The Courage To Start, by John Bingham
Have you ever wanted to become a runner. If so this book might change your life. The author tells his story, in which, after many years of inactivity, he took up running at age 43 and a weight of 240-pounds. At first he managed to run quarter of a mile, then half a mile. As the months passed and he ran 5Ks, 10Ks, half marathons, and eventually, full marathons. The book is full of insights and is a joy to read.
Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
Barbarians at the Gate Bryan Burrough and John Helyar
Two of my favourite and most memorable non-fiction books.
Act Thin, Stay Thin, by Richard B. Stuart
This is a very sane approach to loosing weight. Actually the best book on the subject I’ve ever seen.
Here is a short one of enormous impact:
“A Short History of Progress” by Ronald Wright.
Ronald Wright is a Canadian. This book is the five Massey Lectures he presented in 2004. He says at the outset that he is not going into detail, and he doesn’t, but about a quarter of the book is pages of references.
Essentially, he argues that humankind is facing an age-old predicament. In previous times, though, an escape hatch has always been available in a relatively lightly settled earth. In many cases, people simply abandoned cities and whole civilizations (e.g. in the middle east). In other cases, they expanded their influence to draw on new lands (among the most recent cases – the Brits, who defied Malthus by sucking in food and other resources from vast tracts of the earth at the expense of those living in those vast tracts). Now earth is heavily settled and there is nowhere to go …
Geoff,
Welcome to Literature & Latte/Scrivener forum from a fellow Nisusite — and I’m sure from others of us who frequent both forums. It’s good to see you here. And if you’re just exploring the joys of Scrivener, might one say, “It’s about time” 
I know you have contributed an enormous amount too the Nisus forum and to the development of Nisus itself, and I’m sure you will contribute much here.
But I have to warn you … there’s no vertical ruler in Scrivener, nor is there ever likely to be one 
Mark (xiamenese here and there)
Hiya Mark
I saw your name in the summary list and I thought – ha! I’ve landed among friends here! We both need to be a bit more original when our aliases, don’t we?
Someone sang the praises of Scrivener on the Nisus Forum, in fact, so I thought I would take a look. Several thousands words written in Scrivener already.
No, vertical ruler not wanted – different tool for a different job. 
And here are a couple more non-fiction recommendations:
Silent Theft by David Bollier, Routledge, London & New York, 2002
Capitalism 3.0 by Peter Barnes, Berrett-Koehler, San Francisco, 2006.
Both are about how corporations and governments are working hand in hand to privatize our inheritance – the commons, the common wealth, the water we drink, the air we breathe, the infrastructure build up over generations and millennia – today’s version of England’s infamous enclosures – how we can counter them and protect ourselves and all people against this insidious economic poison.
Me for one, Timotheus for another and Scott Whitlock for a third, though I know there are others. And yes, different tool for a different job. The two work together darn well in my experience, too.
Mark
I, too participate in the Nisus forums and Mellel forums, but under my other alias, shades. Very sneaky, eh? Well, okay, … 
You’re a dag, Shades. :mrgreen:
I’ve tried to go anonymous on a couple of fora but sooner (rather than later) I just hit the s-g-5, as is almost autoamtic, and Ti4M pops up with my signature.
Or someone recommends the sound of my soapbox. 
Cheers, Geoff
Geoffrey Heard, Business Writer & Publisher
“Type & Layout: Are you communicating or just making pretty shapes” – the secrets of how type can help you to sell or influence, now at the new low price of $29.95. See the book at worsleypress.com or Amazon.
Nope, this one is better: Healthy at 100: The Scientifically The Scientifically Proven Secrets of the World’s Healthiest and Longest-Lived Peoples, by John Robbins
A joy to read, and it motivated me to start living healthy like no other book.
Getting Real: The book by 37signals, it’s available free at
http://gettingreal.37signals.com/toc.php
Eat to Live, by Joel Fuhrman. This is a great book. A quote from the book that summarizes his program.
“Eat as many vegetables, beans and fresh fruits as possible, and less of everything else. Any other program is an insult to your intelligence.”
