The Best Books Behind the Documentaries
Hand-picked, top-rated non-fiction to read after the film: one shelf for every subject on Dociflix, from how things work to the ancient world.
How everyday things are made, and why the world works the way it does.
- The Way Things Work Now by David Macaulay
- Stuff Matters by Mark Miodownik
- The Toaster Project by Thomas Thwaites
- Factfulness by Hans Rosling
- Liquid Rules by Mark Miodownik
Wild lives, from the savanna to your garden.
- The Private Life of Plants by David Attenborough
- Life on Earth by David Attenborough
- The Wild Trees by Richard Preston
- H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
- The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben
The deep, the reef and everything that swims between.
- The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson
- Blue Mind by Wallace J. Nichols
- Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery
- Why Fish Don't Exist by Lulu Miller
- Close to Shore by Michael Capuzzo
From our nearest neighbour to the edge of everything.
- Cosmos by Carl Sagan
- A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
- Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson
- Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan
- The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe
The ideas, machines and minds that changed everything.
- The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
- The Gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee
- A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
- The Code Breaker by Walter Isaacson
- The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee
Empires, wars and the people caught up in them.
- Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
- Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
- SPQR by Mary Beard
- The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer
- A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn
Digs, lost worlds and questions nobody can answer yet.
- The Lost City of Z by David Grann
- 1491 by Charles C. Mann
- Cradle of Civilization by Samuel Noah Kramer
- Stonehenge by Mike Parker Pearson
- Stonehenge by Rosemary Hill
Real cases, real people, and the long road to the truth.
- In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
- The Stranger Beside Me by Ann Rule
- Helter Skelter by Vincent Bugliosi
- I'll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara
- Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann
Reporting that changed minds, and the stories behind the headlines.
- The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright
- Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall
- The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein
- Factfulness by Hans Rosling
- Kleptopia by Tom Burgis
How we live, love, argue, believe and belong.
- Evicted by Matthew Desmond
- The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander
- Bowling Alone by Robert D. Putnam
- Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich
- Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell
Lives worth a feature-length look.
- Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
- Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela
- Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson
- The Last Lion by William Manchester
- Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin
Cities, coastlines and journeys, from your sofa.
- A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson
- Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson
- Under the Tuscan Sun by Frances Mayes
- The Great Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux
- The Stones of Florence by Mary McCarthy
How the biggest things ever built got built.
- The Great Bridge by David McCullough
- The Path Between the Seas by David McCullough
- How Buildings Learn by Stewart Brand
- The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder
- To Engineer Is Human by Henry Petroski
Air crashes, shipwrecks, storms and the people who lived to tell it.
- Fly by Wire by William Langewiesche
- The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande
- Flying Blind by Peter Robison
- Black Box Thinking by Matthew Syed
- Midnight in Chernobyl by Adam Higginbotham
Where dinner comes from, and who is cooking it.
- Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain
- Salt Fat Acid Heat by Samin Nosrat
- The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan
- Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser
- Heat by Bill Buford
Medicine, minds and the machine you live in.
- Being Mortal by Atul Gawande
- Why We Sleep by Matthew P. Walker
- The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
- When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
- Complications by Atul Gawande
Where the money comes from, and where it goes.
- The Big Short by Michael Lewis
- Barbarians at the Gate by Bryan Burrough
- Shoe Dog by Phil Knight
- Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty
- Too Big to Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin
The people who make beautiful, loud and strange things.
- Just Kids by Patti Smith
- Chronicles by Bob Dylan
- The Story of Art by E. H. Gombrich
- Ways of Seeing by John Berger
- Civilisation by Kenneth Clark
People pushing at the edge of what is possible.
- Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
- Endurance by Alfred Lansing
- Touching the Void by Joe Simpson
- Born to Run by Christopher McDougall
- The Climb by Anatoli Boukreev
Weather, volcanoes, ice and the long fight for a stable climate.
