The Best Non-Fiction Books

Mullaney is a professor of history at Stanford University, while Rea is an Asian Studies professor at the University of British Columbia. They have both come together to produce a self-help book for academics that focuses on a unique angle: How to aspire to a specific research topic in your academic career?

Research is the activity that vouches your scholarly credentials and is a requisite (along with teaching credits) for climbing the ladder in higher education. Coming up with a research question that you are not just “tackling by the numbers,’ as a formality, necessity or a bitter pill to swallow can sometimes be a challenge. After all you will be devoting significant resources: time, energy, skills, and importantly, your research grants. The authors’ main purpose with this book is to help researchers come up with a research question that is original, inspiring, and actionable. The book is planned like a workbook to give you more than a single strategy at all stages of this first big job as a researcher. The major through-line remains that you are the major source of inspiration; the igniting spark for the fire that will be your research project! Strategies such as “Let Boredom Be Your Guide,” “Commonly Made Mistakes,” and “Sounding Board” help you examine your interest and rejection of a topic from new angles, self-detect issues in your selection strategy, then get help from external resources, such as colleague’s advise, and field-testing your idea. This lets you first revisit potential avenues of research exploration with fresh takes, and then hones your selections by sussing them out in the real world.

Ed Yong’s book urges readers to break outside their “sensory bubble” to consider the unique ways that dogs, dolphins, mice and other animals experience their surroundings.

Ed Yong’s book impresses on us that terms such as “extrasensory” and “ultrasonic” are merely a contrivance of the human’s egocentric world. We consider anything that falls outside our extremely limited sensory limits as “alien,” forgetting that for our animal brethren, extrasensory feats are merely a walk in the park. Yong’s book tries to remedy the shortcomings of our awareness about our own “limits of typicality” by using a polished yet funny, passionate yet jargon-free account of what lies beyond our sensory bubble.

Stories of different animals’ sensorium become lessons in sharing lessons in how God’s creature experience a different, divergent and yet simultaneously existing world. From directly sensing earth’s magnetic field, to detecting sounds from both ends (too silent and too loud) of our hearing capacity, the biggest realization is that how we as well as these animals only share a sliver of reality in this world, unique for every species.

Yong is a science reporter for NPR who has received a Peabody and a Pulitzer for his previous journalism. His book is a must read for all who marvel at life on earth.

-- The New York Times

O’Rourke serves a much needed critique on the faulty Western idea that “we can control the outcomes of our lives.”

Starting from her own decade-long struggles with an undiagnosed, laughed at, passed-over, and ignored Lyme disease, O’Rourke finds similar experiences from chronic illness, women sufferers, and minorities, where “slipping through the cracks” of the American healthcare’s disjointed and unsympathetic non-system, is the norm for these sufferers.

It is astounding when you realize, thanks to her poetically translated research, that it takes at least three years and four doctors for an autoimmune diseased patient to achieve the correct diagnosis, on average. Meanwhile, patients are disbelieved, their symptoms are thought to be “imagined,”and made to feel invisible.

“The illness was severe but invisible. And that invisibility made all the difference — it made me invisible, which itself almost killed me.”

It was her fight against this invisibility that cemented her decision to record her journey and to augment her argumentation by finding voices and suffering similar to hers.

What is common between a monk, an engineer, a prisoner of war, and a multi-ethnic poet?

They are all heroes of China’s 100-year long journey of bringing its complicated 4000 characters based language system to print, and thus, into the digital world. Jing Tsu’s book brings back to life this set of human characters who combined to deliver China from a history of public illiteracy to it’s modern status of cultural, industrial, economical, and political superpower: Wang Zhao, an exiled reformer disguised as a Monk who traveled the country to popularize an alphabet system. Count Pierre, a French prisoner, devised Chinese telegraphy. Zhou Houkun who invented Chinese typewriter. And, Zhi BIngyi, a jailed convict who invented a binary code for the Chinese script using broken pottery and a stolen pen. And finally, Mao Zedong himself who supported the movement to simplify the stroke system in Chinese characters to render them more easier to read and learn.

Jing Tsu’s personal feat is to relay this extraordinary story as a riveting narrative. Her focus on the humanity of the struggles and the achievements makes the book a delight and a must-have for all lovers of language in general and Chinese culture in particular.