I read that. Says quite a lot that nothing near comparable has been written in over 50 (...?) years.
Actually plenty has... it's a great book, but just in terms of history, none of these are on the list:
Ferdinand Braudel,
The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II
Emanuel Le Roi Ladurie,
Montaillou
Carlo Ginzburg,
The Cheese and the Worms
Christopher Hill,
The World Turned Upside Down
Norman Cohn,
The Pursuit of the Millennium
William McNeill,
Plagues and Peoples
Janet Abu-Lughod,
Before European Hegemony
Barbara Tuchman,
The Guns of August (or
A Distant Mirror)
Immanuel Wallerstein,
The Modern World System
Clive Ponting,
Progress and Barbarism
Mark Mazower,
Dark Valley
Popular science / technology books - some favourites of mine are:
Wonderful Life by Stephen J. Gould,
Brighter Than a Thousand Suns by Robert Jungk,
Fire in the Mind by George Johnson and
Chaos by James Gleick.
Travel:
Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer, which is also one of the greatest descriptions of human stupidity of all time. Also Peter Matthiessen's
The Snow Leopard.
I also agree with Delftse Post on his suggestions (except the Dawkins, which I haven't read). Needham's work is outstanding.
