Must-read: 50 best nonfiction books that will broaden your worldview
It is always good to change the genre you are reading. If you are a fantasy lover, you can try some mystery, romance, or historical fiction. But for a more significant change, aside from novels reading some nonfiction books can broaden your view of life and the World.
There are some essential nonfiction books that I really like to read from time to time. These kinds of books will help us to understand what's going on around us and in the world. So what are the best works in the nonfiction genre?
To answer this question I did detailed research and looked at some nonfiction book lists by well-known publications. One of them is Time Magazine’s best nonfiction books list. Another one is the list made by The Guardian. In total, I checked ten different lists and came up with this list. Must say that all of these 10 lists are at least 80% different from each other. But there are some books that all these lists agree are essential and best in the nonfiction genre.
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50 best nonfiction books that will change your worldview and broaden your perspective
These books will change your worldview and broaden your perspective. So here are the 50 best nonfiction books of all time. And if you know any good nonfiction book that you can suggest for readers like me, please share it in the comments with me and everyone who will check out this post.
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50 best nonfiction books of all time
1. A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking (1988)
2. Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (1962)
3. The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe (1979)
4. The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B. White (1959)
5. A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf (1929)
6. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1966)
7. The Double Helix by James D Watson (1968)
8. Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin (1955)
9. Hiroshima by John Hersey (1946)
10. How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie (1936)
11. The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois (1903)
12. On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin (1859)
13. A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson (2003)
14. The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan (2006)
15. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown (1970)
16. The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley (1965)
17. Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen (1937)
18. The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert (2014)
19. No Logo by Naomi Klein (1999)
20. Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama (1995)
21. Orientalism by Edward Said (1978)
22. Dispatches by Michael Herr (1977)
23. The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (1976)
24. The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan (1963)
25. Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth by Richard Wright (1945)
26. How to Cook a Wolf by MFK Fisher (1942)
27. Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves (1929)
28. Walden by Henry David Thoreau (1854)
29. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal by Eric Schlosser (2001)
30. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks (1985)
31. A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn (1980)
32. The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank (1947)
33. The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee (2010)
34. All the President’s Men: The Greatest Reporting Story of All Time by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward (1974)
35. And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic by Randy Shilts (1987)
36. The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes (1986)
37. The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir (1949)
38. Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell (1938)
39. Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov (1951)
40. The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money by John Maynard Keynes (1936)
41. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou (1969)
42. The Civil War by Shelby Foote (1998)
43. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari (2011)
44. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot (2010)
45. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson (2010)
46. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander (2010)
47. The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright (2006)
48. Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster by Jon Krakauer (1997)
49. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany by William L. Shirer (1960)
50. The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs (1961)
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