Here are 100 books that Virology fans have personally recommended if you like
Virology.
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I'm a queer author based in Montreal. When I came out in the early 1990s, at the age of 21, I remember feeling concerned about my future. Family has always been important to me, but I couldn’t imagine what mine would look like as I got older. I knew I wasn't going to have a traditional family like my parents, but I didn’t know what else was possible. Thankfully, I found the answer in books… As queer people, we must seek out and learn our traditions and history. We’re not taught them from birth. Finding books that demonstrate and uplift the bonds that queer people share provides a roadmap for those of us seeking community.
Many books that tackle the AIDS crisis tend to focus on queer meccas like New York City and San Francisco, but Makkai’s The Great Believers illustrate just how hard the virus hit Chicago.
Jumping back and forth between 1985 and 2005, the book follows a close group of gay men and their straight allies as their communities begin to come under attack. In 1985, Yale Tishman is on the verge of great professional success just as his dreams begin to slip through his fingers.
Meanwhile in 2005, Yale’s friend Fiona Marcus finds herself looking for her runaway daughter in the streets of Paris, while also coming to terms with what she had to give up to care for these men. A masterful book.
PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST A NEW YORK TIMES TOP 10 BOOK OF 2018 LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE WINNER ALA CARNEGIE MEDAL WINNER THE STONEWALL BOOK AWARD WINNER
Soon to Be a Major Television Event, optioned by Amy Poehler
"A page turner . . . An absorbing and emotionally riveting story about what it's like to live during times of crisis." -The New York Times Book Review
A dazzling novel of friendship and redemption in the face of tragedy and loss set in 1980s Chicago and contemporary Paris
In 1985, Yale Tishman, the development director for an…
Amidst COVID-19, HIV/AIDS is a touchpoint for journalists, scholars, writers, and a public who seek a usable past in understanding the present and making an uncertain future less so. The challenge of how to love, live, and survive amidst pandemics isn't new, I play here on the title of one of the first safer sex books,How to Have Sex in an Epidemic. As someone who studies how activists document their work and how they bring those materials to life today, I'm both fascinated and troubled by pandemic comparisons. These books offer crucial stories and productive tools to think with as we navigate questions of how to survive, and maybe even thrive amidst intersecting pandemics.
One of the best academic books written at convergence of the HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 pandemics isThe Virus Touch.
Here, Bishnupriya Ghosh showcases how “epidemic media” inform how epidemics are understood and experienced—making this text so relevant right now. She looks at how media—images, numbers, and digital models—whether generated by scientists, artists, or activists enable us to see and understand viruses and bear witness to their effects in new ways.
What is unique about Ghosh’s scholarship is how looks to the environment to study health which illustrates the complex and tangled relationships between epidemics, humans, animals, and media. Ghosh’s rich examples, ranging from modelling viruses to reading test results to tracking infection rates and mortality numbers, ensure that Virus Touch speaks to diverse readers.
In The Virus Touch Bishnupriya Ghosh argues that media are central to understanding emergent relations between viruses, humans, and nonhuman life. Writing in the shadow of the HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 global pandemics, Ghosh theorizes "epidemic media" to show how epidemics are mediated in images, numbers, and movements through the processes of reading test results and tracking infection and mortality rates. Scientific, artistic, and activist epidemic media that make multispecies relations sensible and manageable eschew anthropocentric survival strategies and instead recast global public health crises as biological, social, and ecological catastrophes, pushing us toward a multispecies politics of health. Ghosh trains…
Amidst COVID-19, HIV/AIDS is a touchpoint for journalists, scholars, writers, and a public who seek a usable past in understanding the present and making an uncertain future less so. The challenge of how to love, live, and survive amidst pandemics isn't new, I play here on the title of one of the first safer sex books,How to Have Sex in an Epidemic. As someone who studies how activists document their work and how they bring those materials to life today, I'm both fascinated and troubled by pandemic comparisons. These books offer crucial stories and productive tools to think with as we navigate questions of how to survive, and maybe even thrive amidst intersecting pandemics.
Marty Fink’s book is one of the best examples of recent and groundbreaking scholarship on HIV/AIDS.
Fink examines HIV/AIDS histories through critical disability studies discourse to show in a compelling and very readable way how queer and trans people in the 1980s and early 1990s came together to take care of each other when faced with stark and far-reaching state violence.
This book has deep contemporary relevance showing how multifaceted HIV care-giving narratives continue to inform how individuals and our wider society makes sense of gender, disability, and kinship.
Such work is essential in this political moment where we are seeing ever-more challenges to bodily self-determination, for women, queer and, especially for trans people.
