Books like Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex

01

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

Mary Roach · Science

Stiff follows the human body after death — through anatomy labs, crash-test facilities, forensic research farms, military ballistics testing, and the history of surgical education.

Shares medical research and history of science with Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex.

02

Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal

Mary Roach · Science

Gulp traces the alimentary canal from mouth to colon, using Mary Roach's standard method: firsthand visits to the researchers who work in each region, archival accounts of the stranger experiments in medical history, and a consistent willingness to ask the embarrassing questions that more decorous science writing leaves out.

Shares medical research and history of science with Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex.

03

Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void

Mary Roach · Science

Packing for Mars is Mary Roach's investigation into the unglamorous human problems of spaceflight: what happens to the body in zero gravity, how astronauts eat and sleep and go to the bathroom, what zero-g does to bones and muscles and the vestibular system, and how engineers have spent decades solving problems that are embarrassing to discuss but essential to solve.

Both dig into history of science.

04

The Body: A Guide for Occupants

Bill Bryson · Science

Bill Bryson turns his signature wide-lens curiosity on the human body, covering it organ by organ, system by system, from the skin inward.

A kindred science read.

05

Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art

James Nestor · Science

Breath is James Nestor's investigation into one of the most basic and overlooked aspects of human health: how we inhale and exhale.

Both dig into biology.

06

Climbing Mount Improbable

Richard Dawkins · Science

Climbing Mount Improbable is Richard Dawkins's response to the persistent intuition that complex biological structures — the vertebrate eye, insect wings, spider webs — are too improbable to have evolved by chance.

Both dig into biology.

07

Fermat's Enigma

Simon Singh · Science

In 1637, Pierre de Fermat scrawled a note in the margin of a mathematics book claiming to have found a proof that no three positive integers can satisfy the equation a^n + b^n = c^n for any integer value of n greater than 2 — but that the margin was too narrow to contain it.

Both dig into history of science.

08

Gut

Giulia Enders · Science

Giulia Enders wrote Gut while studying medicine, and the book shows: it is both scientifically informed and written with an enthusiasm that has clearly not yet been worn down by clinical routine.

Both dig into biology.

09

Happy City

Charles Montgomery · Science

Happy City is Charles Montgomery's investigation into the relationship between the design of cities and the psychological well-being of their inhabitants.

Both dig into psychology.

10

Laws of UX

Jon Yablonski · Science

Laws of UX is Jon Yablonski's collection of ten principles drawn from psychology and cognitive science that bear directly on user interface design.

Both dig into psychology.

11

Mathematics: Its Content, Methods and Meaning

Aleksandrov, Kolmogorov & Lavrent'ev · Science

Mathematics: Its Content, Methods and Meaning is a three-volume survey of mathematics compiled by a group of eminent Soviet mathematicians, originally published in Russian in 1956 and translated into English by the American Mathematical Society in 1963.

Both dig into history of science.

12

Scale

Geoffrey West · Science

Geoffrey West is a theoretical physicist who spent decades at Los Alamos and the Santa Fe Institute studying whether there are mathematical laws underlying all complex systems — organisms, cities, companies — and finding that the answer appears to be yes.

Both dig into biology.