This will probably mean nothing to you unless you read his book or a books by Robbins or McDougall. My own experience is that when I eat according to the rule above, I get satiated by 2100 calories, while if I eat what I used to eat before I was satiated first at 3200 calories. What this does for my weight is easy to calculate. What it does for my health is not easy to calculate, but by looking at people in Abchasia, Hunsa and other people whose primary food is vegetables, beans and fruits, I do not think that my health will suffer, the opposite might be true.
In his book Dr. Fuhrman has the interesting formula H=N/C where H is health, N is nutrition and C is calories. So to get health you should eat as much nutrients per calorie as possible. That means avoiding processed food and red meat and eat as much as you can of vegetables. But what if you don’t like vegetables and you love ice cream? That is a static picture of a human being. You maybe like ice cream because you have learned to love ice cream. In the same way that people who smoke have learned to like to smoke, not because they were born smokers. If you eat vegetables you might similarly learn to like vegetables.
People who smoke, don’t like to hear about stopping smoking, and people who eat red meat and processed food don’t like hearing that it’s not good for them. In order to benefit from this book, you have to have a clear, open and scientifically inclined mind.
Pollan makes a case to eat “food”. By food he means not processed food, nor meat from animals fed upon processed food. To find such food is hard nowdays but is managable. After reading this book I’ve been very careful what I buy and what I eat. A five star book
After seeing Bob make these recommendations, I feel compelled to offer a few with an alternative viewpoint re. nutritional decision-making and the health of the human animal:
Actually, I’m going to stop short of a few, as discussion about these topics often gets dicey. There’s a couple to get you started if you’re interested.
Bobueland wrote:
If the subject and the science is of real interest to you, I can also recommend the blogs of Stephan Guyenet, called wholehealthsource, and the blog of Art Ayers, called coolinginflammation.
An addendum to my previous post: I recommend the Weston A. Price book not as one that meets the scientific gold standard (as the data is observational, etc.) but as a book that may prompt further investigation in an enquiring mind.
Thanks edmo, Weston’s book has been cited in almost all the books I’ve recommended. Gary Taubes book seems to be excellent and the philosophy seems to be in line with the ones I recommended (I’ve just bought the Kindle version).
I’ve read that humans couldn’t drink cows milk 60 thousend years (I don’t remember the time exactly) ago, but then a mutation happened that allowed certain individuals to digest it. That led to a positive evolution advantage and the new genes spread rapidly allowing most humans today to be able to drink milk. This is typical for a lot of different foods. But the processed food has not gone through this evolution process and western civilization diseases like Alzheimer’s, diabetes, cancer and heart diseases are a consequence of that. Maybe in 60 thousend years we will be able to digest processed food without getting western civilization diseases, but until then we should avoid them.
Coming Out Of The Ice, An Unexpected Life by Victor Herman.
This is a true story of the author’s life. He was an American teenager and super athlete. Then his father took the family to the “Motherland” to help rebuild Russia. When Victor Herman became of age and demanded to return to his homeland, he was instead thrown into the Russian prison system. This is my all-time favorite book. It is out-of-print, but you can find it on the internet or at those special bookstores.
Read this book, and you will never complain about your life again.
We all think we know about Steve Jobs; BUT truth is his authorized biography is so revealing and truthful; he gave complete access to the biographer and nothing is held back: good AND bad (his birth parents were Syrian he was adopted by an american couple–he and Bill Gates were friends AND Bill loaned Apple lots of $$$ to keep it alive. Getting fired as CEO was the best thing that happened to him, etc.
I just finished David Roberts’ “Finding Everett Ruess,” which is part biography, part mystery and part personal narrative. Long a character of almost mythic stature, Ruess was a 20 year old painter who disappeared into the high desert of Utah in 1934 and was never seen again. Roberts does a pretty good job of not being dazzled by the idea that Ruess was some sort of desert mystic. As a result, his book is, I think, deeper and more interesting than other examinations of Ruess’s disappearance.