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.
replyCan you name some works by the mentioned authors that might be called thought-provoking digests of some area of expertise?
Not really, that's kind of my point. A lot of pop non-fiction takes a few, minor commercial ideas that could be an essay and stretches them out into a book with a lot of fluff.
replyAcademic books will literally change the way you view the world in fundamental ways, they go beyond the digests you mention.