Nonfiction

These are some of my favorite nonfiction works divided up into Books and Essays.

§ Books

• Claude Allegre – The Behavior of the Earth: Continental and Seafloor Mobility. In my opinion, the best lay introduction to plate tectonics.
• Wayne C. Booth – The Rhetoric of Fiction.
• Daniel R. Brooks and E. O. Wiley – Evolution as Entropy: Toward a Unified Theory of Biology.
• Michael W. Doyle – Empires. A great book on the subject of empires and imperialism. Doyle is critical of ideological theories of empire for their provinciality and uses a lot of historical evidence to back his claims.
• John Earman – World Enough and Space-Time: Absolute versus Relational Theories of Space and Time. Great and balanced coverage of this topic. Earman goes over many possible types of spacetime in an attempt to focus the debate.
• Paul Fussell – Poetic Meter and Poetic Form. A great introduction to prosody, sprinkled with many great poems.
• John Gardner – The Art of Fiction. An informal book on writing with many exercises as well as suggestions for reading. (Writers should read great works as well as attempt to write them.)
• Andrew M. Gleason – The Fundamentals of Abstract Analysis. A painless introduction to the subject. Easy to understand with many exercises.
• Peter Hopkirk – The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia. History that reads like good adventure fiction.
• Hans-Hermann Hoppe – Democracy—The God that Failed: The Economics and Politics of Monarchy, Democracy, and Natural Order. Brilliant work that argues democracy is one of the worst forms of government. While I disagree with some of Hoppe's views – especially his cultural conservatism – I find the rest of his work cogent. One problem with the book, though, is that it's a collection of independent essays, so there's lots of repetition.
• Stephen Horwitz – Microfoundations and Macroeconomics: An Austrian Perspective.
• Walter Kaufmann – Tragedy and Philosophy. Breathtaking in scope and scholarship.
• Henry Tompkins Kirby-Smith – The Origins of Free Verse. Witty and eye opening. This should be a must read for anyone who believes free verse started with Walt Whitman.
• Philip Kitcher – The Nature of Mathematical Knowledge. Puts forth the minority view that mathematics is ultimately empirical.
• Morris Kline – Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty.
• Morris Kline – Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times. This three volume set is a must for anyone who is serious about the history of math. Sadly, it does not cover the 20th century all that much.
• Ludwig M. Lachmann – Capital and Its Structure. Great book on [economic] capital theory, introducing Lachmann's notion of heterogeneity in capital. he treats capital as a changing structure rather than blobs of some homogeneous economic substance. Also, very easy to read.
• Mark A. S. McMenamin and Dianna L. Schulte McMenamin – The Emergence of Animals: The Cambrian Breakthrough. The McMenamins examine perhaps the most important evolutionary event next to the beginning of life itself.
• Bert Mendelson – Introduction to Topology. Brief (a little over 200 pages with index) and no nonsense introduction to point set topology. Also, readily available in an inexpensive Dover edition.
• Martha C. Nussbaum – The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy. Nussbaum is one of my favorite living philosophers.
• Stephen Pollard – Philosophical Introduction to Set Theory. A bit biased, but witty and informative.
• Ayn Rand and Nathaniel Branden – The Virtue of Selfishness. A collection of essays by Rand and Branden on metaethics and ethics. I think they should be required reading.
• Rudy Rucker – Infinity and the Mind. Introduction to infinity that is nearly comprhensive in its coverage of the topic, from arithmetic to computing to philosophy.
• Chris Sciabarra – Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism. The detailed treatment of dialectics alone makes this a great book, but add to that his analysis of libertarianism specifically the system of Murray N. Rothbard.
• Paul Seabury and Angelo Codevilla – War: Ends and Means. Great book that everyone should read.
• Lawrence Sklar – Space, Time, and Spacetime. Set the stage for later debates in the field of spacetime philosophy.
• Paul Thagard – Conceptual Revolutions (see my review of this one) and How Scientists Explain Disease.
• Helen H. Vendler – The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets.
• J. R. Waldram – The Theory of Thermodynamics. Starts with quantum mechanics! The way thermodynamics, in my humble opinion, should be taught.
• Stephen M. Walt – The Origins of Alliances. Walt uses the Middle East after World War Two to build a theory of how nations ally. Good stuff for students of foreign affairs, especially since Walt uses the data to attack certain assumptions about international relations.

§ Essays

• Kenyon Cox – "What is Painting?" in his What is Painting? "Winslow Homer" and Other Essays. A great essay written by a painter and art critic who should be more well known.
• Richard Hugo – "Writing off the Subject" in his The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing. A great essay on how the subject should be handled in poetry. It should be applied by all artists to their respective arts.
• Randall L. Schweller – "Bandwagoning for Profit: Bringing the Revisionist State Back In" in International Security 19(1) [Summer 1994]. Eye opening essay on how some nation states do not act for security but more for power. This explains the behvior of nations that risk security for increasing power, even if such behavior is usually short lived.

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