UNCOMMON GROUNDS: The History of Coffee and How it Transformed Our WorldThe Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of (How Science Fiction Conquered the World by Thomas M. Disch.
This is a very good book for the serious SciFi fan. Once you get past the author's obnoxious liberal whining (he's pissed that politically conservative writers like Robert Heinlein and Jerry Pournelle have had a much greater effect on shaping the world than politically correct liberal bed wetting authors like himself), Mr. Disch actually makes some rather on target observations on the writers, the fans, and the effect of both.
Pocket Ref by Thomas J. Glover.
This is one cool book! It fits in a shirt pocket and covers more useful stuff than you can shake a good sized stick at!
Things covered include:
Densities of Gases
Strength of Wood Beams
Periodic Table
Resistor Color Codes
Greek Alphabet
Morse code
Squares, Cubes & Roots
Trig functions
Conversion table to die for...
Tomorrow's Soldier by David Alexander
This is a good introductionary read to future military technology.
Tesla: Man Out of Time by Margaret Cheny. This is a top notch biography
of one of the world's great inventors. Probably more important to modern life than Thomas Edison.
Nikola Tesla was responsible for or invented: