Non fiction. What to read?

I want to share with you a few of the non fiction books that have been read in recent years. However, when making the list, an unexpected selection problem arose. Books for a wide range of books, which are read into the air even by a completely unprepared reader and can compete with fiction books in the sense of a fascinating narrative. Books for more thoughtful reading, to understand which will require a slight strain of the brain, and textbooks (collections of lectures), for students and those who want to more seriously sort out some issues. This list presents exactly the first part - books for the widest possible range of readers (although this, of course, is very subjective). I deliberately abandoned the idea of ​​giving my own description to the books and left original annotations even in those cases when they did not suit me in order not to influence the selection process for further reading. As usual, if you want to add something to this list - welcome to the comments.

1. How music became free [End of the record industry, technological upheaval and zero patient piracy]
Author. Stephen Witt

“How music became free” is a fascinating story in which obsession, greed, music, crime and money are intertwined. This story is told through visionaries and criminals, magnates and teenagers, creating a new digital reality. This is the story of the greatest pirate in history, the most influential music business leader, a revolutionary invention and an illegal website that was four times as large as the iTunes Music Store.
Journalist Stephen Witt keeps track of the secret history of digital music piracy, starting with the invention of German mp3 audio engineers, guiding the reader through a plant in North Carolina where CDs were printed and about 2,000 albums were downloaded into the network over the decade to skyscrapers in Manhattan, whence the powerful Dag Morris, who monopolized the world market for rap music, ruled the music business, and from there into the depths of the Internet — darknet.
')
2. Phenethylamines that I knew and loved []
Author. Alexander Shulgin

An eminent American chemist-pharmacologist of Russian origin lived an amazing life, of which Louis Pasteur’s feat can serve as a counterpart. But unlike Pasteur, Shulgin experienced not new serums, but compounds synthesized by him, the legal and social status of which is currently problematic - psychoactive drugs. Challenging the “new inquisition”, which limited human rights to self-knowledge, Dr. Shulgin, despite all sorts of legal obstacles, continued his research for forty years, having made a kind of scientific feat, the value of which only future generations will appreciate.

3. Revolutionary suicide []
Author. Huey Percy Newton

The legendary hero of the American press, the founder of Black Panther, philosopher, propagandist, political prisoner and professional revolutionary Huey Percy Newton, shortly before the tragic death, wrote his autobiography. "Revolutionary suicide" is not only a detective story of the life of a rebel who was friends with Cuban revolutionaries, Chinese red guards and the controversial Parisian playwright Jean Genet, but also a rare opportunity to feel the atmosphere of those "crazy" years when black rebellions in the ghetto are seized by university students and " Actions against the police were perceived by intellectuals as the beginning of irreversible and long-awaited changes in the structure of the entire Western civilization.

4. Gods, tombs and scientists
Author. Kurt Walter Keram

The book of the German writer K.V. Kerama (1915-1973) "Gods, Tombs, Scientists" won world fame, translated into 26 languages. Based solely on facts, it reads like a fascinating novel. The book tells about the secrets of long past centuries, about amazing adventures, fatal failures and well-deserved victories of people who made the greatest archaeological discoveries in the XIX-XX centuries. This journey through the millennia introduces the existence of other, more ancient than the Egyptian and Greek, civilizations.

5. Signs and wonders: Stories about how forgotten letters and languages ​​were deciphered.
Author. Ernst Dohlhofer 1963 edition (Unfortunately, there is only djvu on the filibuste)

The book tells how forgotten letters and languages ​​were decrypted. In the main part of his book, E. Doblhofer thoroughly outlines the process of deciphering the ancient writing systems of Egypt, Iran, Southern Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, Ugarit, Byblos, Cyprus, the Cretan-Mycenaean linear writing and the ancient Türkic runic writing. Thus, deciphering of almost all forgotten written systems of antiquity has been considered here.

6. You, of course, joke, Mr. Feynman!
Author. Richard Phillips Feynman.

The book tells about the life and adventures of the famous physicist, one of the creators of the atomic bomb, Nobel laureate, Richard Phillips Feynman. This book will completely change your view of scientists; she tells not about a scientist who seems to be dry and boring for most people, but about a person: charming, artistic, daring and far from such one-sided as he dared to consider himself. A wonderful sense of humor and easy conversational style of the author will make reading the book not only informative, but also fascinating.

7. Death and life of large American cities

Author. Jane jacobs

Written 50 years ago, Jane Jacobs’s book, Death and the Life of Large American Cities, has long become a classic, but has not yet lost its revolutionary meaning in the history of understanding the city and city life. It was here that arguments against urban planning were consistently first formulated, guided by abstract ideas and ignoring the daily lives of citizens.

8. About photography
Author. Susan Sontag

The collection of essays by Susan Sontag “About Photography” first saw the light in a series of essays published in the New York Review of Books between 1973 and 1977. In the book, which made it famous, Sontag comes to the conclusion that the wide distribution of photography leads to the establishment of a relationship of “chronic voyeurism” between man and the world, as a result of which everything that happens begins to be placed on the same level and acquires the same meaning.

9. WikiLeaks from the inside
Author. Daniel Domscheit-Berg

Daniel Domscheit-Berg is a German web designer and computer security specialist, the first and the closest associate of Julian Assange, the founder of the world-famous web-based Internet platform WikiLeaks. “WikiLeaks from the inside” is a detailed story of an eyewitness and an active participant about the history, principles and structure of the most scandalous site of the planet. Domscheit-Berg consistently analyzes important WL publications, their causes, consequences and public response, and also paints a vivid and vivid portrait of Assange, recalling the years of friendship and the differences that arose over time, which eventually led to a final break. Today, Domscheit-Berg is working over the creation of the OpenLeaks platform, wanting to bring the idea of ​​Internet disclosures to perfection and provide the most reliable protection for informants.

All books listed here are on filibuste.