Here are 48 books that Mistakes That Worked fans have personally recommended if you like
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I’m an emeritus professor of psychology (University of Washington) who has long been intrigued by the mistakes that people have made throughout history. I’ve long been struck by Oppenheimer’s observation, immediately after the Trinity explosion, that “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” This led me to look into the wide array of mistakes, from the mythic, literary, athletic, business, political, medical, and military. In writing OOPS!, I let myself go in a way that I’ve never before, writing with a critical and wise-ass style that isn’t strictly academic, but is factually accurate and, frankly, was a lot of fun!
Two renowned social psychologists show how people—some famous and some not—avoid taking responsibility for their blunders.
By the book''s end, we see how we avoid admitting our missteps, and aware of how much our own (and everyone's) lives would improve if we could simply say, ''I made a mistake. I'm sorry.”
Renowned social psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson take a compelling look into how the brain is wired for self-justification. This updated edition concludes with an extended discussion of how we can live with dissonance, learn from it, and perhaps, eventually, forgive ourselves.
Why is it so hard to say “I made a mistake”—and really believe it?
When we make mistakes, cling to outdated attitudes, or mistreat other people, we must calm the cognitive dissonance that jars our feelings of self-worth. And so, unconsciously, we create fictions that absolve us of responsibility, restoring our belief that we are smart, moral,…
I’m an emeritus professor of psychology (University of Washington) who has long been intrigued by the mistakes that people have made throughout history. I’ve long been struck by Oppenheimer’s observation, immediately after the Trinity explosion, that “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” This led me to look into the wide array of mistakes, from the mythic, literary, athletic, business, political, medical, and military. In writing OOPS!, I let myself go in a way that I’ve never before, writing with a critical and wise-ass style that isn’t strictly academic, but is factually accurate and, frankly, was a lot of fun!
The title says it well. Sometimes we all need to forgive ourselves for our errors, and to take a clear, sober look at our blunders.
This book shows how rigid thinking can subtly lead us to undermine ourselves. In the process, it identifies seven "cognition traps" to avoid. Easier said than done… but includes some very worthwhile advice.
"Engaging…Teases out the cause and effect of seven [cognition] traps with witty stories of famous blunders…to teach the basis of good judgment. L ike all good historians he's hoping we can avoid making the same mistake twice."―O, The Oprah Magazine
For anyone whose best-laid plans have been foiled by faulty thinking, Blunder reveals how understanding seven simple traps―Exposure Anxiety, Causefusion, Flat View, Cure-Allism, I nfomania, Mirror Imaging, Static Cling―can make us all less apt to err in our daily lives.
I’m an emeritus professor of psychology (University of Washington) who has long been intrigued by the mistakes that people have made throughout history. I’ve long been struck by Oppenheimer’s observation, immediately after the Trinity explosion, that “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” This led me to look into the wide array of mistakes, from the mythic, literary, athletic, business, political, medical, and military. In writing OOPS!, I let myself go in a way that I’ve never before, writing with a critical and wise-ass style that isn’t strictly academic, but is factually accurate and, frankly, was a lot of fun!
It is both entertaining and informative to learn how some of the greatest scientists have been wrong… at least some of the time.
Because of its triumphs, many people look upon science as unerring. Those of us involved in science, however, know that its power comes from its self-correction. Livio shows how scientific mistakes happen and also how they result in ever-closer approximations to the truth.
We all make mistakes. Nobody is perfect. And that includes five of the greatest scientists in history -- Charles Darwin, William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), Linus Pauling, Fred Hoyle, Albert Einstein. But the mistakes that these great scientists made helped science to advance. Indeed, as Mario Livio explains in this fascinating book, science thrives on error; it advances when erroneous ideas are disproven.
All five scientists were great geniuses and fascinating human beings. Their blunders were part of their genius and part of the scientific process. Livio brilliantly analyses their errors to show where they were wrong and right, but what…
A delightful and distinctive picture book biography about Dr. Virginia Apgar, who invented the standard, eponymous test for evaluating newborn health used worldwide thousands of times every day.
You might know about the Apgar Score. But do you know the brilliant, pioneering woman who invented it? Born at the turn…
I’m an emeritus professor of psychology (University of Washington) who has long been intrigued by the mistakes that people have made throughout history. I’ve long been struck by Oppenheimer’s observation, immediately after the Trinity explosion, that “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” This led me to look into the wide array of mistakes, from the mythic, literary, athletic, business, political, medical, and military. In writing OOPS!, I let myself go in a way that I’ve never before, writing with a critical and wise-ass style that isn’t strictly academic, but is factually accurate and, frankly, was a lot of fun!
