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I spent four years at Caltech, so I've read more than my share of science books! But that was many years ago, so it's starting to change.

Richard Dawkins

• Selfish Gene
  Dawkins spends the entire book motivating a concept he calls the Extended Phenotype. As far as I can tell it is just a subtle distinction in what exactly it is we should think of as evolving in evolution: the species, the organism, the gene, or entire coevolving systems? The style is a bit dry, but he illustrates his points with interesting examples of his own and other scientists' work. It is very thought-provoking, even if it falls a little short of the life-changing revelation he suggests it might be in the preface.

Jared Diamond

• Guns, Germs, Steel
  This won the Pulitzer Prize. It sets about trying to understand why it is different peoples developed at different rates around the world. For example, why is it Europeans came to dominate the world instead of Africans, Asians, Americans, Australians, etc? The ultimate reasons turn out to be a combination of several biogeographic factors -- having nothing whatsoever to do with race. It covers an extremely broad range of topics, and essentially presents a complete history of mankind. I can't say how fascinating I found nearly every chapter of this impressive book! It is extremely readable.
• Third Chimpanzee
  This is Diamond's first book, I believe. It's a bit of a scatter-shot, but his purpose seems to be examining what exactly it is that makes us different from chimps, our closest living relative. It is stuffed full of absolutely fascinating discussions of everything from language to sex to genocide. I learned a phenomenal amount of cool random trivia from this book.

Stephen Jay Gould

• Full House
  This was not a good choice as a sole representative of Gould's works, but the bookstore didn't have much selection. He has a very forceful writing style, but damn is he long-winded! This book argued that statisticians need to be careful to consider movement of averages separately from changes in spreads or individual members of the sample; he illustrates his case with baseball statistics (why there are no more .400 hitters) and evolution's apparent (but misleading) trend toward complexity.
• Wonderful Life
  This was also very long-winded, and the subject matter promised to be extremely uninteresting. However Gould has such enthusiasm that he even made the taxonomy of obscure pseudo-arthropod lifeforms absolutely fascinating. He makes an extremely strong case against evolution being a directed process toward complexity or some vaguely described "higher life forms".

Douglas Hofstadter

• Godel, Escher, Bach
  I happen to particularly enjoy Bach, logic puzzles, and math -- all major topics of this broad interesting book -- so I thoroughly enjoyed every page of it (and there are lots of pages to enjoy). I might even go so far as to say it changed how I think a little. Specifically, this book was the kick I needed finally to understand Godel's famous theorem. (That's the one that essentially proves that you can't prove everything. It turns out to have many diverse interpretations and applications throughout science.)

John McWhorter

• Power of Babel
  This is an excellent lay-man's introduction to linguistics. It slowed down a bit toward the end, but he held me rapt most of the way through. He gives loads of fascinating examples of how pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, semantics, etc. change over time and during cultural upheaval.

Steven Pinker

• The Language Instinct
  This is a fascinating book that presents the theory that a good deal of the complexities of human language is hard-wired into the structure of our brain. He supports his theory with tons of fascinating experiments and linguistic evidence. I secretly love linguistics (despite being utterly inept at learning foreign languages myself), so this book fascinated me. I've heard derision of Steven Pinker from scientist friends as being a "pseudo-scientist", but I really don't see where it comes from.

Nassim Taleb

• Fooled by Randomness
  This was a passably interesting treatment of statistics that explains how most people have trouble separating luck from skill. A main point he tries to drive home (that every single reviewer has somehow missed) is that you need to control the downside risk while leaving yourself open for upside. That is, you've got to accept risk if you want anything in life, just make sure the worst case is tolerable.

Stephen Webb

• Where is Everybody
  This is a very broad fascinating survey of the nebulous field that addresses the question: is there extraterrestrial life? He presents a few dozen possible answers to the question and briefly analyzes their pros and cons.

Gary Zukav and David Finkelstein

• Dancing Wu Li Masters
  I've heard great things about this book but I just couldn't get into it. It's probably the curse of the exhausted ex-physicist...