Here are 100 books that The Story of the Human Body fans have personally recommended if you like
The Story of the Human Body.
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I’ve been mad about dinosaurs and ancient life since I was seven. I have been amazingly lucky to be able to develop a career as a professional palaeontologist and to be able to research and talk about the subject. We were first to show the original colours of dinosaur feathers, and this discovery provides a perfect way to open the discussion about how palaeontologists know what they say they know. In my books, I seek to amaze, amuse and inform. I have written many books, including pop science, textbooks, technical-scientific works, and books for children, and every year brings new discoveries to be transmitted to the world.
The best seller of all time, a lively romp through dinosaur research (and researchers).
This is for all readers, and you’ll be hooked by the lively, pacy text by Steve, as he hurtles from continent to continent, digging up bones from China to Poland, working on Tyrannosaurus rex and other great beasts in the basements of the world’s museums, and sharing with readers what it’s like to be a working paleontologist.
For aspiring young bone-diggers, this is an inspiration, although it’s not like this all the time: paleontologists also sometimes have to mark student essays and fight with university systems to get their field trip costs refunded!
The Times Science Book of the Year. A Sunday Times Bestseller.
66 million years ago the dinosaurs were wiped from the face of the earth. Today, Dr. Steve Brusatte, one of the leading scientists of a new generation of dinosaur hunters, armed with cutting edge technology, is piecing together the complete story of how the dinosaurs ruled the earth for 150 million years.
The world of the dinosaurs has fascinated on book and screen for decades - from early science fiction classics like The Lost World, to Godzilla terrorizing the streets of Tokyo, and the monsters of Jurassic Park. But…
Age Like a Yogi explores spiritual awakening yoga-style and the fundamentals of yoga’s sister science, ayurveda, for care of the body. Only one of its 40 chapters is devoted to asana practice––downward dogs and the like––while the rest explores the richness of a yogic lifestyle and worldview. This starts with…
I didn’t know anything at all about meteorites (or, really, space in general) until I took a cosmochemistry class during my first semester of a PhD program in geology. As soon as I learned that meteorites captured information about the start of the Solar System – the material we started with, hints about how planets evolve, and how meteorites changed the course of Earth – I was hooked. At the end of that class in 2007, I switched the main topic of my PhD research to studying meteorites and what they can tell us about the past, and I have been doing it ever since.
Like many folks, I am fascinated with the “where we came from” question. And for me, this is the quintessential book to dive into this topic from an evolutionary biology perspective.
Correct or not, I fancy myself someone that knows a decent amount about evolution and the human body, but I was captivated by the parts of the human body that have endured, for good or for bad, the long journey of us crawling out of the ocean and eventually into the office cubicle.
This book isn’t as laugh-out-loud funny as some others I generally like, but it really is a great book, and I had a hard time putting it down.
The paleontologist and professor of anatomy who co-discovered Tiktaalik, the “fish with hands,” tells a “compelling scientific adventure story that will change forever how you understand what it means to be human” (Oliver Sacks).
By examining fossils and DNA, he shows us that our hands actually resemble fish fins, our heads are organized like long-extinct jawless fish, and major parts of our genomes look and function like those of worms and bacteria. Your Inner Fish makes us look at ourselves and our world in an illuminating new light. This is science writing at its finest—enlightening, accessible and told with irresistible…
I am a scientist who has worked at the coal face of the debate around the origin of animals and ‘Snowball Earth’ his entire career, using a combination of experimental and descriptive science. Over three decades, I have witnessed first-hand how careful attention to detail in study after study has removed doubt from once provocative, even crazy, ideas that are now widely accepted. I love reading popular science from the perspective of the hands-on scientist who has witnessed the debate first-hand and contributed to received knowledge by conceiving new experiments, amassing data, and, more than often, in entirely unexpected ways through sheer curiosity.
I love this book because of the author’s infectious passion for fossils and geology.
The book reads like a detective story, with the innermost secrets of long-extinct animal groups unveiled bit by bit by a master of forensic paleontology.
When I was an undergraduate student over 40 years ago, Richard showed us behind the scenes at the Natural History Museum in London. What I remember most was him describing how long it took his team to reveal just one trilobite eye. Only after many months of painstaking attention to detail were they finally able to work out how a trilobite saw the world 500 million years ago.
With Trilobite, Richard Fortey, paleontologist and author of the acclaimed Life, offers a marvelously written, smart and compelling, accessible and witty scientific narrative of the most ubiquitous of fossil creatures.
