The Canon by Natalie Angier

The full title of this book is The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science. Angier is a science reporter who wrote this book as a way of explaining all of those parts of science that every person should know. Covered in the book are statistics, scales, physics, chemistry, evolutionary biology, molecular biology, geology, and astronomy. We should know these things because they are integral to our understanding of the world, and they act as a base on which to build, when we read of new scientific discoveries or theories. As Angier puts it: "What should nonspecialist nonchildren know about science, and how should they know it, and what is this thing called fun?"
I was surprised by the inclusion of statistics and scales, as well as by the fact that Angier begins her discussion of science with these topics. But both statistics and a notion of the scope of science are very necessary for every other topic. And they are the most commonly misunderstood. Angier's discussion of the other sciences is well rounded and thorough, and at the same time easy to grasp. She connects them all in a way that makes full understanding possible.
The first chapter of the book, before we even jump into statistics, is about thinking like a scientist. This is the most necessary piece of the puzzle, because too often people think of science as something to believe in, or something to agree with. Science is about evidence, it is not a matter of opinion.
What I loved the most about this book was the way that Angier loves to talk about science. It is obvious that she adores both scientific learning and writing. She seems to take great pleasure in creating clever sentences and fun alliterations. And the reader takes tremendous pleasure in following her train of thought. This book is a fantastic way to introduce anyone to "the beautiful basics of science" and is fun to read on top of everything else.
"Science is not a body of facts. Science is a state of mind. It is a way of viewing the world, of facing reality square on but taking nothing on its face. It is about attacking a problem with the most manicured of claws and tearing it down into sensible, edible pieces. Even more than the testimonials to the fun of science, I heard the earnest affidavit that science is not a body of facts, it is a way of thinking."

The World Without Us by Alan Weisman

The very idea presented in this book fascinated the first time I heard it. The narration in the book is speculation about what would happen to the Earth and all of its inhabitants if human beings were to suddenly all disappear. The author provides a handful of explanations for such a disappearance, but none of them are particularly plausible. The idea is just to brainstorm what may happen to all of the marks of our civilization: our cities, roads, wonders, trash, art, agricultural areas, and even what happens to the wilderness that we leave behind.
Weisman uses knowledge gained from many fields of science to complete this brainstorm. He covers archeology, oceanography, and zoology, among many others. He looks at areas of the Earth that have either been untouched by humans, or left the way they are intentionally, whether for decades, centuries, or millenia. He discusses chemical composition of the many things that we will leave behind, and how those things will fare over time. He even brings up some very intriguing points about evolution, and considers what might be the next "human" to evolve once we're gone.
The book is a fantastic overview of our society and species, and catalogues in detail the devastation that we have wrought upon the Earth. It seems that if we were to disappear tomorrow, the world would be left mainly with our chemical waste, in the form of plastics, pesticides, and even nuclear leftovers. Everything else would be absorbed back into the Earth eventually, but these chemical compositions that never existed on Earth before us would remain. It's a frightening thought, and makes this book not only a tremendous catalog of the things that we have created that were beautiful, but also brings home the point that trash goes somewhere, whether or not we ever see it again. The Earth will recover from humanity's depredations eventually, but the hope brought forward in this book is that the recovery will happen while we are still here to see it.