Ask HN: Interesting (Non software) books?

I like this science book about the elements so much I wrote a blog post about it:

http://zachaysan.tumblr.com/post/315148493/the-elements-a-pe...

I don't get it, am I the only hacker that ever has problems with relationships?

I've done more than my fair share of stumbling (including one divorce) and at the age of 32 only now do I feel like I am "getting it".

Nonetheless, I'd recommend the book _Conscious Loving_ by Gay and Kaithlyn Hendricks.

Instead of the superficialities preached by the Venus books, etc they get to the heart of the matter by having us examine ourselves for personal projects, secrets that we are hiding and other subconscious developments that lay at the root of our psyche. We our worlds truly are in our head and our relationships are manifestations of those thoughts. I finally found a book that helps me peal back those layers and helped me figure out why I had been fucking up over so many years...

This is not a good source of information. The author repudiates the key themes in the sequel.

His other book, Creativity, is far more relevant to HN. It is a set of interviews with creative people, exploring how their creative capacities developed.

http://www.amazon.com/Creativity-Flow-Psychology-Discovery-I...

You might be interested in _War and Peace and War_, a theory of history focusing on social capital as a driving force, and in _The Fourth Turning_ -- which looks at changes over four-generation intervals, and which, written in 1997, made some surprisingly good predictions about the 2000s (the Aughts?).

Both of these are in the tradition of Oswald Spengler's _Decline of the West_ and Arnold Toynbee's _A Study of History_; I'd recommend the abridged version of the latter, and I'd observe that if you can make it all the way through either of these you have more stamina than I do...