The Selfish Gene is wonderfully tight, indeed very little noise and a whole lot of signal. Here's two books if you want to learn about math you might want to learn about: The Facts on File Dictionary on Mathematics by Gibson, and Foundations and Fundamental Concepts of Mathematics by Howard Eves, which takes a historical approach, but is not a history per se. More like "this is what the Greeks did, in this period the use of calculus was pretty loose and look at this equation that Euler thought was right, these are the steps that brought rigor to it" etc. Susan Wise Bauer has been writing a series of history books solely focused on "politics", i.e. no coverage of the arts besides occasional mentions; that can be a very useful framework to then hang study of things like the arts off of. Also no wild speculation like Guns, Germs and Steel is filled with, if it wasn't written down and passed down to us, it gets only brief mention. Here's the first one: http://www.susanwisebauer.com/books/history-of-the-ancient-w... (http://www.susanwisebauer.com/books/history-of-the-ancient-world/)…
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