Good Non-Fiction Books

[Propertarian]

Let's see:

This Time Let's Not Eat the Bones and/or Historical Baseball Abstract (the latest edition is the best) by Bill James
Ball Four
Homage to Catalonia (Orwell)
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
The Confessions (Rousseau; a mix of real and fake autobiography)
Philosophical Dictionary (Voltaire)

If you dig politics and economics I've got a couple bonus books:
Everything For Sale (Kuttner)
Happiness: Lessons From A New Science (Layard)
The Great Transformation (Polayni; get the edition from a few years ago if you can with the Stiglitz and Block foreword and Intro)

[nicky g]

Non-fiction is a pretty big category. People can recommend good recent non-fiction books but otherwise saying what kind of subjects you're interested in would narrow it down a lot.

Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell, about the Spanish Civil War, is a classic. Pity the Nation by Robert Fisk about the 1975-1990 Lebanon wars (mostly) is pretty amazing. I'm enjoying his new book even though it's absurdly huge and doesn't have much of a focus. Each chapter is fascinating even if it's clearly just a collection of his journalism presented as a proper book.

[Borodog]

Some non-fiction everyone should read:

The Real Lincoln and How Capitalism Saved America, both by Thomas J. DiLorenzo. He belabors a few points in TRL, but you need to read the material it contains, regardless of the quality of his composition.