This is an accessible account of history through the lens of how “mistakes were made,” and how most of us aren’t told about them.
It is plain old-fashioned great fun to read about blunders in the worlds of business, sports, pop culture, even some of America’s epic military failures (so long as they happened long ago!). A great corrective to claims that the US is uniquely blessed with perfection.
Have you ever wondered what the biggest failures in American history are?
Which sports teams just can’t seem to catch a break and keep failing, over and over and over in the most disastrous manner?
What are some of the biggest failures in American pop culture?
In The United States of Epic Fails: 52 Crazy Stories and Blunders Through History That You Didn't Get Taught in School you’ll learn all about these embarrassing moments and many other American failures on an epic level.
Here you will find out:
What film almost destroyed a major studio and killed a movie genre?…
I have been in love with the Universe since I was a kid. Astronomy has always been my passion, and eventually became my career. This drove me to get my astronomy PhD and work on Hubble for a decade before starting to write and do public outreach about science. I’ve been on podcasts, radio, TV, and consulted for books and blockbuster sci-fi movies. I love science and science fiction – stories are one of the most powerful ways we relate to the Universe. I live and breathe this stuff every day, and my greatest joy is motivating that passion for science in others.
Astronomer Mike Brown is dedicated to finding small icy worlds beyond Neptune.
His discovery of the frozen object Eris in 2005—only slightly smaller but more massive than Pluto—is credited for kick-starting the official debate of how we define a planet, and this book is his personal telling of that story.
He weaves it together with the birth of his daughter in a well-told and engaging tale that will give you insight on how discoveries can change how we see the Universe.
The solar system most of us grew up with included nine planets, with Mercury closest to the sun and Pluto at the outer edge. Then, in 2005, astronomer Mike Brown made the discovery of a lifetime: a tenth planet, Eris, slightly bigger than Pluto. But instead of its resulting in one more planet being added to our solar system, Brown’s find ignited a firestorm of controversy that riled the usually sedate world of astronomy and launched him into the public eye. The debate culminated in the demotion of Pluto from real planet to the newly coined category of “dwarf” planet.…
I know a book can change a person’s life because one of my early life-changing events was reading Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. From it, I took away the idea of how a fact is made, not discovered, and how facts, even those as “objective” as those in science, are different in different ages. It’s less a matter of one age being wrong about “Nature,” for example, than it is that a concept like “Nature” emerges out of a scrum of attitudes, technologies, conventions, etc.
Usually, when I think of the Romantic Age, I think of the art and literature of the time. But I love how this book depicts its science as a wide-open activity, full of the wonder, false starts, pleasures, and pitfalls of any creative activity.
I think every scientist in this book also wrote poetry; the vast majority of them took as a given the fact that aliens lived on other planets; scientific lectures were a form of popular entertainment, as were many discoveries: e.g., laughing gas, the first anesthesia, was used at parties to get high before it was used in medicine.
I love to think of the discoveries of the past in the context of today, as when the race between England and France to develop a steerable hot-air balloon was, in effect, the first “space race.”
Shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize and winner of the Royal Society Prize for Science Books, Richard Holmes's dazzling portrait of the age of great scientific discovery is a groundbreaking achievement.
The book opens with Joseph Banks, botanist on Captain Cook's first Endeavour voyage, who stepped onto a Tahitian beach in 1769 fully expecting to have located Paradise. Back in Britain, the same Romantic revolution that had inspired Banks was spurring other great thinkers on to their own voyages of artistic and scientific discovery - astronomical, chemical, poetical, philosophical - that together made up the 'age of wonder'.
Trained as a physicist and employed for twenty years as an engineer, my great interest in the application of science then led me to write. I authored technical papers on the physics underpinning venerable machines such as pendulum clocks and waterwheels; these were read by the chief editor at Johns Hopkins University Press, who invited me to turn them into a popular science book–the first of fourteen. Often, technological advances were made empirically–the development of sailing ships, bridges, or pocket watches–by working people with no formal knowledge of science, yet their designs survive as triumphs of human thought, as well as useful machines.
I love this book for its affection for its characters and the colorful details of the world in which they lived.
It is a coruscating read about five curious men (curious in both senses) in eighteenth-century England at the dawn of the first industrial revolution–a revolution that they helped to create.
