If you relax the the rules, I’ll bring up David Attenborough. (I haven’t read any other books than his Life on Earth, The Living Planet about the same subject (showing a zoomed-out view of the plant and animal life on the whole planet) but they absolutely dominated this type of market in the 1980′s, I don’t think there were even many alternatives published. Later on my interests turned away from zoology and botany.)
I’ll second the recommendation to relax this rule. I think the ability to gauge the quality of a popular book is a lot more cross-domain than with textbooks. I’ve read good books and I’ve read bad books. I can tell pretty quickly if a book is bad, even if I’m relatively new to the subject area.
Also, I feel like a lot of people would tend to only read one or two pop books in a particular area. Any more knowledge beyond that often comes from the internet or a textbook or elsewhere. I mean, I can count on one hand the number of specific subjects about which I’ve read more than two actual published books, but I’ve spent hundreds of hours each reading about many more subjects than that.
And since pop books aren’t typically comprehensive accounts of an entire field or subject, the most important things really are clarity, engagingness, and worth, and not necessarily completeness. If what is there is valuable, accurate, and it’s presented well, then it’s Good, even if it doesn’t cover some things that are covered by other books.
If you relax the the rules, I’ll bring up David Attenborough. (I haven’t read any other books than his Life on Earth, The Living Planet about the same subject (showing a zoomed-out view of the plant and animal life on the whole planet) but they absolutely dominated this type of market in the 1980′s, I don’t think there were even many alternatives published. Later on my interests turned away from zoology and botany.)
I’ll second the recommendation to relax this rule. I think the ability to gauge the quality of a popular book is a lot more cross-domain than with textbooks. I’ve read good books and I’ve read bad books. I can tell pretty quickly if a book is bad, even if I’m relatively new to the subject area.
Also, I feel like a lot of people would tend to only read one or two pop books in a particular area. Any more knowledge beyond that often comes from the internet or a textbook or elsewhere. I mean, I can count on one hand the number of specific subjects about which I’ve read more than two actual published books, but I’ve spent hundreds of hours each reading about many more subjects than that.
And since pop books aren’t typically comprehensive accounts of an entire field or subject, the most important things really are clarity, engagingness, and worth, and not necessarily completeness. If what is there is valuable, accurate, and it’s presented well, then it’s Good, even if it doesn’t cover some things that are covered by other books.