Some Excellent Non-Fiction Books

 * Henry Hansmann, "The Ownership of Enterprise" (2000). 

This is one of the best analyses of the economic and legal logic the causes some entities to be organized as "for profit" investor owned companies, others to be organized as worker cooperatives or producer cooperatives or consumer cooperatives, others to be organized as member controlled non-profits, and other considerations regarding entity ownership, backed by historical and empirical analysis of what worked, what didn't, and how this supports a larger theoretical framework of what forms of entity ownership make the most sense for particular purposes. Twenty-four years after it was written, all of its conclusions remain sound.

* Theodore Caplow, "How To Run Any Organization" (1976) (207 pages exclusive of end notes).

This short and practical guide lucidly sums up most of the academic consensus knowledge about the most important lessons about what works when it comes to being a manager in an organization. Forty-eight years after it was written, its guidance has aged very well. 

It also provides a carefully pruned and curated list of fourteen more classics of the management literature for further reading, although other solid books on the topic have been written since then.

This isn't necessarily the only book you need to read about management, but it is the best introduction to the subject out there.

* Sue Spencer, "Write On Target" (1976) (121 pages exclusive of end notes).

There are many books on writing that are basically grammar textbooks, are in the same genre as the Associated Press style guide, or focus on style preferences in sentence structure (such as E. B. White and William Strunk Jr., "The Elements of Style" (4th ed. 1999) (105 pages)). 

Bryan A. Garner is the leading authority on modern, plain English, legal writing styles at a similar level of specificity to "The Elements of Style."

But Spencer addresses writing style and rhetoric at a level more focused on the forest than the trees. Many writers and writing instructors have the technical copy editing level mastery of Strunk and Garner, but can't teach and often have not even internalized the kind of insights Spencer provides into telling a compelling story, whether it is fiction or non-fiction. Instead, they merely vaguely suggest putting together an outline to compose something that a Large Language Model AI could have written. 

The titles of her ten chapters are suggestive: "Know the score", "Bite off what you can chew", "Get off to a flying start", "Zero in", "Keep dropping those bread crumbs", "Stick to your guns", "Call a spade a shovel", "Squeeze, please", "Goof-proofing", and "End before your ending."

Once again, these lessons have aged well.

Another widely acclaimed book in the same vein, which I have not yet managed to read, is Blake Snyder, "Save the Cat!: The Last Book On Screenwriting That You'll Ever Need." (2005). It is also a "forest level" writing book, but is more focused on writing "formula" scripts for movies and television, rather than having a more general focus.

* W. Phillips Shively, "Power and Choice: An Introduction To Political Science" (1987).

This textbook, from an introductory political science class I took at Miami University of Ohio, decades later, taught me two main things.

First, the title rubric that breaks politics into the dimensions of "power" and "choice" has been a useful framework for thinking about politics for my entire adult life. My natural inclination is wonkish, focusing on the optimal policy choices I would make if I were king for a day. But it is important to recognize that perfect knowledge of the right choice to make is useless unless you can secure the power necessary to implement those choices, bringing majorities along with you. Other people are more focused on the "power" aspect, often in a Marxist or conspiratorial style analysis, but forget that political policy choices do matter and have consequences, which can't simply be made blindly on a value and results neutral basis.

Second, it eschewed early modern political philosophy in favor of illustrating every topic discussed with pertinent comparative politics examples from the 20th century from all across the globe, opening my eyes to a much broader perspective than high school civics did, and on topics like non-democratic government and the workings of government bureaucracies which I hadn't realized at the time were even a part of the discipline.

It is a little bit dated, because it doesn't have post-1987 developments like the fall of the Soviet Union and end of the Cold War, the market reforms of China, the evolution of the European Union to a more state-like entity,  

* Ronnie Eisenberg with Kate Kelly, "Organize Yourself!" (1986).

This book covers, at the nitty gritty detail level, issues like time management; organizing your personal files and financial records, and managing mail; keeping your closets, kitchen, laundry, grocery shopping, and household help organized; organizing major projects like melding households, moving, planning trips, planning for painters, planning parties and yard sales, and looking for jobs; shopping, organizing your purse and briefcase, organizing your spouse, not misplacing things, finding a doctor, and remembering dates; and the organizational challenges of pregnancy and children.

It doesn't reflect a life transformed by smart phones, personal computers, the cloud, and the Internet, so it is a bit dated. It doesn't contain any deep and profound insights. But, if your friends describe one of your parents' offices (as my friends did) as "it looks like a newspaper stand blew up in there", and you just don't have a foundation of routines and orderliness that is second nature to you, it is good for establishing a baseline foundation for a more organized personal life.

* Randall B. Ripley, "Congress: Process and Policy" (4th ed. 1988).

Some of this book, which I read as a textbook in college, is simply par for the course political science fare. Unlike the other three books mentioned above, this book is somewhat dated (there may be more recent editions, I haven't checked).

For example, it was written before the full running of political realignment between the Democratic and Republican parties, the emergence of the firm alignment between the Republican Party and Evangelical Christianity, the coalition shifts associated with the MAGA movement, innovations in election administration like ranked choice voting and various experiments with open primaries, or the nuclear option in the U.S. Senate.

But what sets this book apart, which was mind-blowing when I first read it, was its vivid description of the early U.S. Congress and how it, and the federal government more generally, was radically transformed into a very different institution, especially as a result of the U.S. Civil War, World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II. This historical context is vital to understanding not just the political history of the United States, but also its legal history which closely parallels the development of other federal government institutions.