Finalist for the LGBTQ Nonfiction Award from Lambda Literary
Queers and trans people in the 1980s and early ‘90s were dying of AIDS and the government failed to care. Lovers, strangers, artists, and community activists came together take care of each other in the face of state violence. In revisiting these histories alongside ongoing queer and trans movements, this book uncovers how early HIV care-giving narratives actually shape how we continue to understand our genders and our disabilities. The queer and trans care-giving kinships that formed in response to HIV continue to inspire how we have sex and build chosen…
Amidst COVID-19, HIV/AIDS is a touchpoint for journalists, scholars, writers, and a public who seek a usable past in understanding the present and making an uncertain future less so. The challenge of how to love, live, and survive amidst pandemics isn't new, I play here on the title of one of the first safer sex books,How to Have Sex in an Epidemic. As someone who studies how activists document their work and how they bring those materials to life today, I'm both fascinated and troubled by pandemic comparisons. These books offer crucial stories and productive tools to think with as we navigate questions of how to survive, and maybe even thrive amidst intersecting pandemics.
In We Are Having This Conversation Now, Alexandra Juhasz and Theodore Kerr blow up the conventions of academic work on epidemics.
In a series of thirteen short dialogues they reflect as activists, media-makers, and scholars on the history, present, and future of AIDS. The reflections on AIDS-related culture and conversation they share, will spark for readers critical questions about how personal experiences, community, cultural production, and interpersonal relations come together.
Doing this kind of reflective work is particularly important now, as we need to begin to understand not only HIV/AIDS, but how it impacts the experience of living amidst other viral pandemics including COVID-19.
We Are Having This Conversation Now offers a history, present, and future of AIDS through thirteen short conversations between Alexandra Juhasz and Theodore Kerr, scholars deeply embedded in HIV responses. They establish multiple timelines of the epidemic, offering six foundational periodizations of AIDS culture, tracing how attention to the crisis has waxed and waned from the 1980s to the present. They begin the book with a 1990 educational video produced by a Black health collective, using it to consider organizing intersectionally, theories of videotape, empowerment movements, and memorialization. This video is one of many powerful yet overlooked objects that the…
Although I come from a family with a number of medical professionals, I am not one myself. My interest in medical thrillers is a three-strand braid that combines my learning and experiences in the fields of sociology, literature, and storytelling. Horrific as the stories on this list are, they share both a hopefulness that mankind is capable of overcoming whatever challenge nature presents, or they themselves conjure and a warning to get ourselves right before the next one comes along. At a time when it is tempting to despair over the human condition, I hope these books inspire your faith in mankind’s resourcefulness and ability to endure.
The most recently published on my list of medical thrillers is The Desperate Hours, which is an account from the front lines of the COVID-19 epidemic as it ravaged New York City.
This one is especially meaningful for me because my pathologist brother, Kevin, was living and working in the midst of the chaos the epidemic caused. Even more poignant for me is the fact that he is quoted in the book.
It is a harrowing account of the tragic reality of that period which, I’m afraid, too many are failing to heed its warning of the potential for even worse future plagues.
In the spring of 2020, COVID-19 arrived in New York City.
Before long, America's largest metropolis was at war against a virus that mercilessly swept through its five boroughs. It became apparent that if Covid wasn't somehow halted, the death count in New York alone would be in the hundreds of thousands. And if New York's hospitals failed, what chance did the rest of the country have?
In The Desperate Hours, award-winning journalist Marie Brenner, having been granted unprecedented 18-month access to the entire New York-Presbyterian hospital system, tells the story of the doctors, nurses, residents, researchers, and suppliers who…
I’m a philosopher fascinated by science and its relationship to society, who science benefits and who it harms; why scientists get some things right and some things wrong; and which scientific results make their way into the physician’s office, the courtroom, and the school textbook. Science impacts all facets of our lives: our health, our relationships with others, and our understanding of our place in our community and in the universe. I’ve spent decades investigating this relationship between science and society; these are some of the books I’ve found most influential in thinking about how we, as humans, impact the environment around us, which in turn circles back and impacts us.
The United States spends far more on healthcare than any other wealthy nation; and yet, on basic measures of health, infant mortality; life expectancy; and rates of chronic illness, Americans have some of the worst outcomes. Why?
In his book, Sandro Galea answers that question. The problem, he shows, is that the nation invests enormous amounts of money in the treatment and search for cures for diseases after those health conditions are already quite advanced, which is both extremely expensive and limited in efficacy.
Meanwhile, the nation invests relatively little in fostering a healthy environment, giving people free and easy access to preventive healthcare; providing economic security; ensuring children have nutritious diets; and prioritizing the cleanliness of air and drinking water.
This book shows how that is a formula for making people sick and then throwing money at the problem after it’s too late to help those most in need.
In WELL, physician Sandro Galea examines what Americans miss when they fixate on healthcare: health.
Americans spend more money on health than people anywhere else in the world. And what do they get for it? Statistically, not much. Americans today live shorter, less healthy lives than citizens of other rich countries, and these trends show no signs of letting up.
The problem, physician Sandro Galea argues, is that Americans focus on the wrong things when they think about health. Our national understanding of what constitutes "being well" is centered on medicine -- the lifestyles we adopt to stay healthy, the…
As an award-winning author of nonfiction books for kids, I’m passionate about discovering titles by other authors that introduce a topic innovatively and engagingly. I obtained a B.S. in Biology, with an emphasis in Ecology, from the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. I received the 2023 Stephen Fraser Encouragement Award and a 2023 finalist for the Russel Freedman Award. I feel that it’s important to plant seeds of curiosity and encourage children to look at the world around them through a different lens. I love reading books that present complicated ideas in a way that young readers (and adults!) can understand.
