Shelfari Book Activity

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

by Rebecca Skloot

Rebecca Skloot takes us on an extraordinary journey, from the “colored” ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers full of HeLa cells; from Henrietta’s small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia — a land of wooden slave quarters, faith healings and... (learn more about this book)

Stiff

by Mary Roach

An oddly compelling, often hilarious forensic exploration of the strange lives of our bodies postmortem.

For two thousand years, cadavers some willingly, some unwittingly have been involved in science's boldest strides and weirdest undertakings. They've tested France's first guillotines,... (learn more about this book)

The Selfish Gene

by Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins' brilliant reformulation of the theory of natural selection has the rare distinction of having provoked as much excitement and interest outside the scientific community as within it. His theories have helped change the whole nature of the study of social biology, and have... (learn more about this book)

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

by Oliver Sacks

In his most extraordinary book, "one of the great clinical writers of the 20th century" (The New York Times) recounts the case histories of patients lost in the bizarre, apparently inescapable world of neurological disorders. Oliver Sacks's The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat tells the... (learn more about this book)

Dark Biology

The Hot Zone

by Richard Preston

The true story of how Ebola Zaire almost ravaged the Americas in 1989. The virus kills nine out of ten of its victims so quickly and gruesomely that even biohazard experts are terrified. It is airborne, it is extreme contagious, and it is about to burn through the suburbs of a major American... (learn more about this book)

The Gargoyle

by Andrew Davidson

On a burn ward, a man lies between living and dying, so disfigured that no one from his past life would even recognize him. His only comfort comes from imagining various inventive ways to end his misery. Then a woman named Marianne Engel walks into his hospital room, a wild-haired,... (learn more about this book)

All Creatures Great & Small: Book 2

All Things Bright and Beautiful

by James Herriot

All Things Bright and Beautiful is the beloved sequel to Herriot's first collection, All Creatures Great and Small , and picks up as Herriot, now newly married, journeys among the remote hillside farms and valley towns of the Yorkshire Dales, caring for their inhabitants---both two- and... (learn more about this book)

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

by Anne Fadiman

When three-month-old Lia Lee Arrived at the county hospital emergency room in Merced, California, a chain of events was set in motion from which neither she nor her parents nor her doctors would ever recover.

Lia's parents, Foua and Nao Kao, were part of a large Hmong community in... (learn more about this book)

Musicophilia

by Oliver Sacks

Music can move us to the heights or depths of emotion. It can persuade us to buy something, or remind us of our first date. It can lift us out of depression when nothing else can. It can get us dancing to its beat.  But the power of music goes much, much further. Indeed, music occupies more... (learn more about this book)

Complications

by Atul Gawande

In gripping accounts of true cases, surgeon Atul Gawande explores the power and the limits of medicine, offering an unflinching view from the scalpel’s edge. Complications lays bare a science not in its idealized form but as it actually is—uncertain, perplexing, and profoundly human.

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