Led by Erasmus Darwin, the Lunar Society of Birmingham was formed from a group of amateur experimenters, tradesmen and artisans who met and made friends in the Midlands in the 1760s. Most came from humble families, all lived far from the centre of things, but they were young and their optimism was boundless: together they would change the world. Among them were the ambitious toy-maker Matthew Boulton and his partner James Watt, of steam-engine fame; the potter Josiah Wedgwood; the larger-than-life Erasmus Darwin, physician, poet, inventor and theorist of evolution (a forerunner of his grandson Charles Darwin). Later came Joseph…
I’m a historian of science fascinated by how scientists cope with uncertainty. I’m drawn to books that identify and try to explain the gaps in scientific knowledge and describe ways of knowing that might not be called scientific. I love to read stories about how ordinary people discover extraordinary things about their environments. I’m always curious about what happens when savvy locals are visited by scientific experts. Will they join forces? Admit what they don’t know? Or is a struggle brewing?
I was captivated by an insight that came to Firestein while he was teaching college biology. Science courses typically teach what scientists know about their disciplines, but what’s most exciting to scientists is what they don’t know.
So Firestein had the brilliant idea to design a course where scientists would share their “ignorance”—the questions that keep them up at night and propel new research. It helps that the author used to work as a stand-up comic!
Knowledge is a big subject, says Stuart Firestein, but ignorance is a bigger one. And it is ignorance-not knowledge-that is the true engine of science.
Most of us have a false impression of science as a surefire, deliberate, step-by-step method for finding things out and getting things done. In fact, says Firestein, more often than not, science is like looking for a black cat in a dark room, and there may not be a cat in the room. The process is more hit-or-miss than you might imagine, with much stumbling and groping after phantoms. But it is exactly this "not…
I’m a historical fiction author and librarian from Hampshire, and I’m passionate about women’s history. I write stories inspired by the lives of real women in the past, who achieved extraordinary things, but whom history has forgotten. My debut novel, Operation Moonlight, won the Penguin Random House First Novel competition in 2019.
This is one of my favourite novels about the imagined life of the 19th Century fossil enthusiast, Mary Anning.
Though poor and uneducated, Mary had a passion for dinosaur fossils, scouring the windswept Jurassic coast near Lyme Regis. She found fossils nobody else could, making discoveries that shook the scientific world. But science in the past was an almost entirely male-dominated arena, and Mary’s finds were effectively stolen from her, and she was ignored and forgotten in the scientific community.
Mary’s story is one of female hardship, endurance, and tenacity, and her contribution to our scientific knowledge deserves to be remembered.
From the New York Times bestselling novelist, a stunning historical novel that follows the story of Mary Anning and Elizabeth Philpot, two extraordinary 19th century fossil hunters who changed the scientific world forever.
On the windswept, fossil-strewn beaches of the English coast, poor and uneducated Mary learns that she has a unique gift: "the eye" to spot ammonites and other fossils no one else can see. When she uncovers an unusual fossilized skeleton in the cliffs near her home, she sets the religious community on edge, the townspeople to gossip, and the scientific world alight. After enduring bitter cold, thunderstorms,…
Artemis Sparke has had it with humans. She heads to the nearby salt marsh to hang out with the birds, plants, and mollusks who don't make a big deal of her stutter. The shoreline sanctuary is predictable, unlike her family and friends, and the data in her science journal proves…
I’ve always read speculative fiction for its new perspectives on reality. Now that I write it too, I appreciate the fabulous minds that create these unique views of our universe even more. Experience in higher education and instructional design led me to appreciate organization that flows at the speed and direction of thought. I adore a well-turned phrase and a well-built world, and I hope this list leads you to a new experience of that same joy.
A lot of speculative fiction involves “basic” technologies like animal domestication, farming, and written language. This well-organized, thoroughly sourced non-fiction book will tell you just how difficult developing all that stuff was on our planet, let alone in whatever fictional universes you may find these technologies in! I will never again take charcoal, or the concept of zero, for granted.
Aside from the book’s valuable content, its language is simple. The author integrates the facts into the fiction that our time machine has broken down, stranding us in a previous era where we are a long, arduous journey away from ever eating microwaved ramen again. North also points out, at every opportunity, all the ridiculousness and hilarity involved in invention, civilization, and attempting to do everything by ourselves. Please, read the footnotes in this one.
"How to Invent Everything is such a cool book. It's essential reading for anyone who needs to duplicate an industrial civilization quickly." --Randall Munroe, xkcd creator and New York Times-bestselling author of What If?
The only book you need if you're going back in time
What would you do if a time machine hurled you thousands of years into the past. . . and then broke? How would you survive? Could you improve on humanity's original timeline? And how hard would it be to domesticate a giant wombat?
With this book as your guide, you'll survive--and thrive--in any period in…
