This list of recommended books has been assembled by Boyce Rensberger, director of the Knight Science Journalism Fellowships program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It represents only a start on background reading and is not meant as an exhaustive compilation.
Classics
- The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin
- Relativity, Albert Einstein
- The Nature of the Chemical Bond, Linus Pauling
- Microbe Hunters, Paul de Kruif
- Silent Spring, Rachel Carson
- Chance and Necessity, Jacques Monod
- The Mountain Gorilla, George B. Schaller
- The Lives of a Cell, Lewis Thomas
- What is Life?, Erwin Schrödinger
Books That Teach
- A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking
- On Human Nature, Edward O. Wilson
- The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Richard P. Feynman
- The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins
- Annals of the Former World, John McPhee (Includes four of McPhee’s books: Basin and Range, In Suspect Terrain, Rising from the Plains, and Assembling California.)
- Chaos, James Gleick
- Genome, Matt Ridley
- Five Kingdoms, Lynn Margulis and Karlene V. Schwartz
- The Whole Shebang, Timothy Ferris
- The Insect Societies, Edward O. Wilson
- The First Three Minutes, Steven Weinberg
- In the Shadow of Man, Jane Goodall
Outstanding Modern Books
- Gun, Germs, and Steel, Jared M. Diamond
- Gödel, Escher, Bach, Douglas R. Hofstadter
- The Hot Zone, Richard Preston
- The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins
- The Beak of the Finch, Jonathan Weiner
- The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker
- The Society of Mind, Marvin Minsky
Biography, History, Memoir
- The Double Helix, James D. Watson
- Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, Richard P. Feynman
- The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes
- A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold
- Ever Since Darwin, Stephen Jay Gould
- Naturalist, Edward O. Wilson
- The Eighth Day of Creation, Horace Freeland Judson
Science and Society, Analysis or Philosophy of Science
- Science, the Endless Frontier, Vannevar Bush
- The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas S. Kuhn
- The Art of the Soluble, Peter B. Medawar
- The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Karl Popper
- The Two Cultures, C.P. Snow
- Science and Human Values, Jacob Bronowski