I was hooked (pun intended) after reading only a few pages of this book! It tells the story of the hookworm, a parasite that caused thousands of Americans living in the South to become deathly ill in the late 1800s, and the efforts of scientists to educate those individuals in order to prevent even more from becoming sick.
The photographs of real people infected with hookworms allowed me to connect even deeper to the story.
Included on NPR's 2022 "Books We Love" List Finalist, 2023 YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction ALSC Notable Children's Book
What made workers in the American South so tired and feeble during the 19th and early 20th centuries? This exciting medical mystery uncovers the secrets of the parasite hookworm, commonly known as the “American Murderer,” and is the latest title in Gail Jarrow’s (YALSA Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults award-winning author) Medical Fiascoes series.
Imagine microscopic worms living in the soil. They enter your body through your bare feet, travel to your intestines, and stay there for years sucking…
I am now considered by many as the expert on creating allergy-free and allergy-friendly gardens and landscapes. I have lectured on the subject all across the US and Canada, and also in Israel, Ireland, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia. For 30+ years now I’ve been researching the connections between urban landscaping and allergies and asthma. My articles have appeared in dozens of fine publications, including The New York Times, The London Times, The Guardian, The Los Angeles Times, Atlas Obscura, Scientific American, Der Spiegel, and The New Scientist. I have owned two nurseries and taught horticulture for twenty years.
Edited by Matilda van den Bosch and William Bird, Nature and Public Health. Each chapter was written by several top experts in the field. There were more than a hundred different experts chosen to write sections of this fine book, selected from all around the world of health, botany, horticulture, urban forestry, urban affairs, and the environment. Nature (or the lack of it) is closely aligned with human health, and this wonderful book explores the subject like no other.
Human beings have always been affected by their surroundings. There are various health benefits linked to being able to access to nature; including increased physical activity, stress recovery, and the stimulation of child cognitive development. The Oxford Textbook of Nature and Public Health provides a broad and inclusive picture of the relationship between our own health and the natural environment. All aspects of this unique relationship are covered, ranging from disease prevention through physical activity in green spaces to innovative ecosystem services, such as climate change adaptation by urban trees. Potential hazardous consequences are also discussed including natural disasters, vector-borne…
I identify as agender and grew up in Oklahoma, one of the worst places to be trans or LGBTQ because of the onslaught of anti-LGBTQ legislation that’s flying through the Oklahoma state legislature. Writing Ugliest, a book about teen activists fighting these laws, reminded me how important standing up for what’s right is and what powerful activists teens can be when they get together. This list has other books celebrating the strength of teens protesting and pushing against societal wrongs. Although some terrible things happen in these books—just like in the real world—reading them reminds us that fighting back is worth it.
I loved this great story about trying to do the right thing when everything is stacked against you. Ecological disasters rarely make the news anymore, but in this book, a teen discovers that a mining operation in her grandma’s town is making people sick. She can’t abide the corruption of local authorities and how everyone is held hostage by the jobs the mining industry brings.
I cheered Liberty along as she fought and fought, gathering help along the way from unlikely corners. She draws on her sense of justice to find a way that works around the corruption and right the wrongs in a real way, and I was reminded that even if you can’t help everyone, helping as many as you can is worth it.
2017 Green Earth Book Award, Young Adult Fiction 2017 Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award (SONWA), Young Adult Notable Book
With her mother facing prison time for a violent political protest, seventeen-year-old Liberty Briscoe has no choice but to leave her Washington, DC, apartment and take a bus to Ebbottsville, Kentucky, to live with her granny. There she can at least finish high school and put some distance between herself and her mother―or her former mother, as she calls her. But Ebbottsville isn't the same as Liberty remembers, and it's not just because the top of Tanner's Peak has been…
I have an annoying habit of figuring out why someone says or believes what they do—and think that is more interesting than their actual ‘truth’. I try to keep this in check during social events (it can make for painful dinner table conversations if I go too far). Still, it means the general take on the medical humanities (and I’d put all the books below in that wide category) is something I’m passionate about. Why do we believe what we do about health? About disease? About the body? And why do we think medical doctors have the truth for us?
I don’t live in the USA, so the American debates about gun control and against universal health care often seem…odd. Why would someone think this is a bad thing? Metzl’s book gives at least one explanation.
Using interviews and observations, he shows how right-wing backlash policies are actually supported by people who are hurt by them because they appeal to a race-based sense of identity and privilege. This book was painful for me, but it explained some things that the news doesn't cover.
As Dying of Whiteness shows, the right-wing policies that resulted from this white backlash put these voters' very health at risk-and in the end, threaten everyone's well-being. Physician and sociologist Jonathan M. Metzl travels across America's heartland seeking to better understand the politics of racial resentment and its impact on public health. Interviewing a range of Americans, he uncovers how racial anxieties led to the repeal of gun control laws in Missouri, stymied the Affordable Care Act in Tennessee, and fueled massive cuts to schools and social services in Kansas. Although such measures promised to restore greatness to white America,…
