Books like Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal

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 Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal.

02

Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex

Mary Roach · Science

Bonk is Mary Roach's investigation into the science of human sexuality — not the pop psychology of relationships, but the actual research: what scientists have done inside laboratory settings to understand how sex works, what they've discovered, and why the field has been so difficult to pursue given institutional and cultural resistance.

Shares medical research and history of science with Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal.

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.

Shares human biology and history of science with Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal.

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.

Both dig into human biology.

05

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.

Shares digestion and microbiome with Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal.

06

An Elegant Defense

Matt Richtel · Science

An Elegant Defense is Matt Richtel's attempt to explain the immune system to a general audience through a combination of narrative science and personal story.

Both dig into human 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

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.

09

The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

Simon Singh · Science

Simon Singh's The Code Book traces the history of cryptography from Caesar's cipher through the breaking of Enigma to the mathematics of public-key encryption and the looming possibility of quantum cryptography.

Both dig into history of science.

10

The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table

Sam Kean · Science

The Disappearing Spoon is Sam Kean's account of how the periodic table of elements came to be — not as a dry exercise in classroom science, but as a record of obsession, accident, rivalry, and the occasional poisoning.

Both dig into history of science.

11

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Thomas S. Kuhn · Science

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, first published in 1962, changed how historians, philosophers, and scientists think about how science advances.

Both dig into history of science.

12

Exercised

Daniel Lieberman · Health

Exercised is Daniel Lieberman's follow-up to The Story of the Human Body, applying the same evolutionary lens specifically to physical activity — what it is, why we resist it, and which kinds produce which benefits.

Both dig into human biology.