In The Organ Thieves: The Shocking Story of the First Heart Transplant in the Segregated South, Chip Jones exposes the racism and questionable ethics behind the first heart transplant at the Medical College of Virginia (MCV) in 1968. The heart was taken from Bruce Tucker, an African American man, before he met the legal definition of death in Virginia at that time, and was given to a white man. Jones worked as a journalist in... Read The Organ Thieves Summary

The Orphan Collector: A Heroic Novel of Survival During the 1918 Influenza Pandemic (2020) is a bestselling historical fiction novel by Ellen Marie Wiseman. Published months after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, this novel explores the devastation of the 1918 flu pandemic through themes of family, shame, and survival against a political backdrop of anti-German sentiments, World War I, immigration, and class. Wiseman has written several other historical novels, often featuring strong women and girls... Read The Orphan Collector Summary

The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession along the Rio Grande by Angela Garcia is an ethnographic study of northern New Mexico’s Española Valley. Garcia shares her experiences working in a heroin addiction clinic called Nuevo Día while researching the connections between land, history, and experience. Home to the highest rates of heroin use in the United States, the Española Valley offers a unique lens to study how drug addiction is informed by institutional treatment and... Read The Pastoral Clinic Summary

The Plague, a philosophical novel by French author Albert Camus, was first published in 1947 and immediately won the prix des Critiques, a literary prize awarded to Francophone authors by the French publishing industry. Having also published The Stranger, The Myth of Sisyphus, and The Fall, Camus, an absurdist writer who wrote extensively in support of the French Resistance against Nazi Germany’s occupation of France, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957. In... Read The Plague Summary

The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York is a 2010 non-fiction book by science writer Deborah Blum. This guide follows the first edition of the book. In The Poisoner’s Handbook, Blum explores how Charles Norris and Alexander Gettler laid the foundations for the modern field of forensic science in New York in the 1920s. Through Norris and Gettler’s stories, Blum also narrates a number of important social... Read The Poisoner’s Handbook Summary

IntroductionThe Poison Squad: One Chemist’s Single-Minded Crusade for Food Safety at the Turn of the Century is a work of historical nonfiction by American writer Deborah Blum. Blum is a Pulitzer Prize winning science journalist and author of six books. In July of 2015, she became the director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and she is the founder of Undark, and online magazine examining topics in science and... Read The Poison Squad Summary

The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward by Daniel H. Pink was published in 2022. It challenges the popular mantra “No regrets” that has dominated Western culture. The book claims that toxic positivity can stymie personal growth and one’s potential to achieve a better life. It is, in essence, an antithesis to popular self-help books that champion blind positivity over conscious consideration of regrets. Pink argues that by embracing the feeling of... Read The Power of Regret Summary

The Premonition: A Pandemic Story is a 2021 nonfiction book by Michael Lewis about an unlikely group of freethinking pandemic researchers whose work puts them at odds with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Trump administration. Their stories unfold against the backdrop of the poor US response to the threat of COVID-19.Lewis explains in the book’s Introduction that in his 2018 novel, The Fifth Risk, he wondered what would happen if... Read The Premonition Summary

The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation is an academic monograph written by historian of slavery Daina Ramey Berry and published by Beacon Press in 2017. Berry’s first book, Swing the Sickle for the Harvest is Ripe: Gender and Slavery in Antebellum Georgia, was published in 2007 by University of Illinois Press. In Swing the Sickle Berry examines the relation... Read The Price for Their Pound of Flesh Summary

The Pull of the Stars, published in 2020, is a work of historical fiction by Emma Donoghue, an Irish Canadian playwright, literary historian, novelist, and screenwriter. The novel was longlisted for the Giller Prize. Told from the first-person point of view of protagonist Julia Power, the story is set at an Ireland hospital during the influenza pandemic of 1918, which was also the last year of World War I. While most of the characters are... Read The Pull of the Stars Summary

