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

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.

Both dig into history of science.

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 human biology and history of science with Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void.

03

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.

Both dig into history of science.

04

Astrophysics for People in a Hurry

Neil deGrasse Tyson · Science

Astrophysics for People in a Hurry is Neil deGrasse Tyson's deliberately compact introduction to the biggest ideas in modern astrophysics.

A kindred science read.

05

A Short History of Nearly Everything

Bill Bryson · Science

A Short History of Nearly Everything is Bill Bryson's attempt to understand the scientific story of everything — from the Big Bang to the emergence of modern humans — by spending three years talking to scientists and reading science history.

A kindred science read.

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

Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

Carl Sagan · Science

Pale Blue Dot takes its title from a photograph taken by Voyager 1 in 1990, as it left the solar system, at Sagan's request.

Both dig into space exploration.

10

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.

11

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.

12

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.