Non-SF/F Books for SF/F Writers

This thread is to suggest books that, while not in the SF/F genre, are good idea fodder for SF/F writers. Books that spark inspiration, basically. Most of my examples are (at least nominally) non-fiction, but they don't have to be.

My suggestions:

UFO's, Conspiracies, and Other Esoterica
I don't believe in this stuff myself, but I find it a great area to mine for plot ideas.

John Keel, The Mothman Prophecies. Much, much better then the movie, and I liked the movie. This would have won awards if it had been published as fiction.

Nick Cook, The Hunt for Zero Point. On the history of antigravity.

Atompunk

Spencer Weart, Nuclear Fear / Rise of Nuclear Fear. On the history of the public perception of nuclear energy, from the discovery of radiation to the present. There are two editions: Nuclear Fear was published in the '80s; Rise of Nuclear Fear is an abridged, updated version published last year. Both are excellent, though Rise is more accessible.

Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon. A popular history of the Cold War nuclear strategists.

Edward Zuckerman, The Day After World War III. Written in the '80s, a popular account of the US government's Continuity-of-Government efforts - basically, their plans for how to survive the apocalypse.

Another suggestion: The Year 2000 by Herman Kahn and Anthony Wiener. Published in the early '70s, it's a classic work of future speculation. There are a couple of chapters that are just long tables of economic performance predictions, which can profitably be skipped, but the rest of it is philosophizing about how society will develop. This is not stereotypical "flying car and a moon base" early Cold War futurism; they're talking about stuff like "how will society adapt to increasing automation?" and "what will be the impact of high-capacity global telecommunications?" They actually got some stuff surprisingly right, and even what they got wrong is fascinating.

I'd like to bump this to suggest The Image of the Future by Fredrick Polak. Tough to find these days, and very dense - it's two volumes of 500 pages each - but quite fascinating: it's a history of Western beliefs about the future, and how those beliefs have influenced history, from the days of Israel and Greece to 1960 (when it was written). Not a perfect work, by any means - in particular, it's explicitly limited to "the West" and its antecedent cultures - but still full of interesting stuff.