Best non-fiction books of 2018

Human beings are primates, and primates are political animals. Our brains, therefore, are designed not just to hunt and gather, but also to help us get ahead socially, often via deception and self-deception. But while we may be self-interested schemers, we benefit by pretending otherwise. The less w

The Case Against Education book. Read 238 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. Despite being immensely popular--and immensely lucrativ...

Growth is good. Through history, economic growth, in particular, has alleviated human misery, improved human happiness and opportunity, and lengthened human lives. Wealthier societies are more stable, offer better living standards, produce better medicines, and ensure greater autonomy, greater fulfi

How solar could spark a clean-energy transition through transformative innovation--creative financing, revolutionary technologies, and flexible energy systems. Solar energy, once a niche application for a limited market, has become the cheapest and fastest-growing power source on earth. What's mo

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Black Swan, a bold new work that challenges many of our long-held beliefs about risk and reward, politics and religion, finance and personal responsibility In his most provocative and practical book yet, one of the foremost thinkers of our time re

From the best-selling, award-winning author of 1491 and 1493--an incisive portrait of the two little-known twentieth-century scientists, Norman Borlaug and William Vogt, whose diametrically opposed views shaped our ideas about the environment, laying the groundwork for how people in the twenty-first

Chosen by Pankaj Mishra as one of the Best Books of the Summer Neoliberals hate the state. Or do they? In the first intellectual history of neoliberal globalism, Quinn Slobodian follows a group of thinkers from the ashes of the Habsburg Empire to the creation of the World Trade Organization to sh

"This is an important book and likely the most thoughtful of the year in the social sciences... Highly recommended, it is likely to prove one of the most thought-provoking books of the year."--Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution How did human minds become so different from those of other animals

<b>A groundbreaking book about how technological advances in genomics and the extraction of ancient DNA have profoundly changed our understanding of human prehistory while resolving many long-standing controversies.</b><br /><br />Massive technological innovations now allow scientists to extract and

A radical reinterpretation of how your mind works - and why it could change your life 'An astonishing achievement. Nick Chater has blown my mind' Tim Harford 'A total assault on all lingering psychiatric and psychoanalytic notions of mental depths ... Light the touchpaper and stand well back'

Reconstruction book. Read 42 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. The era known as Reconstruction is one of the unhappiest times in Am...

How earnest hippies, frightened parents, suffering patients, and other ordinary Americans went to war over marijuana In the last five years, eight states have legalized recreational marijuana. To many, continued progress seems certain. But pot was on a similar trajectory forty years ago, only to