Ask HN: Thought-Provoking Books

If you want truly, truly heavy and thought-provoking you need to get away from brick-and-mortar bookstore, commercial, non-fiction, and get into work that's produced within and for academia.

For example, I've learned more from Anthony Giddens, Crawford Young, and Peter Berger in a handful of books than almost everything I've learned from pop books combined. The real stuff you want to read is in academia and fairly hidden from public view.

Not to argue, but your comment was also thought-provoking, thanks :) It seems like most works of academia are not provoking; rather, they are shaping. Many are written by specialists in the area who carefully choose what to state and suggest, and very often follow the structure of a big "thought" that is further explained and explored. Few pop books that might meet my criteria are basically digests, but fact-based ones. It's interesting that "Thinking, Fast and Slow" is a middle ground in some sense. Daniel Kahneman is definitely from academia, and in my opinion, he wrote a digest of what he touched on during his career, which was also thought-provoking for me, but not on a big scale.

Can you name some works by the mentioned authors that might be called thought-provoking digests of some area of expertise?