• Baum, R.F.  (1988). Doctors of Modernity: Darwin, Marx, & Freud.  Sherwood, Sugden, & Company. [Excellent]
• Alexander, Christopher. (2004). The Nature of Order:  An Essay on the art of Building and the Nature of the Universe. Book Four:  The Luminous Ground. Berkeley:  The Center for Environmental Structure.  [Highly recommended, very significant work]
• Boorstein, Daniel.  (1999). The Seekers. The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World. Vintage. [So far so good; very eloquently written and informative]
• Brown, Dan. (1998). Digital Fortress.  New York:  St. Martin's. [Very entertaining]
• Brown, Dan. (2003).  The Da Vinci Code.  New York:  Doubleday. [Very entertaining and engaging, presenting quite a challenge in disentangling fiction from fact.]
• Bywaters, Paul, Eileen McLeod, and Lindsey Napier.  (2010). Social Work and Global Health Inequalities. www.policypress.co.uk.
• Carter, Rita.  (2002).  Consciousness. Weidenfeld & Nicholson.  [Fairly basic traditional view, but well written, with many details and spiffy diagrams]
• Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. (1994). The Evolving Self. Harper Perennial.  [Decent, but not his best]
• Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. (1997)  Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention.  Harper Perennial.  [Highly recommened; grounded in some solid qualitative research interviews with highly successful people in various fields.]
• Damasio, Antonia.  (2003).  Looking for Spinoza. Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain.  Harcourt. [Well worth reading, but doesn't compare with his earlier book, The Feeling of What Happens]
• Diamond, Jared.  (1997).  Guns, Germs, and Steel.  The Fates of Human Societies.  W.W. Norton. [A major work, very insightful, but based on a fairly materialistic conflict based perspective, one that ignores culture and much else]
• Diamond, Jared. (2005). Collapse. How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.  Viking. [Diamond seems to have learned a good bit from the critiques of his first book, namely, to consider culture and human choice. Clearly a more mature, thoughtful, and complex analysis; an excellent follow-up to the book mentioned above. Highly recommended.]
• Eco, Umberto.  (2006).  The Mysterious Flame of Queen  Loana.  London: Vintage Books. [A wonderful novel about an antiquarian book dealer struggling to rediscover his identity after developing a rather peculuar type of amnesia.  Highly recommended, but not an easy read in all parts.]
• Eghigian, Greg. (2010). From Madness to Mental Health.  Rutgers University Press.
• Fogel, Robert William.  (2000).  The Fourth Great Awakening & The Future of Egalitarianism.  The University of Chicago Press.   [Superb, very insightful.  Nice attempt to incorporate a spiritual attempt in interpreting American history, but this is only a beginning]
• Fauconnier, Gilles and Mark Turner.  (2002).  The Way we Think:  Conceptual Blending and the Mind's Hidden Complexities.  New York:  Basic Books.  [A very exciting, new development in cognitive theory, but a difficult read, requiring much patience.]
• Friedman, Thomas L.  (2003).  Longitudes & Attitudes.  Exploring the World after September 11.  Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. [Highly recommended]
• Gardner, Howard.  (2004). Changing Minds.   Cambridge:  Harvard Business School Press. [Much of the theory seems like a statement of the obvious, but nonetheless worth reading].
• Gardner, Howard.  (1985). The Mind's New Science.  A History of the Cognitive Revolution.  Basic Books. [Now a bit dated, but informative]
• Gigerenzer, Gerd.  (2007). Gut Feelings.  The Inteligence of the Unconscious.  Viking.  Readable and interesting book, but he seems to leave much out in what seems to be a fairly simplistic theory of intuition.
• Gladwell, Malcolm.  (2000).  The Tipping Point. How Little Things can Make a Big Difference.  Abacus. [This best-seller is indeed very readable, but it amazed me how much Gladwell has missed in the contributions of complex systems theory and chaos theory, especially sensitivity to initial conditions, to understanding his subject.]
• Gladwell, Malcolm.  (2005). Blink. The Power of Thinking without Thinking.  New York:  Little, Brown, & Co. [Again, readable and interesting, but unimpressive in his incorporation of much of the literature on the subject.]
• Greene, Brian.  (2004).  The Fabric of the Cosmos:  Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality.  New York:  Alfred Knopf. [More readable than his first book, and not that much that is new, but still to be recommended.  Provides a much more intuitive understanding of rather abstruse material.  Greene is a true master of the metaphor.]
• Hanh, Thich Nhat.  (2007). The Art of Power.  New York:  HarperOne.  Fairly nice discussion of the psychology of power from a spiritual perspective.
• Hoffman, Lynn.  (1981).  Foundations of Family Therapy.  New York:  Basic Books.  [Superb, best book on family systems theory that I've read.  One of the few in the field who incorporates nonlinear dynamics, and moves beyond the traditional equilibrium theories.
• Hudson, Rex.  (2002).  Who Becomes a Terrorist and Why.  [Highly recommended, but I am not objective, as this is my brother's book, in which he predicted in1999 that Al Quada would ram a plane into the Pentagon.  Since he wrote it as a government report, its publication was a surprise to him. ]
• Huntington, Samuel P. (1996).  The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.  A Touchstone Book. [Another fairly materialistic, conflict based perspective on recent historical developments, but well worth reading]
• Krishnamurti, J. and David Bohm.  (1985).  The Ending of Time.  Harper Collins. [I was disappointed; only got half way through it.]
• Landon, John C. (2005). World History and the Eonic Effect. Civilization, Darwinism, and Theories of Evolution.  Eonix Books. He has some interesting theories about large-scale periodic patterns of human history, but I only got through half of this very dense difficult to read book, with very few details, evidence, or substantiation.
