100 Best Non Fiction Books has its origins in the recent 2 year-long Observer serial which every week featured a work of non fiction (the definition of which also included books of poetry and plays). It is also a companion volume to McCrum's very successful 100 BEST NOVELS published by Galileo in 2015.
The list of books starts in 1611 with the King James Bible and ends in 2014 with Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction. And in between, on this extraordinary voyage through the written treasures of our culture we meet Pepys' Diaries, Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species, TS Eliot's The Wasteland, Beckett Waiting for Godot, Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch, Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff, Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time and a whole host of additional works that have either changed our ways of seeing the world, or were landmarks of expression in their time - and still resonate.