The Man Who Shocked The World: The Life and Legacy of Stanley Milgram by Thomas Blass.

Stanley Milgram conceived and performed the infamous obedience experiments at Yale in the 1960s. He recruited people from New Haven and had them administer increasingly dangerous electric shocks to people who couldn't learn a simple word list. Almost two-thirds of the people were willing to essentially kill a stranger who did nothing wrong except mess up a word memorization test. As a Jew of European heritage, Milgram was using this experiment to show how so many Germans could be so willing to participate in the Holocaust. The electric shocks were fake, the victim was an actor screaming in pain. The subject was simply responding to the color of authority -- a person in a lab coat -- and Milgam set out to prove that blind obedience to authority could override personal morals in a majority of the population.

Milgram also codified the concept of "six degrees of separation" which has recently been proven to be a flawed concept. An interesting guy who tragically died very young at the age of 51 of a heart attack.