81–90 of 213 posts
Literary Theory: An Introduction, Terry Eagleton
Loosely speaking, Eagleton is best known for Marxist literary theory (dialectical materialism).
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Feynman's little popular science book _QED: The Strange Theory of Light & Matter_ is a gem. It's very short and non-mathematical, but still manages to get remarkably close to the truth.
If you're more mathematically inclined (e.g., fluent in multivariate calculus) and know a little classical physics, the first 5 chapters of Wald's _General Relativity_ are an essentially complete introduction to the subject.
Another classic is Shannon's _A Mathematical Theory of Communication_, which introduces the subject of information theory, and then solves basically all the subject's main problems.
In economics, I think the record for signal to noise is probably held by Keynes _The Econonic Consequences of the Peace_, 118 pages, in which he basically forecasts the disastrous course of events from 1918 to 1939.
Since you don't say specifically what topics you are interrested in I'll just name a few of my own favorite non-fiction books that have a great signal-to-noise ratio: - Computer Organization and Design, Fourth Edition: The Hardware/Software Interface - Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment - Effective Modern C++ - SFML Game Development - Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools
Haven't done any writing of C++ since college, and not too much reading either, but just flew through Effective Modern C++, and found it to be a great, information-dense, and eye-opening read. Highly recommended.
Republic Lost by Lawrence Lessig had a high density of ideas.
The best book I've read in the last 5 years is David Simon's, "Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets"...if you've watched The Wire, half of its material is derived from this real life account of being embedded in Baltimore's homicide unit: https://books.google.com/books/about/Homicide.html?id=N8LS0b... All of Atul Gawande's books, notably: The Checklist Manifesto [1]: http://atulgawande.com/book/the-checklist-manif…
The Making of Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes, he stars with the science of the atom as it was figured out in the late 19th century and continues through the end of World War II
That was just the most outrageous example, but there are plenty more. But as far as I know it's the best book on the subject, and as "Luc" says in the other comment right now in this subthread, he doesn't oversimplify the science.
If you like that, for more of the same without a lot of fluff I'm finding The Magic Furnace by Marcus Chown to be wonderful, it's is a history of the elements. How we deduced the very existence of atoms thousands of years ago, then generally much more recently their nature, then how they came to come about (e.g. fusion in stars). Truly fantastic and rather tightly written, the fluff about the philosophers and scientists is generally only a sentence or three.
If you like both of those, as I recall, haven't read it since the '80s, George Gamow's 30 Years That Shook Physics ought to fill out the rest of the basic picture, focusing more on our friends the electrons, which is where almost all the action in chemistry happens, that's something these other two books don't cover in as much detail as the nucleus.
The Art of Computer Programming.