Here are 100 books that The Remarkable Life of the Skin fans have personally recommended if you like
The Remarkable Life of the Skin.
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I've been in love with biology since first playing with earthworms and marveling at the sprouting of radish seeds as a five-year-old. Further interest and curiosity led me to positions as nature counselor at summer camps and an eventual college degree in biology. Medical school was at times tedious, but the efficient, compact, durable mechanics of the musculoskeletal system totally engaged my interest. A residency in orthopedic surgery and a fellowship in hand surgery were natural follow-ons. My other passion is a love of teaching, taking a learner from where ever their understanding is presently and guiding them to what they need to know next. And they should have fun in the process.
Should bookstores shelve Gulp in the Humor section or the Science section? Both.
With her usual comedic and eclectic approach to her subject, Roach ranges and rages through our digestive system end to end. She mixes plenty of real science with quirky and unexpected diversions headlined by chapter titles such as "Dead Man’s Bloat and Other Tales from the History of Flatulence Research"; "Up Theirs, The Alimentary Canal as Criminal Accomplice"; and "Stuffed, The Science of Eating Yourself to Death".
"America's funniest science writer" (Washington Post) takes us down the hatch on an unforgettable tour. The alimentary canal is classic Mary Roach terrain: the questions explored in Gulp are as taboo, in their way, as the cadavers in Stiff and every bit as surreal as the universe of zero gravity explored in Packing for Mars. Why is crunchy food so appealing? Why is it so hard to find words for flavors and smells? Why doesn't the stomach digest itself? How much can you eat before your stomach bursts? Can constipation kill you? Did it kill Elvis? In Gulp we meet…
I've been in love with biology since first playing with earthworms and marveling at the sprouting of radish seeds as a five-year-old. Further interest and curiosity led me to positions as nature counselor at summer camps and an eventual college degree in biology. Medical school was at times tedious, but the efficient, compact, durable mechanics of the musculoskeletal system totally engaged my interest. A residency in orthopedic surgery and a fellowship in hand surgery were natural follow-ons. My other passion is a love of teaching, taking a learner from where ever their understanding is presently and guiding them to what they need to know next. And they should have fun in the process.
Any author who voluntarily has his nose packed and totally obstructed for over a week attracts my awe as one who is committed to walking the walk of his subject.
Nestor’s descriptions of this experience and the immense joy he encounters when his nasal airways were unblocked and his sense of smell restored sets the stage for an engaging tour through the science and art of a vital bodily function that we mostly ignore—respiration.
He posits that humans have been ignoring breath for centuries at our detriment and which accounts for sleep apnea, snoring, asthma, and autoimmune diseases. He poses means of relief. What a fresh breath.
THE PHENOMENAL INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER - OVER A MILLION COPIES SOLD WORLDWIDE
SHORTLISTED FOR THE ROYAL SOCIETY BOOK PRIZE
'Who would have thought something as simple as changing the way we breathe could be so revolutionary for our health, from snoring to allergies to immunity? A fascinating book, full of dazzling revelations' Dr Rangan Chatterjee
There is nothing more essential to our health and wellbeing than breathing: take air in, let it out, repeat 25,000 times a day. Yet, as a species, humans have lost the ability to breathe correctly, with grave consequences. In Breath, journalist James Nestor travels the world…
I've been in love with biology since first playing with earthworms and marveling at the sprouting of radish seeds as a five-year-old. Further interest and curiosity led me to positions as nature counselor at summer camps and an eventual college degree in biology. Medical school was at times tedious, but the efficient, compact, durable mechanics of the musculoskeletal system totally engaged my interest. A residency in orthopedic surgery and a fellowship in hand surgery were natural follow-ons. My other passion is a love of teaching, taking a learner from where ever their understanding is presently and guiding them to what they need to know next. And they should have fun in the process.
Now turning to the human body, Bryson continues his long tradition of combining loads of engaging, thoroughly researched information with ironic humor.
He dissects his subject system by system, starting with the normal structure and function of the skin and eventually moving to the “nether regions.” He follows with chapters on what can go wrong and what can go very wrong. Whereas other books focus on single systems, e.g., skeleton or gut, The Body is broader in its scope but understandably not so thorough.
For a single book to heighten a reader’s marvel and understanding of the human workings, this is the one.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Bill Bryson, bestselling author of A Short History of Nearly Everything, takes us on a head-to-toe tour of the marvel that is the human body—with a new afterword for this edition.
