Skunk Works by Ben R. Rich and Leo Janos - Rich provides a first hand account of how Lockheed Aviation's Skunk Works filled the skies with a succession of radically innovative, remarkably effective warbirds.

Moneyball by Michael Lewis - Lewis tells the engaging story of how the Oakland Athletics have managed to field a pennant contender on one of the lowest budgets in baseball by embracing a scientific revolution in the evaluation of baseball talent, tactics, and strategy.

Slide Rule by Nevil Shute - Novelist Nevil Shute had an earlier career as an aeronautical engineer. In "Slide Rule", he details his company's efforts to produce an airship, the R100, in "competition" with the State of England.

Louis Pasteur: Free Lance of Science by Rene Dubos - A distinguished microbiologist and intellectual historian of biology, Dubos' essentialized, sympathetic portrait of Pasteur's career is set against the backdrop of the triumph of the germ theory of life over spontaneous generation and the triumph of biochemistry over the vitalist school of life.

The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Earth by James Lovelock - James Lovelock offers the outlines of an intriguing "physiology" of earth. Together with Lynn Margulis, he first seriously proposed that microbial life regulates key aspects of the Earth's physical environment, most notably the composition of the atmosphere. The scale of his insight affords him unusual insight into many controversial areas: ozone depletion as threat to life (nope), the prospect of life on Mars (nil), why life must "infect" a planet if it is to have a chance of persisting on a geologic time scale.

Edison: the Man who Made the Future by Ronald Clark - A superb, compact biography of the inventor. Among the gems in this brief biography: Edison's iron ore enhancement plant as inspiration for Henry Ford's idea of a "production flow"-- the assembly line, rather than batch jobs.