Category: Nonfiction

Rating: 8.0/10. Book about animal cognition and methods to probe them. Recently, we are starting to learn that many animals are more intelligent than we thought, because the methodology to test their intelligence in the past was flawed. Instead of giving them artificial, one-size-fits-all tests, we should take into account each species’ individual “Umwelt” —…

Rating: 7.3/10. Book about child language acquisition by a Yale linguistics professor and researcher in the area. Each chapter talks about a different areas of linguistics (eg: phonology, morphology, syntax) and how children acquire it. There’s a lot that we don’t understand about the language acquisition process, but it seems to be very efficient and…

Rating: 8.2/10. One of the longer books I’ve read, this is a 660-page book about geology. It is actually composed of five books that were separately published from 1981 to 1998. It won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction. The author has a narrative style that takes a while to get used to: at first…

Rating: 8.1/10. A fairly unique book that explains molecular biology using illustrations and detailed to-scale 3D renderings of molecules. Only about 150 pages but there’s an illustration on nearly every page, explaining many different cellular processes, such as: DNA transcription, cellular respiration, breakdown of an E. coli bacterium, viruses, drugs. Doesn’t go too deep into…