Non-fiction Reading List

READ THE FOLLOWING CAREFULLY!

I am listing books here to give you some idea of the types of books you may choose from - however, remember that your required non-fiction book must have been published since January 2007!  Most of these will not fit that requirement, although if you choose to read two non-fiction books, you may choose the second from here.

You should try to choose a book that makes a clear argument. Be sure to choose a topic that interests you. I encourage you to buy cheap used books at the Bookworm (on Edison St.) or on www.amazon.com! Note that I have read some, but not all of the books on the list, so I can't always vouch for their content. (I did try to choose books that have won national recognition such as the Pulitzer Prize, or that came highly recommended by other AP Language teachers.) Choose this book as carefully as you would choose any other book to read. I suggest that you ask parents and friends for advice about high-quality, argumentative nonfiction!

The obesity epidemic in America:

• Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal, by Eric Schlosser
• The Obesity Epidemic: Science, Morality, Ideology, by Michael Gard and Jan Wright

The plight of the working poor:

• Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, by Barbara Ehrenreich
• There Are No Children Here, by Alex Kotlowitz
• The Working Poor: Invisible in America, by David Shipler

Global warming and pollution:

• Thin Ice: Unlocking the Secrets of Climate in the World's Highest Mountains, by Mark Bowen
• Global Warming and Other Eco Myths: How the Environmental Movement Uses False Science to Scare Us to Death, by Ronald Bailey
• Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson

Cigarettes:

• Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris, by Richard Kluger

The Justice System:

• Crime and Punishment in America, by Eliott Curie

• Crazy: A Father's Search Through America's Mental Health Madness, by Pete Earley

Education and child-rearing:

• Freedom and Beyond, by John Holt
• The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do, by Judith Rich Harris

• It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us, by Hillary Rodham Clinton
• The End of Education, by Neil Postman
• The Big Test, by Nicholas Lehmann (about the SATs)
• Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James Loewen

Foreign Policy:

• The Assassin's Gate: America in Iraq, by George Packer
• “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide, by Samantha Power
• The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, by Lawrence Wright

Medicine:

• The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures, by Anne Fadiman
• Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World, by Tracy Kidder
• Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic, by John De Graaf, David Wann, and Thomas H. Naylor

Pop culture and television:

• Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Stronger, by Steven Johnson
• Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, by Neil Postman
• The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things, by Barry Glassner
• Why People Believe Weird Things by Michael Shermer
• The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell

Psychology and Sociology:

• Blink , by Malcolm Gladwell
• The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
• You Just Don't Understand-- Women and Men in Conversation, by Deborah Tannen
• You're Wearing That? Understanding Mothers and Daughters in Conversation, by Deborah Tannen
• The Argument Culture: Stopping America's War of Words, by Deborah Tannen
• Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences, by Howard Gardiner
• War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, by Chris Hedges
• Freakanomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner
• Generation Rx by Greg Critser

Mathematics:

• Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas Hofstadter
• How to Lie with Statistics, by Darrell Huff

Science:

• The Elegant Universe, by Brian Greene
• Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective, by Carl Sagan
• The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins

Politics and the Media:

• Who’s Looking Out For You?, by Bill O’Reilly
• Culture Warrior, by Bill O’Reilly
• The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, by Barack Obama
• Godless: The Church of Liberalism, by Ann Coulter
• The Conscience of a Liberal, by Paul Krugman
• Broken Government: How Republican Rule Destroyed the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial Branches, by John W. Dean
• Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distorts the News, by Bernard Goldberg
• The World is Flat, by Thomas Friedman