• Laszlo, Ervin.  (2006). The Chaos Point.  The World at the Crossroads.  Hampton Roads. [A thoughtful, readable, application of complex systems theory to understanding contemporary world history and what he sees as an approaching tipping point involving the effects of global warming. Decent book.]
• Lanza, Robert and Bob Berman.  (2010). Biocentrism. Dallas:  Benbella.  
• Lehrer, Jonah. (). How we decide.
• Morris, James Winston. (2005). The Reflective Heart. Discovering Spiritual Intelligence in Ibn 'Arabi's Meccan Illuminations.  Fons Vitae. [A profound, yet difficult to read, spiritual treatise.]
• Munsiff, A.G. (1998).  Hazrat Babajan.  The Emperor of the Spiritual Realm of Her Time.  Meher Era Publications. [The most thorough biography of Babajan's 120+ years; fascinating.]
• Murray, Charles. (2003).  Human Accomplishment.  The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 BC to 1950.  New York:  Harper Collins.  [Recommended].
• Naisbitt, John.  (1999).  High Tech / High Touch.  Broadway Books.  [Alright]
• Nisbett, Richard E.  (2003).  The Geography of Thought.  How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why.  The Free Press. [Excellent; highly recommended.  About the best social psychological study of Eastern (Chinese) and Western cognitive styles that I've seen].
• Nisbet, Robert.  (1980).  History of the Idea of Progress.  New York:  Basic Books.  [Excellent, classic work in the history of ideas; eye opening account of the ebb and flow of the notion of progress].
• Nizami.  [Translated from Persian & edited by Rudolf Gelpke).  The Story of Layla and Majnun.  New Lebanon:  Omega.  [Now I understand why this is considered one of spiritual classics of the ages.  A painfully moving human love story. A must read.]
• Radin, Dean.  (2006).  Entangled Minds.  New York:  Paraview Pocket Books.  [Radin, probably the leading research in psi, goes beyond his earlier metaanalyses to develop a theoretical understanding of psychic phenomenon based on principles of quantum physics, especially nonlocality.  Fine book.]
• Parker, Andrew.  (2003).  In the Blink of an Eye:  How Vision Kick-started the big Bang of Evolution.  The Free Press.  [Although boring and overly technical in places, Parker has a fascinating theory that the sudden evolution of vision set the Cambrian explosion off.  He doesn't have a convincing explanation about why this happened, and its relationship with the development of the nervous system and consciousness, but I believe that is a major contribution and many others will be picking up on this important lead.)
• Sachs, Jeffrey D. (2005). The End of Poverty. Economic Possibilities for Our Time.  New York: Penguin. This is well worth reading, nice overview of international development efforts, with much information than is not commonly known. And very encouraging and practice.
• Peck, M. Scott. (1993).  A World Waiting to be Born.  The Search for Civility.  Arrow.  [Still reading; an account of a liberal Christian psychiatrist about practice, his life, and family.  Decent book, though not sure if I agree with all that he considers to be so 'civil']
• Shaw, Darwin C. (2010). Effort & Grace.
• Seife, Charles.  (2000).  Zero. The Biography of a Dangerous Idea.  Penquin.  [Dynamite! Amazing what one can read into the history of mathematics]
• Stevens, Don E. (1995).  Some Results. Companion Books. [Highly recommended discussion of the spiritual life]
• Smolin, Lee.  (2002). Three Roads to Quantum Gravity.  [Excellent update on recent developments in this field].
• Schwartz, Jeffrey M., and Sharon Begley. (2002).  The Mind and the Brain.  Neuroplacticity and the Power of Mental Force. Harper.
• Taleb, Nassim Nicholas.  The Black Swan:  The Impact of the Highly Improbable.  New York:  Random House.  [Recommended]
• Taylor, Eugene.  (1999). Shadow Culture. Psychology and Spirituality in America.  Counterpoint.  [This is a beautifully written cultural history of alternative and mystical spiritualities in America, and their complex intermingling with folk psychology.]
• Wilczek, Frank. (2008). The Lightness of Being.  Mass, Either, and the Unification of Forces.  New York: Basic Books.  This is a suburb, eye-opening account of some the most recent advances in theoretical physics, written in an engaging (although not always easy) fashion by a Nobel prize winning physicist.  The focus is on a universal energy field that pervades time and space, that's being referred to by various terms, such as zero-point energy (ZPE), the Dirac Sea, the Cosmological Constant, or dark energy. 
• Urban, Greg. (2001). Metaculture.  How Culture Moves through the World.  University of Minnesota Press. [Still reading; in some ways boring, but an important work, and actually, very well written.]
• Vardy, Peter.  (1999). The Puzzle of God.  Fount. [Interesting, though sometimes tedious introduction to the "philosophy of God"]
• Weiner, Eric. (2008). The Geography of Bliss. One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World. New York: Twelve. [A great intellectual travelogue, in which the author visits ten countries to examine either their reputed happiness or lack thereof, all the while chit-chatting about his travels and the local color, but lacing the discussion with his commentary on the research and theory on subjective well-being, and occasionally, some amazing insights.]
• Wolfram, Stephen. (2002). A New Kind of Science.  Wolfram Media Inc. [From the founder of Mathematica, a massive treatise on complex systems theory, but unfortunately, I doubt there is much that is new in here. However, so far I've only made it through the first half, and am not sure if I will return to the second half. There is some good information, especially on cellular automata, but it is very tedious.]

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