The Quiet Room: A Journey Out of the Torment of Madness is a 1994 memoir that chronicles the years-long struggle of Lori Schilling, a bright, promising, high-achieving Jewish woman, born to affluent parents and afflicted with schizophrenia. Ultimately, Schilling will emerge triumphant from her journey, which includes many stints, both voluntarily and involuntarily, in mental hospitals, several suicide attempts, and a constant battle with hallucinated voices that viciously assail Lori and bid her to kill... Read The Quiet Room Summary

The Reason I Jump is a 2007 nonfiction biography written by Japanese teenager Naoki Higashida. In it, Higashida answers a range of questions about his nonspeaking autism, as well as exploring the topic through various asides and short stories. Higashida looks at why some people with autism struggle with verbal communication, something he attributes to a “gap” between thought and expression. He addresses the problems some people with autism face with nonspeaking communication and bodily... Read The Reason I Jump Summary

The Scalpel and the Silver Bear: The First Navajo Woman Surgeon Combines Western Medicine and Traditional Healing (1999) is the autobiography of Dr. Lori Arviso Alvord. It details her journey to become the first Navajo female surgeon, overcoming the challenges presented to her by her own Navajo culture as well as the prevailing stereotype at the time that only men could be surgeons. Along this journey, Lori realizes that western medicine is facing a crisis... Read The Scalpel and the Silver Bear Summary

The Second Life of Mirielle West is a work of historical fiction by American author Amanda Skenandore set at what was initially named the “Louisiana Leper Home” in Carville, Louisiana. Carville lasted from 1894 into the 1970s and was a completely quarantined community. Skenandore uses her knowledge as a registered nurse along with research about Carville to explore the medical challenges and social stigma that accompanied the disease of leprosy for most of the 20th... Read The Second Life of Mirielle West Summary

The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human by Indian American oncologist, biologist, and author Siddhartha Mukherjee is a review of scientific advancement and life at the cellular level. To tell this story, Mukherjee draws on numerous sources, including personal memories, visits with scientists, patient encounters, discussions with medical professionals, and historical records. Mukherjee chronicles the discovery of the cell as the basic building block of all living organisms, including... Read The Song of the Cell Summary

Anne Fadiman’s nonfiction book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures chronicles the life of Lia Lee, a Hmong girl who lives with her family in Merced, California, in the 1980s and 1990s. The book examines the cultural misunderstandings and conflicting belief systems that result in Lia’s poor medical treatment after she is diagnosed with a severe form of epilepsy, Lennox-Gastaut Syndrome... Read The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down Summary

The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance is a 2013 non-fiction book by David Epstein that investigates the role of genetics in athletics. The Sports Gene became a New York Times best seller and was nominated for the 2014 PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing. Epstein, an investigative reporter and a passionate runner, combines data from scientific research, interviews with experts, and biographies and anecdotes of individual athletes to paint a complex... Read The Sports Gene Summary

The Story of My Experiments with Truth is the autobiography of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, more widely known as Mahatma Gandhi. A key political and spiritual leader of India and the Indian independence movement, Gandhi penned this work to narrate his quest for truth and the principles that underpinned his life’s journey. Originally published in 1927, this memoir provides a meticulous account of Gandhi’s spiritual, moral, and political evolution. The literary era in which this was... Read The Story of My Experiments with Truth Summary

The Story of Stuff: How Our Obsession with Stuff is Trashing the Planet, Our Communities, and Our Health—and a Vision for Change (2010) is a book by Annie Leonard. It is based on a short animated documentary with the same title (2007) written and narrated by Leonard. Leonard criticizes American consumer society that values novelty, accumulation, and low prices for being unsustainable. Overconsumption affects our health, our happiness, and our planet. Leonard travels from factories, to... Read The Story of Stuff Summary

The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease (2013) is a science book by Daniel E. Lieberman. Lieberman is a paleoanthropologist, and he works as a researcher, author, and professor of Biological Sciences and of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. In The Story of the Human Body, Lieberman applies an evolutionary perspective to modern health concerns, centering on mismatch diseases, or diseases that arise from a mismatch between humans’ biological evolution and... Read The Story of the Human Body Summary