The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness is a 2024 book by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist and professor at New York University. Haidt is known for writing nonfiction books, such as The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012) and The Happiness Hypothesis (2006). In The Anxious Generation, Haidt explores how the rapid integration of digital technology into children’s lives... Read The Anxious Generation Summary

The Beauty in Breaking, published in 2020, is a memoir by emergency room physician Michele Harper. The book, which is her first, chronicles both her personal and professional life. As an African American woman, Harper expresses her indignation toward American injustices, particularly systemic racism, that find their way into the healthcare system. In addition, Harper recollects harrowing moments of her childhood when she endured domestic abuse in her home, which helped inform her desire to... Read The Beauty in Breaking Summary

First published in 1969 by William Collins Sons & Co., historian Philip Ziegler’s The Black Death is a classic, critically acclaimed text on the history of the devastating epidemic that ravaged medieval Europe. As the author himself notes in the preface: “there may be controversy over its precise significance, [but] no one would today deny that the Black Death was of the greatest economic and social importance as well as hideously dramatic in its progress”... Read The Black Death Summary

Ole J. Benedictow’s 2004 monograph, The Black Death, 1346-1353: The Complete History, is an analytical and synthetic demographic, social, and medical history of the plague’s spread from Eurasia across Western Europe during the 14th century. This book was republished by Boydell Press in 2021, but page numbers refer to the first edition.SummaryBenedictow challenges previous scholars’ assertions about how the plague spread and what form of the disease infected Europeans. He argues that bubonic plague, not... Read The Black Death 1346-1353 Summary

Widely known for his best-selling books A Short History of Nearly Everything and A Walk in the Woods, author and educator Bill Bryson published another bestseller in 2019. The Body: a Guide for Occupants is a tour of human anatomy and its wonders. Compiled for the general reader, The Body is a compendium of facts, many amazing or weird, about human anatomy and physiology. It explores the various organ systems—skin, brain, eyes, nose, mouth and throat... Read The Body: A Guide for Occupants Summary

The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love by Sonya Renee Taylor delves into the realms of radical self-love and societal change. Originally published in 2018, the book has since become a New York Times bestseller and has gone on to spark a movement. Fusing self-help and social justice, Taylor presents a critique of societal norms related to body image and identity and offers a pathway toward personal liberation and societal transformation... Read The Body Is Not an Apology Summary

The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma is a 2014 nonfiction work by Bessel van der Kolk, M.D. This guide refers to the 2015 edition published by Penguin Books. Van der Kolk, a psychiatrist specializing in various forms of trauma, has worked in trauma therapy for his entire professional career, publishing numerous scientific research studies of his own and contributing to many more. In addition to being a... Read The Body Keeps the Score Summary

The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science by psychiatrist-researcher Norman Doidge catalogues recent scientific breakthroughs in neuroplasticity. It explores why scientists long believed in a hardwired, unchanging brain and how the discovery of plasticity changed not only the field of neuroscience but people’s understanding of human nature. It was first published by Penguin Books in 2007 and became a New York Times bestseller the same year. The... Read The Brain That Changes Itself Summary

Published in 2015, The Brain: The Story of You is a work of popular science by American neuroscientist David Eagleman. It was written as the companion book to his Emmy-nominated PBS television series of the same name. In this book, Eagleman takes readers on a tour of the “inner cosmos,” arguing that the human conscious experience is a complex and dynamic construction of the physical brain. Eagleman draws on a wide range of vivid case... Read The Brain Summary

Lindsey Fitzharris’s 2017 work of narrative nonfiction, The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine, is a biography and medical history that documents a pivotal moment in science. The book transports readers to the mid-19th century, a time when surgery was a brutal, filthy, and often fatal last resort. It follows the life of Joseph Lister, a quiet Quaker surgeon who, inspired by Louis Pasteur’s germ theory, developed a... Read The Butchering Art Summary

