10 books like Parts

Julia Donaldson is the supremo of rhyming. I am certainly not the only writer she has inspired. All her books are really well crafted and the fact that she is a singer and very musical can be felt by reading her exemplary rhyme.  

I recommend this book, the first which made her name in this genre, because it has all the qualities of a best rhyming text. It tells a story to which children can relate, is never boring, and has an unerring and satisfying beat.

The Crayon Box that Talked begins with a young girl overhearing a box of crayons arguing in a toy store about how they don’t like each other for their differences. The little girl buys the box of crayons and when she gets home begins to color. As the crayons begin to blend together and create beautiful art, they begin to see that their differences are actually something to celebrate because they all contribute to the bigger picture. The message in this book is beautiful.

Snowmen at Night is such a creative tale about all of the fun and mischief snowmen get into when we are sleeping! It seems they slide away from our yards and gather together to play games, drink cocoa, ice skate, and sled. It explains why snowmen may look different from day to day. I also love the illustrations in this book, they really bring the story to life and there are even hidden images within the pages which are so much fun to find!

The Legend of Spookley the Square Pumpkin is a fun Halloween read, but more importantly a wonderful story that shows the importance of acceptance. Spookley is unlike any other pumpkin in the patch because he is square instead of round. At first, the other pumpkins tease Spookley and are unkind to him because he is different. After a storm blows in and Spookley saves the day, the other pumpkins realize it doesn’t matter what Spookley looks like, what matters is the kind of pumpkin he is and how he showed kindness to others.

St. John Paul II was also a brilliant philosopher and theologian. Here is his answer to errors of our modern age. Here is his antidote to the deconstruction and disintegration of the family, marriage, manhood, womanhood, and even sex, itself. I would list it higher, but it's not precisely about his life—though it is his greatest life's work. Like the falling of small stones that start an avalanche, this book is slowly restoring the world.  

Of the many good books about human evolution, Dan Lieberman’s is my favorite. A biologist and paleoanthropologist, Lieberman describes in clear, accessible prose the fossils that document our own origins, stressing function as inferred from fossils. Having recounted the story of our evolutionary origins, he goes on to explain its consequences – some good, some bad – for human health in the 21st century.

While the West was busy with postmodernism, the Soviet world cultivated social realism based on the 19th-century figurative tradition of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. East Germany was no exception with its own figurative tradition at Dresden Academy of Fine Arts. Gottfried Bammes was a professor of art there, and he further developed classical anatomy studies by introducing a more scientific approach. Illustrations in Der Nackte Mensch are precisely measured and reliable, and each of them introduces a new way to look at human anatomy. Concepts such as wire-framing and splitting organic form into geometric shapes appear here. This book is full of ideas, and it has been a huge influence on how I perceive human anatomy. Gottfried Bammes is, in my opinion, the greatest anatomist of the 20th century!

Jack Hartnell anatomises the Middle Ages in a very real sense: the book is divided up into parts of the body. It is a brilliant and innovative approach, allowing him to bring together the history of medicine, artistic objects, political thought, cartography, metaphor, and the medieval imagination, among other things. Importantly, he looks far beyond Western Europe, so the book also includes Jewish and Islamic approaches to the body, explores the Byzantine world, and analyses objects and ideas from, for instance, North Africa and the Middle East. The book focuses on the Mediterranean world in its broadest sense, ranging widely across sources and disciplines but staying rooted in the question of how medieval people thought about and experienced their bodies. As you might expect from an art historian, he has lavishly illustrated the book, and it gives readers a great sense of the beauty and weirdness of the art and… show more.

With both humor and scientific precision, Ed Yong takes us through the microscope lens into the world of microbes and microbiology that share our world and, in some cases, our bodies. Yong's book connects those worlds to show our interdependence. His book provides ample evidence that while disease-causing microbes grab most of the headlines, many others in the microbiome are essential allies for a healthy life and are critical to advancements in biotechnology.

This entire Magic School Bus series has also been a favorite of ours with our kids. I love the way that the bus goes inside of the human body and gets up close and personal with the cells of the human body. I remember thinking about how it made the difficult-to-see and -imagine immune system easy to picture in the mind of the reader.