Books like Anatomy of an Epidemic

01

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

John Carreyrou · Business

Bad Blood is Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou's account of Theranos, the blood-testing startup founded by Elizabeth Holmes that claimed its proprietary technology could run hundreds of diagnostic tests from a single finger-prick of blood.

A kindred health read.

02

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

Siddhartha Mukherjee · Science

The Emperor of All Maladies is Siddhartha Mukherjee's account of cancer from antiquity to the present — its biology, its treatments, its false dawns, and the scientists and patients caught in the middle of each.

A kindred health read.

03

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Rebecca Skloot · Science

In 1951, a Black woman named Henrietta Lacks died of cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

A kindred health read.

04

The Body Keeps the Score

Bessel van der Kolk · Psychology

The Body Keeps the Score is Bessel van der Kolk's account of four decades spent studying and treating trauma, from Vietnam veterans at the VA in the 1970s to survivors of childhood abuse, accidents, and domestic violence.

A kindred health read.

05

Brain Energy

Christopher M. Palmer · Health

Brain Energy is Christopher Palmer's argument that mental illness is fundamentally a metabolic disorder — specifically, a disorder of mitochondrial function and brain energy regulation.

Shares psychiatry and mental illness with Anatomy of an Epidemic.

06

The Psychopath Test

Jon Ronson · Psychology

Jon Ronson is a journalist who starts investigating a strange series of anonymous books sent to academics around the world, and ends up spending a year exploring psychopathy, the Hare Psychopathy Checklist, and the question of whether the diagnostic categories psychiatry uses are tools for understanding people or labels that do damage of their own.

Shares psychiatry and mental illness with Anatomy of an Epidemic.

07

The Case Against Sugar

Gary Taubes · Health

The Case Against Sugar is Gary Taubes's focused argument that sugar — sucrose and high-fructose corn syrup specifically — is the primary cause of the obesity and diabetes epidemics, and the likely driver of the cluster of diseases, from heart disease to Alzheimer's, that researchers now associate with insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome.

Both dig into public health.

08

The Noonday Demon

Andrew Solomon · Health

The Noonday Demon is Andrew Solomon's exhaustive, literary account of depression — his own experience of it, its science and treatment history, its cultural and political dimensions, and the lives of people living with it across the world.

Both dig into psychiatry.

09

A Beautiful Mind

Sylvia Nasar · Biography

Sylvia Nasar's biography of the mathematician John Nash — Nobel laureate, game theory pioneer, and paranoid schizophrenic — is one of the finest accounts of genius and mental illness in biographical literature.

Both dig into mental illness.

10

Bad Science

Ben Goldacre · Science

Bad Science is Ben Goldacre's dissection of how scientific evidence gets misrepresented, distorted, and invented in the service of selling health products, generating media coverage, and protecting bad actors from accountability.

Both dig into public health.

11

Fast Food Nation

Eric Schlosser · Science

Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation is one of the most consequential pieces of American investigative journalism of the early twenty-first century.

Both dig into public health.

12

Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry

Randolph M. Nesse · Psychology

Randolph Nesse spent forty years as a psychiatrist and evolutionary biologist asking a question most of his colleagues found strange: why did natural selection leave us so vulnerable to anxiety, depression, and other forms of suffering?

Both dig into psychiatry.