100 books like The Unfolding of Language

In recent years we have often heard it said that the United States is, for the first time in history, a diverse society.

David Hackett Fischer’s classic Albion’s Seed illustrates how not only the United States but the British seaboard colonies had enormous cultural diversity, based on the different regional origins in the British Isles of the bulk of their settlers.

The Founders knew this already: John Adams of Massachusetts nominated George Washington of Virginia to be commander of the Continental Army, because he understood that the Revolution needed support beyond New England, and Washington as commander soon learned that leading prickly Yankee New Englanders required different tactics than leading deferential Anglican Virginians. 

This book picks up where Evening in the Palace of Reason leaves off, with Bach composing the Musical Offering on a horrible theme from King Frederick.

It explains canons and fugues, and thus helps you understand Bach’s work better, but it then goes on a safari through the intellectual landscape of ideas related to fugues–strange loops, self-similarity, recursion, and of course the guys in the title. It’s not for everyone, but if you like any two of logic, philosophy, or music, give this a try.

What I love about Quammen’s science writing is that he immerses himself in the subject. Whether he’s writing about bat caves in Malaysia or the ebola virus killing gorillas in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, he ingratiates himself with a top scientist working on the problem and gets himself invited on a field trip.

Like a fusion between a travelogue and an Indiana Jones movie, this book is an utterly compelling read that marries the joy (and challenges) of doing science in exotic places with biological lessons that we all need to know about. This awesome book was written pre-COVID and predicts much about the pandemic.

The message? Humans should leave wild animals alone lest we catch their viruses.

We’ve often been inspired by the insights that Sapolsky has drawn from his years of fieldwork with baboons in Africa, but this book is grander in scope than his previous work, it’s a tour de force examination of human nature and behaviour.

From one of the best natural history writers of our time, neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky draws on his deep expertise to trace the biological and evolutionary origins of our human capacity for two different kinds of behavioural strategy:  morality, reconciliation and peace versus aggression, tribalism, and war. 

Jim Baggott is one of a handful of remaining hard science writers from the old school of honest science writing.

He is technically proficient in quantum physics and he avoids the cheap sensationalism that afflicts modern science writing. This book offers a fascinating insight into the narrow field of quantum gravity, with a personal angle that makes it very readable.

It conveys the same excitement I can still remember feeling as a teenager learning about the mysteries of fundamental physics for the first time. As someone who has worked in this general area of research, I very much enjoyed the mix of ideas presented with a page turning ease.

This little-known book is a beautifully written story of how spacetime processes explain the world of biology and morphology (organism development), using the analogy of mixing colours in a painting to explain how complex forms emerge from “simple" daubs of colour.

Coen explains ideas that go back to Alan Turing’s pioneering studies of biological processes, as well as computation, in a way that was highly influential to me as a scientist. Most of all this is a fine story that will stay with you for years to come written in a personal voice.

This selection is as much about its author as the book itself. It is one of a series of books, written in Dawkins superbly approachable style, on the subject of Darwinian evolution.

Dawkins began writing with his groundbreaking book The Selfish Gene. Unfortunately, the latter was rewritten so many times as to lose its initial impact, and this overshadowed the much better book The Extended Phenotype due to the forces of popular science publishing.

This newer book, with illustrations by his then-wife Laila Ward (of Dr Who fame) is a fine example from the man who brought us the Selfish Gene theory of forward evolutionary selection and multi-scale thinking. It’s a wild ride, written by a great writer and explainer whose role in modern science writing should not be underestimated.

Lakoff famously contends that metaphor is the crux of all human understanding. This classic academic, literary, philosophical, and sociological text suggests that at the root of what it means to be human is an absolute need to describe all experience and knowledge through comparison. Read More Than Cool Reason to begin gaining an appreciation for the theory of how metaphor makes us who we are and establishes our place in the universe.

Shariatmadari writes beautifully, and this book will make you think differently about how we use language and how that language uses and shapes us, both as individual actors and as a society. Our language – those everyday vocabularies and grammars that we deploy without a second thought – is neither original nor value-free; instead, “to speak is ‘to swim in an inherited stream of images and words’”, crafted by generations before us. For small talk, this may not matter so much. But for the bigger, weightier things in life, for the things that really matter, the way we talk can have real consequences on what we are able to understand, and how we are able to respond.

This book is a classic. It transformed my perspective on how metaphors imperceptibly guide the way we think.

Typically, we learn about metaphors in literature classes, where they are thought of as stylistic embellishments. This book turns that idea on its head, showing how metaphors guide the way we speak, think, and behave in response to pretty much everything. 

Take the example of time. Almost all the ways we talk about it rely on the metaphor of money: I “budget time,” “waste time,” “run out of time,” etc. Speaking this way makes me think of time as something that can be either spent or saved, even though it can’t.

Not only time but a nearly endless number of concepts are structured metaphorically, influencing how we think and act without our noticing.