Neil deGrasse Tyson Selects the Eight Books Every Intelligent Person on the Planet Should Readby Maria Popova

How to “glean profound insight into most of what has driven the history of the western world.”

In December of 2011, Neil deGrasse Tyson — champion of science, celebrator of the cosmic

perspective, master of the soundbite — participated in Reddit’sAsk Me Anything series of public

questions and answers. One reader posed the following question: “Which books should be read by

every single intelligent person on the planet?” Adding to history’s notable reading lists —

including those by Leo Tolstoy, Alan Turing, Brian Eno, David Bowie, Stewart Brand, and Carl

Sagan — Tyson offers the following eight essentials, each followed by a short, and sometimes

wry, statement about “how the book’s content influenced the behavior of people who shaped the

western world”:

1. The Bible (public library; free ebook), to learn that it’s easier to be told by others what to think and

believe than it is to think for yourself

2. The System of the World (public library; free ebook) by Isaac Newton, to learn that the universe

is a knowable place

3. On the Origin of Species (public library; free ebook) by Charles Darwin, to learn of our kinship

with all other life on Earth

4. Gulliver’s Travels (public library; free ebook) by Jonathan Swift, to learn, among other satirical

lessons, that most of the time humans are Yahoos

5. The Age of Reason (public library; free ebook) by Thomas Paine, to learn how the power of

rational thought is the primary source of freedom in the world

6. The Wealth of Nations (public library; free ebook) by Adam Smith, to learn that capitalism is an

economy of greed, a force of nature unto itself

7. The Art of War (public library; free ebook) by Sun Tzu, to learn that the act of killing fellow

humans can be raised to an art

8. The Prince (public library; free ebook) by Machiavelli, to learn that people not in power will do all

they can to acquire it, and people in power will do all they can to keep it

Reverse-engineering one of the greatest minds of all time by his information diet.

“Success,” concluded this 1942 anatomy of

inspiration, “depends on sufficient knowledge of the special

subject, and a variety of extraneous knowledge to produce new

and original combinations of ideas.” Few are the heroes of

modern history more “successful” and inspired than the

great Carl Sagan, and his 1954 reading list, part of his papers

recently acquired by the Library of Congress, speaks to

precisely this blend of wide-angle, cross-disciplinary curiosity

and focused, in-field expertise — and is balanced with a healthy approach to reading and “non-

reading”, with some books read “in whole” and others “in part.” (Sagan, as we know, was an avid

advocate of books.)

Besides books immediately relevant to Sagan’s work as a scientist and educator in cosmology and

astrophysics, he took great care to also touch on history, philosophy, religion, the arts, social

science, and psychology. A small but revealing sample, fodder for your own cognitive bookshelf:

Extraordinary Popular Delusions (public library; public domain) by Charles Mackay

The Uses of the Past: Profiles of Former Societies (public library) by Herbert Joseph Muller

The Immoralist (public library) by André Gide

Education for Freedom (public library) by Robert Maynard Hutchins (Chapter One: “The

Autobiography of an Uneducated Man”)

Young Archimedes and Other Stories (public library) byAldous Huxley

Timaeus (public library; public domain) by Plato

Who Speaks for Man? (public library) by Norman Cousins

The Republic (public library; public domain) by Plato

The History of Western Philosophy (public library) by W. T. Jones

But We Were Born Free (public library) by Elmer Holmes Davis

Wash down with Alan Turing’s reading list.