Tyler Reinhard

Book Recommendations

These are works of (mostly) nonfiction that have stuck with me. Many of these are dog-earred textbooks I keep behind my desk and refer to often. A few are biographies or histories that I listened to as audiobooks. What they have in common is that each of them brought me from knowing effectively nothing about a subject, to having a good enough grasp of a complex topic to have an interesting discussion with an expert in that field.

• 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed, Eric H. Cline
• American Exception: Empire and the Deep State, Aaron Good
• The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome, Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges
• The Body: A Guide for Occupants, Bill Bryson
• The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger, Marc Levinson
• Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?, Graham Allison
• The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, David Graeber and David Wengrow
• The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life, Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson
• The Elements of Typographic Style, Robert Bringhurst
• Ghost Boy: The Miraculous Escape of a Misdiagnosed Boy Trapped Inside His Own Body, Martin Pistorius
• The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis
• I Was Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant, Daniel Tammet
• The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot
• The Last Days of the Incas, Kim MacQuarrie
• The Last Man Who Knew Everything: The Life and Times of Enrico Fermi, Father of the Nuclear Age, David N. Schwartz
• The Making of Asian America: A History, Erika Lee
• Nose Dive: A Field Guide to the World’s Smells, Harold McGee
• Nuclear War: A Scenario, Annie Jacobsen
• The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero, Robert Kaplan
• The Neuroscience of Intelligence, Richard J. Haier
• The Russian Cosmists: The Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Fedorov and His Followers, George M. Young
• The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Edward Tufte
• What’s Our Problem? A Self-Help Book for Societies, Tim Urban

List last updated Jan 11, 2025