100 books like Natural Obsessions

This book concerns a group of young firefighters known as smokejumpers and the catastrophic Mann Gulch Forest Fire in Montana in 1949. 

Maclean was from the community and worked in the US Forest Service before he became a professor and eventually an author who spent years researching the event. You learn about the physics of forest fires, the invention of the first "escape fire," how multiple and cascading errors can lead to a disastrous outcome, and about the lives and heroics of a group of firefighters.

Interestingly, it is all seen through the journey of a man trying to understand a captivating event from his past. This book falls pretty squarely in the non-fiction category, but has multiple stories interwoven with the facts. It helps that Maclean was not only an author of many nonfiction articles, but also the author of the highly successful novel (and movie) A River Runs… show more.

I love Sack’s empathy toward his patients and his commitment to telling a different and highly unique narrative about the human experience. His classic collection of essays is not about intelligence, but each patient he writes about knows and understands the world differently than what is considered normal.

Sacks makes room for the challenges and brilliance of all ways of being in the world.

This is a fascinating and compelling journey through the most neglected and significant public health innovation since vaccines and nutritional guidelines, the modern toilet.

Author Chelsea Flanagan takes us on a wild ride through the history of this neglected and highly significant home appliance, including contemporary efforts to make toilets more environmentally friendly and even less expensive. Relatively inexpensive, safe sewage saves millions of lives a year, more than all our modern medicines combined.

A stunning biography of a brilliant mathematician, John Forbes Nash, and his descent and resurrection from madness, that became a hit movie.

Nasar makes both the mathematics and the personality of an early, unusual and important game theorist come alive for even the most math-adverse reader. This is an unusual account of recovery, of a mind apprehending the world of human competition, and a poetical love and coming-of-age story.

Cheating takes place in all organisms at all levels.

This book takes readers to cheating at the cell level, particularly cancer cells. It demonstrates to readers how cancer cells take the path of going rogue, refusing to die as they are preprogramed.

In light of this, fighting cancer is essentially fighting cells that defy their fate by cheating. This introduces a fresh strategy for tackling cancer.

You don’t often get philosophers delving into the biomedical sciences. They mostly prefer physics and cosmology. But there are great pickings in the other sciences too! 

Laplane considers the various proposed attributes of stem cells and classifies these as categorical, dispositional, relational, and system-based. She concludes that stem cells do comprise a "natural kind" i.e. a real thing, out there, not just a figment of our imagination. What emerges from this critical evaluation is that we should think not about stem cells as such but about stem-type behaviors that may be shown by various cell populations in specific circumstances. Defining stem cells is slippery and difficult, but defining stem cell behavior is relatively easy, and stem cell behavior is real and important.

I really enjoyed this book and have found it a wonderful reference, mapping the history of the quest for trying to figure out how biological information is stored (in the form of DNA in chromosomes), and how biological information flows from DNA to RNA to proteins.

The book is long and exhaustive, but it’s one of my favorites!

Although lacking the name recognition of an Einstein, Watson, or Salk, French microbiologist Francois Jacob was one of the most important scientists of the 20th century.

Together with Jacques Monod, his close collaborator, Jacob figured out how genes are regulated, a discovery that underlies all molecular biology. Jacob came to science late in life, after his dreams of becoming a physician were crushed by injuries suffered during World War II.

In this autobiographical blend of scientific and personal discovery, he takes us through his journey as a damaged soldier, fraught human, and brilliant researcher.

This biography brings fully to life the multi-faceted Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger. Although best known as the co-inventor of quantum mechanics, he later wrote a book called What is Life which inspired many physicists to apply their talents to biology. Moore gives a full account of Schrödinger’s upbringing, his education, his science, and his extensive philosophical writings. You can judge for yourself if Moore is persuasive when he argues that the erotic intensity of several of Schrödinger’s extramarital affairs helped fuel and found expression in some of his specific scientific achievements. 

James Watson was a clever, pushy, and critical young American molecular biologist exposed to the scientific culture of Britain in the early 1950s.

The book is full of acerbic comments about “stuffy” Cambridge dons and the rules of etiquette that young Jim struggled with, all the while scheming to maintain the various fellowships that allowed him to remain in the UK and pursue his ambition: to understand the chemical nature of the genetic material, DNA.

The book provides a lively account of his collaboration with an older Brit, the brilliant Francis Crick, who was also trying to unscramble DNA. Much of the technical stuff will be incomprehensible to most, but the method the two followed is clear. The partnership was hugely fruitful and the book is a lively account of how science actually works.

Watson and Crick tried everything while coping with competitors and their criticisms as well as their… show more.