Health & Medicine

Siddhartha Mukherjee’s book, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, is nothing less than an account of the 4,000-year quest to understand and treat cancer, a malady that continues to plague us over the centuries. Mukherjee, an Indian-American oncologist and author, received a Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for the 2010 work. The autobiography opens with Mukherjee’s fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he treats a 31-year-old mother named Carla Reed, who has... Read The Emperor of All Maladies Summary

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The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World is a nonfiction book by Steven Johnson. It was published in 2006 and was named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times and a Best Book of the Year by Library Journal and Entertainment Weekly.The immediate subject of The Ghost Map is the cholera outbreak that took place in London in 1854... Read The Ghost Map Summary

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The Gifts of Imperfection: Your Guide to Wholehearted Living (2022) by Brené Brown (originally published as The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You’re Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are in 2010) introduces the key concepts that have become a signature of Brown’s research, such as reclaiming the importance of vulnerability and defining shame as an obstacle to self-development and connection. The original book spent 75 weeks on The New... Read The Gifts of Imperfection Summary

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Will Allen, author of the 2012 book The Good Food Revolution: Growing Healthy Food, People, and Communities, co-written with Charles Wilson, is an important figure in the American urban farming movement. Born into a farming family, Allen spent much of his adolescence and early adulthood hoping to avoid the agricultural life; however, after a career in professional basketball and later in corporate sales and marketing, Allen finds himself farming full-time, with idealism in his heart... Read The Good Food Revolution Summary

The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder by Charles Graeber is a true crime biography of the life of Charles Cullen, one of the most prolific serial killers in US history. Graeber is an American journalist who spent time as a medical student before moving on to journalism, writing for many prolific news outlets. His joint history in medicine and writing provides him with the necessary expertise to explain the intimacies... Read The Good Nurse Summary

The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History is a 2004 nonfiction work by American historian John M. Barry. It traces the history of the worst pandemic in world history, the influenza pandemic of 1918 and 1919. Barry approaches the subject with a broad audience in mind, placing the story of the flu inside the broader story of medical and scientific history. While focusing on the men who fought the pandemic, Barry... Read The Great Influenza Summary

The Great Trouble: A Mystery of London, the Blue Death, and a Boy Called Eel (2013) is a middle grade historical fiction novel by American author Deborah Hopkinson. Hopkinson is a prolific writer of books for young readers and has published over 70 books, including biographies, picture books, middle grade historical fiction, and long-form nonfiction. The Great Trouble explores themes of class disparity and scientific inquiry and is set against the background of the 1854... Read The Great Trouble Summary

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T.R. Reid’s The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care was published in 2009 and then rereleased in 2010 with an addendum that addressed the passage of the Affordable Care Act. Reid has worked for many years as a foreign correspondent for The Washington Post and was former chief of the newspaper’s Tokyo and London bureaus. Reid used the travel opportunities that his work offered to travel the world... Read The Healing of America Summary

The Hot Zone by Richard Preston is a non-fiction thriller, published in 1994, two years after his article “Crisis in the Hot Zone” appeared in The New Yorker. Preston writes often on Ebola, bioweapons, and emerging viruses. The Hot Zone deals with the breaking of Ebola into the human species and a 1989 incident in which an Ebola-like virus, the Reston virus, sweeps through a monkey quarantine facility outside of Washington, DC. The book served... Read The Hot Zone Summary

The House of God is a novel written by American author and doctor Samuel Bergman under the pseudonym Samuel Shem and originally published in 1978. The book is heavily based on Bergman’s own experiences as a medical intern in the early 1970s, and the fictional hospital “the House of God” is a thinly veiled fictional version of the Beth Israel teaching hospital associated with Harvard Medical School. The novel is a satire in the vein... Read The House of God Summary

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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot is a non-fiction book that tells the story of Lacks and her HeLa cells, or the immortal cell line that doctors retrieved from her cervical cancer cells. Crown Publishing Group published the book in 2010, and it won a National Academies Communication Award the following year. This guide refers to the Crown 2010 first edition. Henrietta Lacks was a black American woman who died of cancer... Read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks Summary

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The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales (1973) is British neurologist Dr. Oliver Sacks’s fourth book. Sacks is a renowned physician, professor, and writer whom the New York Times calls “the poet laureate of medicine.” Sacks is best known for his 1973 memoir Awakenings, in which he explores the history of the encephalitis lethargica epidemic. In 1990, the story was adapted into a critically acclaimed movie starring Robin Williams... Read The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat Summary