It's hard to pick a favorite - everyone brings their own perspective to their time. One of my early favorites was 'A Jew Who Stood Guard for Hitler'[1], the account of a kid who joined the Nazis for a while - till they found out he was Jewish and kicked him out. Ah, the naivety of youth.
"Build Your Own Metal Working Shop From Scrap" by David Gingery which covers everything from building a foundry to making all your tools from first principles using nothing but river sand and junk metal for smelting.
"On Trails" by Robert Moore that discusses how walking paths from the first peoples persist, grow and change over hundreds of years, along with advances in walking trail design in recent years to become a part time recreational activity vs the pure utility of terrain traversal as they first were. Covers how a trail is a "living thing", as it were, because any who tread on it help reinforce it. Covers non human trails like ants and their reenforcement via pheromones and the like.
To continue this discussion and to tie it into the original link, worth looking at this YouTube Video where "Jon Pike interviews Quentin Skinner about Thomas Hobbes' masterpiece Leviathan"...
