Books like Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

01

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 Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers.

02

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.

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.

Shares medical research and history of science with Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers.

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

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

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.

07

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.

08

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.

09

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.

10

The Song of the Cell

Siddhartha Mukherjee · Science

The Song of the Cell is Siddhartha Mukherjee's account of how the cell — the basic unit of life — was discovered, decoded, and eventually harnessed to rebuild and repair the human body.

Both dig into human body.

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

Weapons of Math Destruction

Cathy O'Neil · Science

Weapons of Math Destruction is mathematician and data scientist Cathy O'Neil's investigation of how algorithms — statistical models used to make decisions about people's lives — can perpetuate and amplify inequality rather than reduce it.

Both dig into ethics.