Really good recommendations in this thread so far.
The Mukherjee book is really good. I also like everything Atul Gawande writes, especially Better and Being Mortal. He’s an excellent writer about the intersection of medical policy, medical practice, and patient experience.
Some classic books:
If he hasn’t read it, Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was a seminal book for our generation (and the source of the phrase “paradigm shift”).
Fernand Braudel was the leading figure of the “Annales” movement in historical scholarship, focusing on economics, technology, and the lives of common people rather than on politics and wars. His most famous books are The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, and the three-volume Civilization and Capitalism 15th-18th Centuries, which is a history of the world over those 400 years and an attempt to understand the rise to dominance of Western Europe. These are really interesting books, and completely unlike most popular Anglo-American historical writing.
In terms of more conventional Anglo-American history writing about something other than Ango-American history, I think Jonathan Spence (writing about China, lots and lots of books) and Simon Schama (books about the French Revolution, Holland, and the history of the Jewish People) are excellent, engaging writers and top scholars as well.
Most of Claude Levi-Strauss’ work is impenetrable, but his early book Tristes Tropiques is easy to read narrative that presents the origins of many of his original and exciting ideas.
For someone who likes poetry, Helen Vendler’s books on Shakespeare’s sonnets or Keats’ Odes would be great.
Recently, I got into reading Icelandic sagas. They are 13th-14th century histories of events that took place in the several centuries before that, and they would be the origin of Western vernacular literature in prose if anyone outside of Iceland had read them at the time. Really engaging, fun, and unique. The two that are perpetually everyone’s favorites are Egil’s Saga and Njal’s Saga. (J.R.R. Tolkien was a leading scholar of the sagas.)
I haven’t read it, but people love Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel, which is another vast attempt to explain the dominance of Europe and East Asia.