Bill Bryson once again proves himself to be an incomparable companion as he guides us through the human body—how it functions, its remarkable ability to heal itself, and (unfortunately) the ways it can fail. Full of extraordinary facts (your body made a million red blood cells since you started reading this) and irresistible Brysonesque anecdotes, The Body will lead you to a deeper understanding…
I've been in love with biology since first playing with earthworms and marveling at the sprouting of radish seeds as a five-year-old. Further interest and curiosity led me to positions as nature counselor at summer camps and an eventual college degree in biology. Medical school was at times tedious, but the efficient, compact, durable mechanics of the musculoskeletal system totally engaged my interest. A residency in orthopedic surgery and a fellowship in hand surgery were natural follow-ons. My other passion is a love of teaching, taking a learner from where ever their understanding is presently and guiding them to what they need to know next. And they should have fun in the process.
Since zoologist Bill Schutt previously wrote the very popular Cannibalism, A Perfectly Natural History, you might expect that his more recent expose of the heart would be equally wide-ranging, engaging, and touched with macabre. It is.
With clarity and wit, Schutt describes circulation from worms to bats to whales along with the curious adaptations that explain why frog hearts can freeze solid and resume function and why the blood of horseshoe crabs is favored by researchers. Schutt not only describes this living pump across the animal kingdom but also through time as philosophers and scientists have pondered, and eventually discovered, its true function.
If you have an interest in biology, history of science, or your own inner workings, Pump will make your heart throb.
"Fascinating . . . Surprising entertainment, combining deep learning with dad jokes . . . [Schutt] is a natural teacher with an easy way with metaphor.”—The Wall Street Journal
In this lively, unexpected look at the hearts of animals—from fish to bats to humans—American Museum of Natural History zoologist Bill Schutt tells an incredible story of evolution and scientific progress.
We join Schutt on a tour from the origins of circulation, still evident in microorganisms today, to the tiny hardworking pumps of worms, to the golf-cart-size hearts of blue whales. We visit beaches where horseshoe crabs are being harvested for…
Maia Haag is the president and co-founder of I See Me! Personalized Books & Gifts. She had the idea to write her own personalized children’s book while on maternity leave. She and her husband, who is a graphic designer, published My Very Own Name, which launched their company. Maia has written over ten engaging, uniquely personalized stories that make each child feel special. She’s even written a personalized book for dog lovers If My Dog Could Talk—based on her own family pet!
It’s more important than ever for young children to learn to value and celebrate what makes each of us unique and different. This personalized story teaches your child to value what makes him or her special. The story also teaches your child to love and appreciate the diversity that children across the world bring to make the world a vibrant place: different languages that we speak, hobbies that we have, various skin tones, different hairstyles, and different ways that we love other people.
I’ve been fascinated by the ancient Greeks and Romans since my teenage years. I was lucky to have inspiring teachers when I was an undergraduate. Spending a few months in Greece during my university years intensified my love of antiquity, and now I’m a professor who teaches Greek and Latin. One of the things that first drew me to the Greeks and Romans was the sophistication of their poetry, and that’s why I wrote this list.
Ovid is an expert on all kinds of love and doesn’t hesitate to tell you regularly about his expertise. His seduction tips are hopelessly absurd and often offensive. But what a talented poet he is!
I find the poems riveting even as I accept that his sensibilities are not mine. The poet tells us that he was exiled from Rome during the reign of the emperor Augustus, and I wonder what mischief lies behind this unfortunate experience.
This collection of Ovid's poems deals with the whole spectrum of sexual desire, ranging from deeply emotional declarations of eternal devotion to flippant arguments for promiscuity. In the Amores, Ovid addresses himself in a series of elegies to Corinna, his beautiful, elusive mistress. The intimate and vulnerable nature of the poet revealed in these early poems vanishes in the notorious Art of Love, in which he provides a knowing and witty guide to sexual conquest - a work whose alleged obscenity led to Ovid's banishment from Rome in AD 8. This volume also includes the Cures for Love, with instructions…
I’m a lecturer in medical humanities at the University of Leeds in England and I’m currently writing a book about the portrayal of traumatic pregnancy in fantastic literature (science fiction, horror, fantasy…). ‘Medical humanities’ is a field of study that looks at medical issues using the tools of the humanities, so it encompasses things like history of medicine, bioethics, and (my specialty) literature and medicine. Thinking about literature through the lens of traumatic pregnancy has led me to some fascinating, gory, and philosophical books, some of which I’m including on this list.
The unnamed protagonist of this book is a pregnant woman who has recently moved to the isolated Australian outback with her (pretty useless) husband. The couple have fled the city in part because of our narrator’s fear of a novel pandemic that is sweeping the land. As her pregnancy develops, skin cells replicating inside her body, the narrator fears that her fetus may harbour the virus.
This virus really speaks to my interest in difficult, gory pregnancies and births: cutis is an illness that causes the skin cells to hyperactively replicate, sealing over the body’s orifices and suffocating or starving its victims.
