Books like 'The Gene: An Intimate History'
Readers who enjoyed The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee also liked the following books featuring the same tropes, story themes, relationship dynamics and character types.
historical psychological medical evolution outdoors technology politics
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Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari, Carlos Manuel Vesga
Rated: 4.42 of 5 stars · 55 ratings100,000 years ago, at least six human species inhabited the earth. Today there is just one. Us. Homo sapiens...Categorized as:
evolution medical outdoors politics technology 21st-century adult ancient-civilization -
A Life on Our Planet: My Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future by David Attenborough
Rated: 4.54 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsSee the world. Then make it better.I am David Attenborough. At time of writing, I am 93 years old. I've had an extraordinary life. It's only now that I appreciate how extraordinary. As a young man, I felt I was out there in the wild, experiencing the untouched natural world - but it was an illusion... -
Cosmos by Carl Sagan, LeVar Burton
Rated: 4.39 of 5 stars · 43 ratingsCosmos has 13 heavily illustrated chapters, corresponding to the 13 episodes of the Cosmos television series. In the book, Sagan explores 15 billion years of cosmic evolution and the development of science and civilization. Cosmos traces the origins of knowledge and the scientific method, mixing science and philosophy, and speculates to the future of science...Categorized as:
evolution outdoors politics technology 20th-century adult ancient-civilization audiobook -
Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling, Annemie de Vries
Rated: 4.35 of 5 stars · 41 ratingsFactfulness: The stress-reducing habit of only carrying opinions for which you have strong supporting facts.When asked simple questions about global trends—what percentage of the world’s population live in poverty; why the world’s population is increasing; how many girls finish school—we systematically get the answers wrong... -
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The Premonition: A Pandemic Story by Michael Lewis
Rated: 4.38 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsFor those who could read between the lines, the censored news out of China was terrifying. But the president insisted there was nothing to worry about.Fortunately, we are still a nation of skeptics. Fortunately, there are those among us who study pandemics and are willing to look unflinchingly at worst-case scenarios... -
Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake, Christine Clemmensen
Rated: 4.38 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsThere is a lifeform so strange and wondrous that it forces us to rethink how life works…Neither plant nor animal, it is found throughout the earth, the air and our bodies. It can be microscopic, yet also accounts for the largest organisms ever recorded, living for millennia and weighing tens of thousands of tonnes... -
The Body: A Guide for Occupants by Bill Bryson
Rated: 4.31 of 5 stars · 34 ratingsIn the bestselling, prize-winning A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson achieved the seemingly impossible by making the science of our world both understandable and entertaining to millions of people around the globe.Now he turns his attention inwards to explore the human body, how it functions and its remarkable ability to heal itself... -
Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman
Rated: 4.33 of 5 stars · 28 ratingsFrom the author of Utopia For Realists, a revolutionary argument that the innate goodness and cooperation of human beings has been the greatest factor in our successIf one basic principle has served as the bedrock of bestselling author Rutger Bregman's thinking, it is that every progressive idea -- whether it was the abolition of slavery, the advent of democracy, women's suffrage, or the... -
Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage by Rachel E. Gross
Rated: 4.47 of 5 stars · 15 ratingsA scientific journey to the center of the new female body.The Latin term for the female genitalia, pudendum, means “parts for which you should be ashamed.” Until 1651, ovaries were called female testicles. The fallopian tubes are named for a man. Named, claimed, and shamed: Welcome to the story of the female body, as penned by men... -
Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium by Carl Sagan
Rated: 4.28 of 5 stars · 25 ratingsIn the final book of his astonishing career, Carl Sagan brilliantly examines the burning questions of our lives, our world, and the universe around us... -
Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari
Rated: 4.22 of 5 stars · 41 ratingsYuval Noah Harari, author of the critically-acclaimed New York Times bestseller and international phenomenon Sapiens, returns with an equally original, compelling, and provocative book, turning his focus toward humanity’s future, and our quest to upgrade humans into gods.Over the past century humankind has managed to do the impossible and rein in famine, plague, and war... -
An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back by Elisabeth Rosenthal
Rated: 4.33 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsA New York Times bestseller/Washington Post Notable Book of 2017/NPR Best Books of 2017/Wall Street Journal Best Books of 2017 "This book will serve as the definitive guide to the past and future of health care in America...Categorized as:
medical politics audiobook historical journalism mental-illness non-fiction psychological -
The Story of Civilization [Volumes 1 to 11] by Will Durant, Ariel Durant
Rated: 4.36 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsVol 1 Our Oriental HeritageVol 2 The Life of GreeceVol 3 Caesar and ChristVol 4 The Age of FaithVol 5 The RenaissanceVol 6 The ReformationVol 7 The Age of Reason BeginsVol 8 The Age of Louis XIVVol 9 The Age of VoltaireVol 10 Rousseau and RevolutionVol 11 The Age of... -
Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution by Cat Bohannon
Rated: 4.36 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsTHE REAL ORIGIN OF OUR SPECIES: a myth-busting, eye-opening landmark account of how humans evolved, offering a paradigm shift in our thinking about what the female body is, how it came to be, and how this evolution still shapes all our lives todayHow did the female body drive 200 million years of human evolution? • Why do women live longer than men? • Why are women more likely to get... -
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Trans Bodies, Trans Selves: A Resource for the Transgender Community by Laura Erickson-Schroth
Rated: 4.50 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsThere is no one way to be transgender. Transgender and gender non-conforming people have many different ways of understanding their gender identities. Only recently have sex and gender been thought of as separate concepts, and we have learned that sex (traditionally thought of as physical or biological) is as variable as gender (traditionally thought of as social)...Categorized as:
medical politics non-fiction lgbtq trans-mc psychological feminism social-commentary -
The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons: The History of the Human Brain as Revealed by True Stories of Trauma, Madness, and Recovery by Sam Kean, Henry Leyva
Rated: 4.21 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsThe author of the bestseller The Disappearing Spoon reveals the secret inner workings of the brain through strange but true stories. Early studies of the human brain used a simple method: wait for misfortune to strike -- strokes, seizures, infectious diseases, horrendous accidents -- and see how victims coped. In many cases their survival was miraculous, if puzzling... -
Get Well Soon: History's Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them by Jennifer Wright
Rated: 4.21 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsThroughout time, humans have been terrified and fascinated by the diseases history and circumstance have dropped on them. Some of their responses to those outbreaks are almost too strange to believe in hindsight... -
Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker
Rated: 4.19 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsIf you think the world is coming to an end, think again: people are living longer, healthier, freer, and happier lives, and while our problems are formidable, the solutions lie in the Enlightenment ideal of using reason and science...Categorized as:
evolution politics technology 21st-century audiobook contemporary historical non-fiction -
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
Rated: 4.15 of 5 stars · 41 ratingsInheriting the mantle of revolutionary biologist from Darwin, Watson, and Crick, Richard Dawkins forced an enormous change in the way we see ourselves and the world with the publication of The Selfish Gene... -
Superior: The Return of Race Science by Angela Saini
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsSuperior tells the disturbing story of the persistent thread of belief in biological racial differences in the world of science. After the horrors of the Nazi regime in WWII, the mainstream scientific world turned its back on eugenics and the study of racial difference... -
Pushed: The Painful Truth About Childbirth and Modern Maternity Care by Jennifer Block
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsIn the United States, more than half the women who give birth are given drugs to induce or speed up labor; for nearly a third of mothers, childbirth is major surgery - the cesarean section. For women who want an alternative, choice is often unavailable: Midwives are sometimes inaccessible; in eleven states they are illegal. In one of those states, even birthing centers are outlawed... -
The Wizard and the Prophet by Charles C. Mann
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsFrom the best-selling, award-winning author of 1491 and 1493--an incisive portrait of the two little-known twentieth-century scientists, Norman Borlaug and William Vogt, whose diametrically opposed views shaped our ideas about the environment, laying the groundwork for how people in the twenty-first century will choose to live in tomorrow's world... -
Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia by Sabrina Strings
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsIn her first book, sociologist Strings (sociology, Univ. of California, Irvine) explores the historical development of prothin, antifat ideologies deployed in support of Western, patriarchal white supremacy... -
The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease by Daniel E. Lieberman, Luís Oliveira Santos
Rated: 4.22 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsA landmark book of popular science—a lucid, engaging account of how the human body evolved over millions of years and of how the increasing disparity between the jumble of adaptations in our Stone Age bodies and the modern world is fueling the paradox of greater longevity but more chronic disease... -
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Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by James C. Scott
Rated: 4.22 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsCompulsory ujamaa villages in Tanzania, collectivization in Russia, Le Corbusier’s urban planning theory realized in Brasilia, the Great Leap Forward in China, agricultural "modernization" in the Tropics—the twentieth century has been racked by grand utopian schemes that have inadvertently brought death and disruption to millions... -
The End of the World Is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization by Peter Zeihan
Rated: 4.20 of 5 stars · 20 ratings2019 was the last great year for the world economy.For generations, everything has been getting faster, better, and cheaper. Finally, we reached the point that almost anything you could ever want could be sent to your home within days - even hours - of when you decided you wanted it.America made that happen, but now America has lost interest in keeping it going... -
A Short History of Trans Misogyny by Jules Gill-Peterson
Rated: 4.38 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsAn accessible, bold new vision for the future of intersectional trans feminism, called "one of the best books in trans studies in recent years" by Susan StrykerWhy are trans women the most targeted of LGBT people? Why are they in the crosshairs of a resurgent anti-trans politics around the world? And what is to be done about it by activists, organizers, and allies?A Short History of... -
Why Evolution Is True by Jerry A. Coyne
Rated: 4.15 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsWeaving together and explaining the latest discoveries and ideas from many disparate areas of modern science, this succinct and important book explains the truth about, and the beauty of, evolution... -
The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions by Greta Thunberg
Rated: 4.30 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsWe still have time to change the world. From Greta Thunberg, the world's leading climate activist, comes the essential handbook for making it happen.You might think it's an impossible task: secure a safe future for life on Earth, at a scale and speed never seen, against all the odds. There is hope - but only if we listen to the science before it's too late... -
Blood and Guts: A History of Surgery by Richard Hollingham
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsToday, astonishing surgical breakthroughs are making face transplants, limb transplants and a host of other previously undreamed of operations possible. But getting here has not been a simple story of selfless men working tirelessly in the pursuit of medical advancement. Instead it's a bloodstained tale of blunders, arrogance, mishap and murder...
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