Last week, I gave you a list of the best fiction books I read in 2014. Here’s a list of the best non-law, non-fiction I read in 2014. I hope you find something that interests you. I read much more non-fiction than fiction, so this list is a little longer. As with my list of fiction, they’re in no particular order.

1. Rose George, Ninety Percent of Everything: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry that Puts Clothes on Your Back, Gas in Your Car, and Food on Your Plate. An extremely well-written look at the global shipping industry—not the FedEx and UPS type of shipping, but actual ships. The author traveled over 9,000 miles on a container ship. The book discusses that voyage, interlaced with a boatload of material (pun intended) about the history of shipping, the regulation of shipping, shipwrecks, piracy, and a number of other subjects.

2. Rich Cohen, Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football. I’m neither a Chicago Bears fan nor a Mike Ditka fan, but this was an interesting book. For those who are young and familiar with the current Bears, yes, the Bears actually won back in 1985. Cohen covers more than just that 1985 team. The book looks at the history of the team back to the early days of the NFL and also the aftermath of the 1985 championship—what happened to the team and the players afterwards.

3. Adam Minter, Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade. A look at trash and recycling. Recycling makes more sense economically than I thought; apparently, much of our recycled materials make their way to China for use in Chinese manufacturing. I never knew that trash could be so interesting.

4. William Easterly, The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor. Easterly, an economist at N.Y.U., discusses anti-poverty programs and their effect on the third world. He argues that the technical solutions proposed by experts haven’t worked and that the real key to development is bottom-up: giving poor people economic freedom. I previously recommended this book here. My co-blogger Haskell Murray reviews it here.

5. Jang Jin-Sung, Dear Leader: Poet, Spy, Escapee—A Look Inside North Korea. The author worked in the propaganda arm of the North Korean government and was honored by Kim Jong-Il for his epic poetry. This book is the story of his escape from North Korea, but also an account of life among the privileged in Pyongyang.

6. Louisa Lim, The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited. An amazing account of how China has been able to recast, and even erase, from its history the events in Tiananmen Square in 1989. The scary part is how they have used nationalism to supplant the yearnings for freedom that prompted Tiananmen.

7. Mark Miodownik, Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials that Shape Our Man-Made World. An introduction to how materials are made and how they’re put together, down to the atomic level. He discusses for instance, why diamonds and graphite are so incredibly different, even though they’re both carbon-based. For those who have a heavy scientific background, there won’t be much new here, but he explains the science in ways that a non-scientist like me can understand.

8. Jenny Lawson, Let’s Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir. A hilarious autobiography of a Texas woman who now writes a blog at TheBloggess.com. Parts of it made my literally laugh at loud. I was constantly reading parts of the book to my wife.

9. Ben Macintyre, A Spy among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal. The story of Kim Philby, perhaps the best-known Russian spy ever. An interesting look at the good-old-boys’ network that was British intelligence at the time and their unwillingness to believe that one of their own would actually betray them.

10. Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century. I tend to be a grammar prescriptivist; Pinker is not. I’m a big fan of Strunk & White; Pinker is not. But I nevertheless enjoyed this guide to grammar, punctuation, and sentence and paragraph structure. Pinker’s suggestions are sensible. He also explains why things should be written as he suggests and why grammar and structure matter.

11. Hampton Sides, In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the U.S.S. Jeannette. An account of an attempt to sail to the North Pole from the Pacific Ocean and on to the Atlantic. At the time, many people thought that there was a great polar sea beyond the ice. The Jeannette was stuck in the ice for two years before it sank and the crew had to try to make their way through the ice and eventually overland through Russia.

12. Ian Leslie, Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It. I have already blogged about this one. See here.

13. Kim Zetter, Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World’s First Digital Weapon. The story of the Stuxnet computer worm which someone, apparently the U.S. government, used to disrupt Iran’s uranium enrichment program.  Zetter tells the story primarily from the viewpoint of the computer experts who discovered and then unraveled the virus. He also discusses the ethical and practical implications. Among other things, what’s the risk to “us” now that we’ve unleashed this weapon on someone else?