All these had a huge impact on me. The descriptions are inadequate, I've just tried to mention the subject matter.<p>Deborah Tannen, <i>You Just Don't Understand</i> - how males and females talk different languages.<p>Lakoff & Johnson, <i>Metaphors We Live By</i> - how our language and thoughts are built from a fabric of conceptual metaphors. <i>Philosophy In The Flesh</i> is about the conceptual metaphors that philosophy is built from.<p>Jonathan Glover, <i>Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century</i> - WWI, WWII and other wars, nazism, communism etc<p>Plutarch's <i>Lives</i> - biographies and stories from famous ancient Greeks and Romans. Amazing how little's changed.<p>Lin Yutang, <i>The Importance of Understanding</i> - introduced me to ancient Chinese philosophers. <i>The Importance of Living</i> - introduced me to ancient Chinese writers, poets and the Chinese way of life.<p>Hofstadter, <i>Gödel, Escher, Bach</i> - read it when I was 14, and I was into music, art and programming, so it blew my mind.<p>Susan Faludi, <i>STIFFED</i> - men, work, jobs, masculinity, 20th C<p>Walter Lippmann, <i>Public Opinion</i> - media, war, propaganda, democracy<p>Noam Chomsky's political books<p>E.F. Schumacher, <i>Small is Beautiful</i> - the world, development, government, planning, organization, humanity, sustainability<p>J.R. Saul, <i>Voltaire's Bastards</i> - power, history, democracy, technocracy, reason, rationality, history from late 18th C until today.<p>Raymond Williams, <i>Culture and Society 1780-1950</i> - the anti-industrialist tradition, politics, culture, society and the new language describing these things<p>Clifford Pickover, <i>Computers, Patterns, Chaos, and Beauty</i> - programming, mathematics, art, fractals, dynamical systems etc<p>Ben Zander, <i>The Art of Possibility</i> - hard to explain, kind of advanced self-help, the magic of changing attitudes, expectations, habits.<p>My favourite non-fiction books of all time, though, are the essays of Emerson, Hazlitt, RL Stevenson, GK Chesterton, Santayana, Bertrand Russell. And the books of Nietzsche, SARK and Robert Fulghum.