Books like How To — picked by fans

The author starts with the question: “Are you smarter than my chimpanzee?” When you finished the book, you’ll be so humble to say: I am not!

While reading the book, I was several times surprised by how adults (including myself) have a distorted perception of reality. For example, eighty percent of children worldwide are vaccinated. This means that almost all human beings alive today have some access to basic modern health care. However, on average, just 13 percent of people get the right answer.

Don’t forget that you can only make correct decisions based on accurate data. For this, you can rely on (the many) reliable databases that are available via the internet.

It was for me the first book that convinced me to think and work more with facts and data, i.e., evidence-based management

I find this book answers questions many people ask: Why aren’t we always logical? What gets in the way of our making effective decisions?

I first read this book when I started my consulting practice and realized I needed to combine psychology with philosophy in teaching critical thinking in professional settings. People want to understand why we can be unreasonable in the first place. Kahneman’s book helped me improve my own thinking, making me aware of the ways my previous experiences quickly provide interpretations of new experiences.

I find the ability to “hit the pause button” regarding my response to a specific situation and to ask myself, “Is my immediate, intuitive response useful or misleading me?” is one of my most important insights from this book.

Geoffrey West does a remarkable thing in this book; he brings his training as a theoretical physicist to problems of biology, global sustainability, and the economics of our cities. He shows the power of mathematics to illuminate remarkable facts about fundamental questions like "Is there a limit to how long animals can live?", "How big can animals get?" and even "Why do cities last so long?"

I learned how the square-cube law explains why you couldn't have a real-life Godzilla, that all mammals share roughly the same amount of heartbeats, and about branching patterns in our lungs, rivers, and trees. Fascinating.

The author covers the many biases we all hold and how they influence our every decision as well as our interpretation of our observations.

Someone once said, "It is far easier to entertain than it is to educate." What McRaney pulls off with shocking ease in this book is that he provides a little education in an entertaining fashion. He explains the complex in a simple, understandable, and entertaining fashion.

McRaney makes a perfect cut between the simple without being base and the intellectual without being too professorial. He takes real-life situations, places you in them, gives you what you think your reaction would be to them, and explains to you why you don't really react in the manner you think you do. He explains why you're not as self-aware or as smart as you think you are.

Randall Munroe is the creator of the online comic xkcd. He’s a really funny guy who also happens to be crazy smart and knowledgeable about, well, just about anything science and tech, it seems.

In this book, he tackles critical questions, like how fast can you hit a speed bump while driving and live, and if there was a robot apocalypse, how long would humanity last? You see? Really critical questions.

This is more a grab it off the shelf, put your feet up, pick a random page, and have fun type of read rather than a cover-to-cover read (although, confession, I did, more than once), and it’s a whole lot of really smart fun.

When it comes to human spaceflight programs, a lot has been written about the astronauts, administrators, and decision-makers who set policy and defined these programs from the top. The People’s Spaceship presents the four decades of NASA’s Shuttle Program as a mission to engage the public in the excitement of space exploration and make spaceflight relevant to people’s everyday lives.

In a post-Apollo era of declining budgets, NASA’s outreach efforts during the Shuttle era demonstrate the agency’s increasing reliance on public support and the public relations apparatus it built to garner it. Despite the Shuttle’s flaws, NASA managed to create a sense of public ownership of the program, as well as generations of kids who grew up dreaming of their own Shuttle flights.

I enjoyed this book because I shared the author's life with him in both the Mercury and Mission Control Centers. I witnessed his intense management and leadership style first-hand.

Not only was he my direct supervisor, but he was my mentor and friend. His family was very close to mine; he was also my neighbor. Gene is one of the reasons the Space Program was so successful. He epitomizes "Tough and Competent."

Politics, ambition, and science collided when NASA announced that a small rock that fell on Antarctica contained tiny fossils of ancient life on Mars. Advance plans for the public report were kept secret while coordinated all the way up through President Bill Clinton. Aides wondered if the great discovery would help his re-election. But after a televised press conference and the subsequent media circus, many qualified scientists disputed the claimed fossils. NASA is still searching for past or present life on Mars.  They will surely take greater care in reaching future conclusions, won’t they? And if you may wonder why an alleged DC sex worker had prior knowledge of the “breakthrough,” read ace Washington Post reporter (now retired) Kathy Sawyer’s brilliant and thorough account.

This is a children’s version of the book that inspired the movie.

Like everyone else who saw that movie, I was blown away by the story – I was also thoroughly ashamed that I hadn’t heard about these amazing women before.

I’m no math whizz, so making all those impossibly complicated calculations – on which people’s lives would depend – is already completely beyond me. But doing so with such dignity and determination in the face of the daily grind of petty prejudice and poisonous ignorance puts them in the superhero category.

I was in tears in the movie, and once again when reading the book.

Arthur C. Clarke is my favorite of the “Big Three” giants of the golden age of science fiction. His clear prose and hard-science background mix with big ideas, optimism, and flashes of poetic brilliance, and these qualities are all just getting off the ground in his first novel. Clarke wrote it in 1947, right after he had left his work as a radar engineer for the RAF.

It is the realistic story of an international effort to put men on the moon, written 10 years before NASA was founded and 22 years before humanity succeeded. I was amazed by the foresight into the difficulties in administration, fundraising, secrecy, public relations, anti-science zealotry, good ol’ engineering, and problem-solving as they sent humanity on its first moonshot. It’s a real case of art inspiring life, as Clarke and other visionaries showed other engineers that the fantastic was feasible.