- The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert
- The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells
- Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
- Under a White Sky by Elizabeth Kolbert
- How to Avoid a Climate Disaster by Bill Gates
Pharaohs, emperors and the first cities.
- The Complete Pyramids by Mark Lehner
- The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt by Toby Wilkinson
- Temples, Tombs and Hieroglyphs by Barbara Mertz
- The Pyramids by Miroslav Verner
- The Complete Tutankhamun by Nicholas Reeves
The great wars, the battles and the machines that fought them.
- The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman
- A World Undone by G. J. Meyer
- The Sleepwalkers by Christopher Clark
- Dreadnought by Robert K. Massie
- Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves
How we think, feel, remember and fool ourselves.
- The Brain by David Eagleman
- The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks
- Incognito by David Eagleman
- The Tell-Tale Brain by V. S. Ramachandran (neurology)
- The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk
Life online, and what it is doing to us.
- Irresistible by Adam Alter
- The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt
- Stolen Focus by Johann Hari
- Please Kill Me by Legs McNeil
- Our Band Could Be Your Life by Michael Azerrad
Faith, myth and the stories people live by.
- A History of God by Karen Armstrong
- The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James
- Zealot by Reza Aslan
- Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
- The Invention of Tradition by Eric Hobsbawm
The games, the greats and the will to win.
- Inverting the Pyramid by Jonathan Wilson
- Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby
- Soccernomics by Simon Kuper
- Moneyball by Michael Lewis
- The Blind Side by Michael Lewis
The machines that move us.
- The Wright Brothers by David McCullough
- Skunk Works by Ben R. Rich
- Fly by Wire by William Langewiesche
- Skyfaring by Mark Vanhoenacker
- West with the Night by Beryl Markham
Deep time, from the first life to the last mammoth.
- The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs by Steve Brusatte
- Dinosaurs Rediscovered by Michael Benton
- The Dinosaur Heresies by Robert T. Bakker
- Otherlands by Thomas Halliday
- Dinosaurs: A Concise Natural History by David E. Fastovsky
Earning, saving, investing, and a working life that works.
- The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel
- Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert T. Kiyosaki
- Your Money or Your Life by Vicki Robin
- The Millionaire Next Door by Thomas J. Stanley
- The Little Book of Common Sense Investing by John C. Bogle
The questions that never go away, and the minds that chased them.
- Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder
- The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant
- Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
- Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
- Letters from a Stoic by Seneca the Younger
Making, mending, growing and building a home.
- Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew B. Crawford
- Walden by Henry David Thoreau
- The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan
- The Craftsman by Richard Sennett
- How Buildings Learn by Stewart Brand
Peoples who live by older ways, and what they know.
- The World Until Yesterday by Jared M. Diamond
- Wayfinders by Wade Davis
- Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
- Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown
- The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell
Stillness, meaning and the search for a well-lived life.
- The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle
- Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Emil Frankl
- Wherever You Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn
- How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan
- The Art of Happiness by His Holiness Tenzin Gyatso the XIV Dalai Lama
Dogs, cats, horses and the people who save animals.
- Inside of a Dog by Alexandra Horowitz
- The Genius of Dogs by Brian Hare
- Being a Dog by Alexandra Horowitz
- Marley & Me by John Grogan
- The Lion in the Living Room by Abigail Tucker
The songs, the scenes and the people who made them.
- Just Kids by Patti Smith
- This Is Your Brain on Music by Daniel J. Levitin
- Chronicles by Bob Dylan
- How Music Works by David Byrne
- Revolution in the Head by Ian MacDonald
Movies, television, games and the stories behind them.
- Easy Riders, Raging Bulls by Peter Biskind
- Masters of Doom by David Kushner
- Adventures in the Screen Trade by William Goldman
- Blood, Sweat, and Pixels by Jason Schreier
- The Ultimate History of Video Games by Steven L. Kent