Summer Science Reading Book List
Ecology/Botany/Evolution
 Wicked Plants: The weed that killed Lincoln’s mother and other botanical atrocities by A
Stewart
 The World Without Us by Alan Weisman
 A Garden of Marvels: How We Discovered that Flowers have sex, leaves eat air and other
secrets of plants by R Kassinger
 Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan
 A Natural History of the Senses by Diane Ackerman
 Fire Under the Sea by Joseph Cone
 The Firecracker Boys by Dan O’Neill
 Fateful Harvest by Duff Wilson
 The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dustbowl
by Timothy Egan
 The Origin by Irving Stone
 The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring by Richard Preston
 Before the Dawn by N. Wade
Human A&P
 Gulp by Mary Roach and any of her other books (Bonk, Packing for Mars, Stiff, or Spook)
 The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her Doctors, and the Collision of
Two Cultures by Ann Fadiman
 Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness by Susannah Cahalan
 How We Die: Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter by Sherwin Nuland
 The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right by Atul Gawande
 Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance by Atul Gawande
 Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science by Atul Gawande
 The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukerjee
 The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human by VS Ramachandran
 The Deadly Dinner Party & Other Medical Detective Stories by J Edlow
 Post Mortem: Solving History’s Great Medical Mysteries by PA Mackowiak
 Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink
 Survival of the Sickest by S Moalem
Viruses, Genetics, Prions, etc
 Epigenetics: How Environment Shapes our Genes by R Francis
 The Hot Zone: A Terrifying True Story by Richard Preston
 The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York by
Deborah Blum
 Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus by Wasik & Murphy
 The Virus Hunter: Thirty Years of Battling Viruses around the World by CJ Peters
 The Family that Couldn’t Sleep by DT Max
 The Ghost Map: The story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How it Changed
Science, Cities, and the Modern World by Steven Johnson
 Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA by Brenda Maddox
 Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters by Matt Ridley
 The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley
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Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes by Svante Paabo
The Selfish Gene by R Dawkins
The Coming Plague by Laurie Garrett
History/Biography
 “Surely you are Joking Mr. Feynman!” by R Feynman
 What do you care what other people think by R Feynman
 Blood Work: A Tale of Medicine and murder in the Scientific Revolution
 A Man of Misconceptions by John Glassie
 Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His
Time by Dava Sobel
 The Remedy: Robert Koch, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the Quest to Cure Tuberculosis by T
Goetz
 The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love and the History of the World
from the Periodic Table of Elements By S Kean
 The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation discovered the beauty and terror of
Science by R Holmes
 The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom by G Farmelo
Other Authors: Oliver Sacks, Temple Grandin, Stephen J Gould