's Tongue
- Guns, Germs, and Steel
- The Third Chimpanzee
- Collapse
- Why is Sex Fun?
- 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
- 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created
- Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence
- Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human
- The Ancestor's Tale by Richard Dawkins
- The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia by Peter Hopkirk
- Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation: The Definitive Guide to the Evolutionary Biology of Sex by Olivia Judson
- Napoleon's Buttons: How 17 Molecules Changed History by Penny Le Couteur and Jay Burreson.
- Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World by Nicholas Ostler
- The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker
Runners up include Diamond's The World Until Yesterday, and several of Dawkins' explanations of natural selection. TWUY is simply too long and tedious to be good reading. And unfortunately Dawkins severely undermined the power of his science writing firstly by writing essentially the same book half a dozen times, and then by writing a certain other book guaranteeing that the people who could most use a cogent summary of natural selection won't touch any of them.
I also excluded several books I greatly enjoyed but which did not have sufficient scope to influence my thinking. These are Bill Bryson's The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way, Freakanomics, and James Lowen's Lies My Teacher Told Me and Lies Across America.
How about you all? What are some great books on academic topics, written for a lay audience, which were enjoyable to read and influenced your thinking?