Audre Lorde was a poet, essayist, activist, and memoirist whose writings on lesbian feminism and race were integral to second-wave feminism. Lorde was born in New York City on February 18, 1934 to Grenadian immigrant parents. She attended Hunter High School, where she edited the school’s literary magazine. She published her first poem, which had been rejected by an English teacher, in Seventeen magazine. She later attended Hunter College, where she trained to become a... Read The Cancer Journals Summary

The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness (2007) is an award-winning, best-selling memoir by Elyn R. Saks about her life with schizophrenia. It recounts Saks’s mental health journey from the beginnings of her illness through its progression and eventual management, as she finds personal and professional success along the way.Elyn Saks is a professor, lawyer, psychoanalyst, and academic, currently serving as the associate dean and the Orrin B. Evans Professor of Law, Psychology, Psychiatry... Read The Center Cannot Hold Summary

The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right is a 2009 book by Atul Gawande. The book provides insights into surgical care and the problems that often arise in the field, and offers the checklist as a simple, yet powerfully effective solution. Gawande includes a significant amount of data in the book, some of which is alarming for readers not involved in his profession as a surgeon. He also interviews many professionals from different industries... Read The Checklist Manifesto Summary

The Children of Men is a dystopian 1992 science fiction novel by P.D. James set in 2021, years after the onset of a mass infertility epidemic. Unless scientists can discover a cure, there will be no more births and the human race will go extinct when the youngest generation dies. This scenario allows James to explore many themes, including existentialism, the meaning of a good life, and the corrupting nature of power.The novel switches between... Read The Children of Men Summary

The Choice: Embrace the Possible is a memoir published in 2017 by Dr. Edith Eva Eger, a psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor. After enduring anti-Semitism, cruelty, communism, and xenophobia, Eger integrates the lessons she learned to show how everyone can choose freedom and halt cycles of suffering. The memoir incorporates World War II history and psychological analysis into Eger’s story of survival, recovery, and joy. The Choice has received the Christopher Award, which acknowledges books, films... Read The Choice: Embrace the Possible Summary

The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race, written by historian and journalist Walter Isaacson, is a profile of 2020 Nobel Prize winner Jennifer Doudna and an overview of the frontiers of genetic editing. Published in 2021, The Code Breaker was one of the year’s most anticipated nonfiction titles in science, debuting at number one on The New York Times nonfiction best-seller list. The book was especially relevant given... Read The Code Breaker Summary

The Collected Schizophrenias is a collection of 13 essays written by Esmé Weijun Wang and originally published in 2019. The collection chronicles Wang’s experiences with schizoaffective, bipolar, and post-traumatic stress disorders, as well as her views on the origins and natures of these conditions. Wang is a first-generation immigrant and public advocate for the destigmatization of mental disorders in the United States. The Collected Schizophrenias received the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize in 2019 and the... Read The Collected Schizophrenias Summary

The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self (2021) is a self-help book by Michael Easter, a journalist and academic at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. This book examines topics such as evolutionary biology, human psychology, and individual well-being. Leveraging his journalistic experience, Easter intertwines his own expeditions with scholarly inquiry, probing how the pursuit of discomfort can catalyze physical, mental, and spiritual maturation. While spanning diverse terrains—from Alaska’s rugged... Read The Comfort Crisis Summary

Released in 1994, The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance is a nonfiction book by science journalist Laurie Garrett. It examines the stories of infectious disease outbreaks from the mid-to-late twentieth century and offers assessments of the social, biological, and ecological factors surrounding epidemic disease transmission. Garrett, a leading writer on science and public health issues, has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her reporting and the George Polk Award... Read The Coming Plague Summary

Abraham Verghese’s The Covenant of Water is an expansive, multigenerational tale of an Indian family whose members all suffer from what is termed the “Condition.” From the story’s opening in 1900 to its close in 1977, this Condition leads to the death by drowning of many members of the family, usually male. It is Big Ammachi’s greatest hope that someone will someday discover the cause of, and thus the cure for, this Condition. She becomes... Read The Covenant of Water Summary