Non fiction books make us smart and better-informed about a wide variety of important topics of our age. Some, like Bill Bryson's 'A Short History of Nearly Everything' cover almost all the big topics, while Rachel Carson’s 'Silent Spring' covers just one, pollution.

The Sixth Extinction By Elizabeth Kolbert (2014)
The Year Of Magical Thinking By Joan Didion (2005)
No Logo By Naomi Klein (1999)
Birthday Letters By Ted Hughes (1998)
Dreams From My Father By Barack Obama (1995)
A Brief History Of Time By Stephen Hawking (1988)
The Right Stuff By Tom Wolfe (1979)
Orientalism By Edward Said (1978)
Dispatches By Michael Herr (1977)
The Selfish Gene By Richard Dawkins (1976)
North By Seamus Heaney (1975)
Awakenings By Oliver Sacks (1973)
The Female Eunuch By Germaine Greer (1970)
Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom By Nik Cohn (1969)
The Double Helix By James D Watson (1968)
Against Interpretation By Susan Sontag (1966)
Ariel By Sylvia Plath (1965)
The Feminine Mystique By Betty Friedan (1963)
The Making Of The English Working Class By Ep Thompson (1963)
Silent Spring By Rachel Carson (1962)
The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions By Thomas S Kuhn (1962)
A Grief Observed By Cs Lewis (1961)
The Elements Of Style By William Strunk And Eb White (1959)
The Affluent Society By John Kenneth Galbraith (1958)
The Uses Of Literacy: Aspects Of Working-Class Life By Richard Hoggart (1957)
Notes Of A Native Son By James Baldwin (1955)
The Nude: A Study Of Ideal Art By Kenneth Clark (1956)
The Hedgehog And The Fox By Isaiah Berlin (1953)
Waiting For Godot By Samuel Beckett (1952/53)
A Book Of Mediterranean Food By Elizabeth David (1950)
The Great Tradition By Fr Leavis (1948)
The Last Days Of Hitler By Hugh Trevor-Roper (1947)
The Common Sense Book Of Baby And Child Care By Dr Benjamin Spock (1946)
Hiroshima By John Hersey (1946)
The Open Society And Its Enemies By Karl Popper (1945)
Black Boy: A Record Of Childhood And Youth By Richard Wright (1945)
How To Cook A Wolf By Mfk Fisher (1942)
Enemies Of Promise By Cyril Connolly (1938)
The Road To Wigan Pier By George Orwell (1937)
The Road To Oxiana By Robert Byron (1937)
How To Win Friends And Influence People By Dale Carnegie (1936)
Testament Of Youth By Vera Brittain (1933)
My Early Life: A Roving Commission By Winston Churchill (1930)
Goodbye To All That By Robert Graves (1929)
A Room Of One’s Own By Virginia Woolf (1929)
The Waste Land By Ts Eliot (1922)
Ten Days That Shook The World By John Reed (1919)
The Economic Consequences Of The Peace By John Maynard Keynes (1919)
The American Language By Hl Mencken (1919)
Eminent Victorians By Lytton Strachey (1918)
The Souls Of Black Folk By Web Du Bois (1903)
De Profundis By Oscar Wilde (1905)
The Varieties Of Religious Experience By William James (1902)
Brief Lives By John Aubrey
Personal Memoirs By Ulysses S Grant (1885)
Life On The Mississippi By Mark Twain (1883)
Travels With A Donkey In The Cévennes By Robert Louis Stevenson (1879)
Nonsense Songs By Edward Lear (1871)
Culture And Anarchy By Matthew Arnold (1869)
On The Origin Of Species By Charles Darwin (1859)
On Liberty By John Stuart Mill (1859)
The Wonderful Adventures Of Mrs Seacole In Many Lands By Mary Seacole (1857)
The Life Of Charlotte Brontë By Elizabeth Gaskell (1857)
Walden By Henry David Thoreau (1854)
Thesaurus By Dr Peter Mark Roget (1852)
London Labour And The London Poor By Henry Mayhew (1851)
Household Education By Harriet Martineau (1848)
Narrative Of The Life Of Frederick Douglass
Essays By Rw Emerson (1841)
Domestic Manners Of The Americans By Frances Trollope (1832)
An American Dictionary Of The English Language By Noah Webster (1828)
Confessions Of An English Opium-Eater By Thomas De Quincey (1822)
Tales From Shakespeare By Charles And Mary Lamb (1807)
Travels In The Interior Districts Of Africa By Mungo Park (1799)
The Autobiography Of Benjamin Franklin By Benjamin Franklin (1793)
A Vindication Of The Rights Of Woman By Mary Wollstonecraft (1792)
The Life Of Samuel Johnson Lld By James Boswell (1791)
Reflections On The Revolution In France By Edmund Burke (1790)
The Interesting Narrative Of The Life Of Olaudah Equiano By Olaudah Equiano (1789)
The Natural History And Antiquities Of Selborne By Gilbert White (1789)
The Federalist Papers By ‘publius’ (1788)
The Diary Of Fanny Burney (1778)
The History Of The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire By Edward Gibbon (1776-1788)
The Wealth Of Nations By Adam Smith (1776)
Common Sense By Tom Paine (1776)
A Dictionary Of The English Language By Samuel Johnson (1755)
A Treatise Of Human Nature By David Hume (1739)
A Modest Proposal By Jonathan Swift (1729)
A Tour Through The Whole Island Of Great Britain By Daniel Defoe (1727)
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding By John Locke (1689)
The Book Of Common Prayer By Thomas Cranmer (1662)
The Diary Of Samuel Pepys By Samuel Pepys (1660)
Hydriotaphia
Leviathan By Thomas Hobbes (1651)
Areopagitica By John Milton (1644)
Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions By John Donne (1624)
The First Folio By William Shakespeare (1623)
The Anatomy Of Melancholy By Robert Burton (1621)
The History Of The World By Walter Raleigh (1614)
King James Bible: The Authorised Version (1611)