Trilobites were shelled animals that lived in the oceans over five hundred million years ago. As bewilderingly diverse then as the beetle is today, they survived in the arctic or the tropics, were spiky or smooth, were large as lobsters or small as fleas. And because they flourished for three hundred million years, they can be used to glimpse a less evolved world of ancient continents and vanished oceans. Erudite…
The Beatles are widely regarded as the foremost and most influential music band in history and their career has been the subject of many biographies. Yet the band's historical significance has not received sustained academic treatment to date. In The Beatles and the 1960s, Kenneth L. Campbell uses The…
An acclaimed scientist, teacher, and writer, Andrew Knoll has travelled the world for decades, investigating ancient rocks to understand the intertwined histories of our planet and the life it supports. His boyhood thrill at discovering fossils has never deserted him. It continues to motivate him to explore topics that range from the earliest records of life and the emergence of an oxygen-rich atmosphere; the diversification of both plants and animals, and the intricacies of mass extinctions, past and present. He has also participated in NASA’s exploration of Mars.
It’s one thing to appreciate that fossils record the history of life, but something else altogether to understand how we came to know that. Rudwick’s classic book recounts the discoveries, large and small, that over centuries revealed fossils to be remnants of lost worlds. An exceptional exercise in the history of science. The Meaning of Fossils is required reading for students of paleontology.
"It is not often that a work can literally rewrite a person's view of a subject. And this is exactly what Rudwick's book should do for many paleontologists' view of the history of their own field."-Stephen J. Gould, Paleobotany and Palynology
"Rudwick has not merely written the first book-length history of palaeontology in the English language; he has written a very intelligent one. . . . His accounts of sources are rounded and organic: he treats the structure of arguments as Cuvier handled fossil bones."-Roy S. Porter, History of Science
I am an award-winning children’s picture book author who writes stories about obstacles children encounter, focusing on the emotional and mental health of the character so children facing similar situations are able to relate. I have been writing poems and short stories since I was a child and all of my stories are written in rhyme. I love reading a rhyming book out loud and listening to the story unfold.
Parts is a hilarious and fun tale about a boy who thinks he is falling apart. After his toes start peeling, his tooth falls out, and he finds fuzz in his belly button, he thinks he will most likely have to be held together by duct tape. As the story unfolds, the boy’s parents realize they never told him all of these things are normal and soothe his worries. The rhyming scheme of this book is incredible and the illustrations capture the fun-loving nature of the message.
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I just don't know what's going onOr why it has to beBut every day it's something worseWhat's happening to me?So begins this uproarious new story from the best-selling creator of No Jumping on the Bed!,Green Wilma, and other popular books. The young narrator has discovered a disturbing trend: There's fuzz in his belly button his toes are peeling and something just fell out of his nose. The last straw is a loose tooth, which convinces him of the awful truth his parts are coming unglued!Parts deals with a subject of deepest interest to every young child: the stuff our bodies…
My interest in medieval history comes from a love of language. My favourite Old English word is wordhord, which refers to a poet’s mental stockpile of words and phrases. My word hoarding (and sharing) started with tweeting the Old English word of the day in 2013. This spread to other social media platforms, a blog, an app, and now two books. I have a PhD in English from King’s College London (my thesis was on blood in Old English, even though blood actually makes me squeamish). I enjoy histories that make me think about the past from a different perspective.
This book is filled with fascinating facts about medieval medicine, surgery, humoural theory, disease, and diagnosis. But what is surprising is how many other aspects of the Middle Ages are covered through the theme of bodies.
We learn about strange creatures like blemmyae (who have no heads and faces in their chests) and cynocephali (dog-headed people), saints and relics, race relations and politics, manuscript manufacture, religion, literature, travel, eating habits, love, sexuality, and gender identity.
I love how the chapters are organized by body part, from head to feet, a clever approach I have never seen in a history book before. Hartnell demonstrates how the medieval past is "an uncanny place at once startlingly different from and strangely familiar to our own."
Just like us, medieval men and women worried about growing old, got blisters and indigestion, fell in love, and had children. And yet their lives were full of miraculous and richly metaphorical experiences radically different from our own, unfolding in a world where deadly wounds might be healed overnight by divine intervention, or where the heart of a king, plucked from his corpse, could be held aloft as a powerful symbol of political rule.
In this richly illustrated and unusual history, Jack Hartnell uncovers the fascinating ways in which people thought about, explored, and experienced their physical selves in the…
Discover the ultimate guide to taking on adulthood with body confidence. In a world where body satisfaction plummets during adolescence, and a global pandemic and social media frenzy have created extra pressure, Adultish: The Body Image Book for Life is a survival kit for young adults. This all-inclusive book provides…
Ever since I traveled to Ethiopia as a child and saw its forms of Christianity, I’ve been fascinated with the ways that a religion that seems to be “pure” and ethereal actually gets mixed with folk traditions. I came to specialize in the ways that Egyptian Christianity became Egyptian. But I have also noted this phenomenon throughout religions: Buddhism, Judaism, and Islam all assimilated themselves to particular regions and village expressions. This dynamic exchange between the “great tradition” and resilient local traditions is fascinating to trace even today when many leaders claim that nothing exists except for pure religious teaching. But historians of religions know that every religion is constantly “syncretizing.”