While this book has a Wicker Man-style horror of small-town life, I particularly appreciate the way that its dystopian setting reflects and distills the anxieties that many women really experience during pregnancy.
Sealed is a gripping modern fable on motherhood, a terrifying portrait of ordinary people under threat from their own bodies
Heavily pregnant Alice and her partner Pete are done with the city. Alice is haunted by rumors of a skin-sealing epidemic starting to infect the urban population. She hopes their new remote mountain house will offer safety, a place to forget the nightmares and start their family. But the mountains and their people hold a different kind of danger. With their relationship under intolerable pressure, violence erupts and Alice is faced with the unthinkable as she fights to protect her…
I chose to study creative nonfiction during my MFA program so I could learn what makes great memoirs work, but I first fell in love with the genre as a teenager, when I picked up Angela’s Ashes off my mom’s bedside table. I’m grateful for the way memoir gives me a window into the lives of people of other races, religions, abilities, experiences, and even other centuries.While my book The Place We Make isn’t only a memoir—it’s a blend of memoir and historical biography—it was my desire to both understand the view through my research subject’s eyes, and analyze how I was seeing the world myself, that drove me to write it.
I have been telling people about Girl in the Dark ever since I read it eight years ago. More than that—I feel like part of me has still been in Anna Lyndsey’s blackout-curtained room, with heavy tape sealing out every crack of light, ever since then.
I had never heard of her condition, which causes extremely painful sensitivity to the smallest amount of light. Lyndsey describes her physical symptoms with vivid detail, but it’s her attention to the psychological effects of being forced to withdraw from virtually all human society that makes this such a jaw-dropping read.
Haunting, lyrical, unforgettable, Girl in the Dark is a brave new memoir of a life without light.
Anna Lyndsey was young and ambitious and worked hard; she had just bought an apartment; she was falling in love. Then what started as a mild intolerance to certain kinds of artificial light developed into a severe sensitivity to all light. Now, at the worst times, Anna is forced to spend months on end in a blacked-out room, where she loses herself in audiobooks and elaborate word games in an attempt to ward off despair. During periods of relative remission, she can venture…
I’ve had a passion for crime/thriller/suspense/horror novels since high school, when I truly fell in love with reading. Specifically, during my junior year, when my English teacher, after having us read Catcher in the Ryeby J.D Salinger, then announced to the class that we were reading Stephen King the rest of the year. Up until that point I hated to read, but then after reading King—we read just about all of his novellas—I fell in love with the darker side of storytelling, and the macabre in general. Now when I consider buying a book, the darker the better! I hope you enjoy these reads as much as I did!
Why did I first pick it up? Because of the cover. Why did I buy it? Because of the story promised on the cover flap. And it was a French, international, multi-translated mega-hit. What happened after I read it? I hunted down the author’s next 2 books and bought them, because holy smokes, this one blew me away. The crime scenes in this novel left absolutely nothing to the imagination, and once the pages started turning there was no stopping this deadly suspense train. Plus, Commandant Camille Verhoeven is about as uniquely cool as a protagonist can get.
For Commandant Camille Verhoeven life is beautiful. He is happily married and soon to become a father.
HE'S ALWAYS ONE CHAPTER AHEAD
But his blissful existence is punctured by a murder of unprecedented savagery. When his team discovers that the killer has form - and each murder is a homage to a classic crime novel - the Parisian press are quick to coin a nickname . . . The Novelist.
HE HATES HAPPY ENDINGS
With the public eye fixed on both hunter and hunted, the case develops into a personal duel, each hell-bent on…
Growing up in a household with a large family, I recall times when it was difficult to find my voice, having to compete with multiple family members to be heard. Over the years, I developed a special compassion for children who may feel overlooked, or unseen, which also prompted my decision to become a children’s book author, catering to write empowering stories. So, I am especially passionate about this list of children’s stories that also helps to shape the trajectory of every child, by instilling in them early on their true value & infinite capabilities. ☺
This book was a very inspiring read. I adored the connections of friendship and teamwork, also the encouragement to step up and step out when necessary to be brave.
I loved the fact that it encourages you to discover your own true uniqueness, to go beyond your comfort zone, and to embrace the skin you're in.
Inspire your children to find their strength and grow their self-confidence!
While playing with her friends one day, Emily Hedgehog realizes that all of the other animals have such amazing talents. She feels like all she has is her prickly quills which are always getting in the way and hurting her friends.
When all of the animals find their friend Squirrel in a dangerous situation, they work together and use their strengths to save her, including Emily who quickly gains self-esteem when she discovers that her quills are actually her strength instead of her weakness.