Where most people imagine Christian belief and experience as something that takes place in the heart and mind, Cox Miller looks at the many ways that early Christianity worked through the senses.
Touch and taste, the visual experience of spectacle and image, the scents of churches and tombs, and the powerful presence of material “things” like relics all rendered Christianity a religion of physical experience more than mindful faith.
With few exceptions, the scholarship on religion in late antiquity has emphasized its tendencies toward transcendence, abstraction, and spirit at the expense of matter. In The Corporeal Imagination, Patricia Cox Miller argues instead that ancient Christianity took a material turn between the fourth and seventh centuries. During this period, Miller contends, there occurred a major shift in the ways in which the human being was oriented in relation to the divine, a shift that reconfigured the relationship between materiality and meaning in a positive direction.
The Corporeal Imagination is a groundbreaking investigation into the theological poetics of material substance in…
Microbial ecologists once had the luxury of no one caring about their work. My colleagues and I had been busy showing that there are more microbes than stars in the Universe, that the genetic diversity of bacteria and viruses is mind-boggling, and that microbes run nearly all reactions in the carbon cycle and other cycles that underpin life on the planet. Then came the heat waves, wildfires, droughts and floods, and other unignorable signs of climate change. Now everyone should care about microbes to appreciate the whole story of greenhouse gases and to understand how the future of the biosphere depends on the response of the smallest organisms.
The multitudes of this book are not the ones envisioned by Walt Whitman. Rather, they are bacteria, viruses, protozoa, and other microbes that each of us carries. The human body is more microbial than human, with bacteria alone outnumbering human cells by almost 10 times.
As Yong puts it, “We cannot fully understand the lives of animals without understanding our microbes and our symbioses with them.” Not just the lives of animals, but of plants too, as this book makes clear.
With advanced degrees in biochemistry and an award-winning stint as a writer at The Atlantic, Yong has the chops to get the science right and the skills of a journalist to weave the science and sketches of scientists together into compelling stories. The book’s subtitle is a nod to Darwin (“There is grandeur in this view of life”) and gets at the big-picture perspective gained by looking at…
THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER FROM THE WINNER OF THE 2021 PULITZER PRIZE
Your body is teeming with tens of trillions of microbes. It's an entire world, a colony full of life.
In other words, you contain multitudes.
They sculpt our organs, protect us from diseases, guide our behaviour, and bombard us with their genes. They also hold the key to understanding all life on earth.
In I Contain Multitudes, Ed Yong opens our eyes and invites us to marvel at ourselves and other animals in a new light, less as individuals and more as thriving ecosystems.
I’m a traditional sculptor with more than 25 years of experience. Being a dyslectic student in the 2000s, I developed a systematic approach to translating medical anatomy texts into visual information that I could use while sculpting. All the anatomy books for artists at the time were text-centered. My reference sketches became quite popular among colleagues. It was clear that visual artists perceive information best when it’s visual, and that is how I got the idea for my first book. Now the Anatomy for Sculptors handbooks are bestsellers among visual artists striving to better understand the human form.
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!
Gottfried Bamme - The naked man. Hand and textbook of anatomy for artists VEB Verlag of Art | 1982 | ISBN: 3364000166 | German | 480 pages Shown with special reference of their own tasks, objectives and methodological problems. With around 840 individual anatomical drawings by the author, over 120 examples of masterpieces of the fine arts, model 190 single shots and many students work.
Over the past 50 years, scientists have made incredible progress in the application of genetic research to human health care and disease treatment. Innovative tools and techniques, including gene therapy and CRISPR-Cas9 editing, can treat inherited disorders that were previously untreatable, or prevent them from happening in the first place.…
Scott L. Smith, Jr. is a Catholic author, attorney, and theologian. He is the author of Pray the Rosary with Saint John Paul II, the St. Joseph Consecration for Children and Families, along with Fr. Donald Calloway, a new translation of St. Louis de Montfort's Total Consecration to Jesus through Mary. He contributes regularly to his blog, The Scott Smith Blog, and is the co-host of the Catholic Nerds podcast.
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.
A new critical translation of Pope John Paul II's talks on the Theology of the Body by the internationally renowned biblical scholar Michael Waldstein. With meticulous scholarship and profound insight, Waldstein presents John Paul II's magnificent vision of the human person. Includes a preface by Cardinal Schönborn, a foreword by Christopher West, a comprehensive index of words and phrases, a scriptural index, and a reference table for other versions of the papal texts. Recipient of a CPA Award!
