Here are 100 books that Bite fans have personally recommended if you like
Bite.
Book DNA is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
“Natural history” may have been my first words. As a college biology major, I came to deeply appreciate the diversity and adaptations of animal life. In medical school, I learned how human tissues, especially bone, work and fail. Orthopedic surgery residency allowed me to drill down, literally and figuratively, on living bone. I have traveled extensively on all continents and, in so doing, continue to expand my passion for learning about bone’s historical and cultural aspects along with its marvelous biological properties. In 2017, I began blogging (aboutbone.com), and in 2020, I published Bones, Inside and Out. Now I’m also biting into teeth. I love life’s hard stuff.
Bryson comes through once again with a comprehensive, fact-filled journey, this time through the human body.
I love the witty anecdotes he peppers throughout. I find myself laughing out loud with his ironic sense of humor as he describes the workings of bones and muscles (along with the lesser tissues) in ways that general readers can understand and appreciate.
NATIONAL BESTSELLERNEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERINTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS' CHOICE NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2019 BY Maclean's - The Washington Post - USA Today - IndigoBill Bryson, bestselling author of A Short History of Nearly Everything, takes us on a head-to-toe tour of the marvel that is the human body. As compulsively readable as it is comprehensive, this is Bryson at his very best, a must-read owner's manual for everybody.Bill Bryson once again proves himself to be an incomparable companion as he guides us through the human body--how it functions, its remarkable ability to heal…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
“Natural history” may have been my first words. As a college biology major, I came to deeply appreciate the diversity and adaptations of animal life. In medical school, I learned how human tissues, especially bone, work and fail. Orthopedic surgery residency allowed me to drill down, literally and figuratively, on living bone. I have traveled extensively on all continents and, in so doing, continue to expand my passion for learning about bone’s historical and cultural aspects along with its marvelous biological properties. In 2017, I began blogging (aboutbone.com), and in 2020, I published Bones, Inside and Out. Now I’m also biting into teeth. I love life’s hard stuff.
I love the way the author casts a wide net over the topic and covers facets as diverse as the history of dentistry, the diminished job prospects for those with poor dentition, and the story of the pioneering dentist who made Shirley Temple’s teeth glisten on the silver screen.
Smiling will never be the same, at least not for me.
'Show me your teeth', the great naturalist George Cuvier is credited with saying, 'and I will tell you who you are'. In this shattering new work, veteran health journalist Mary Otto looks inside America's mouth, revealing unsettling truths about our unequal society. Teeth takes readers on a disturbing journey into the role teeth play in our health and our social mobility. Muckraking and paradigm-shifting, Teeth exposes for the first time the extent and meaning of our oral health crisis.
“Natural history” may have been my first words. As a college biology major, I came to deeply appreciate the diversity and adaptations of animal life. In medical school, I learned how human tissues, especially bone, work and fail. Orthopedic surgery residency allowed me to drill down, literally and figuratively, on living bone. I have traveled extensively on all continents and, in so doing, continue to expand my passion for learning about bone’s historical and cultural aspects along with its marvelous biological properties. In 2017, I began blogging (aboutbone.com), and in 2020, I published Bones, Inside and Out. Now I’m also biting into teeth. I love life’s hard stuff.
I was fascinated by the stunningly beautiful color photographs of 300 skulls, and I learned a lot from the accompanying brief descriptions of their animal owners’ skeletal anatomy, habitat, and behavior. From newts to cassowaries, seahorses to wombats, and hedgehogs to dolphins, the breadth of adaptations across the zoological realm is evident and worthy of appreciation.
I particularly liked the middle section where the author describes the skull’s iconography across cultures and through history along with its role in art. The book is on my coffee table and is always a conversation starter.
Skulls is a beautiful spellbinding exploration of more than 300 different animal skulls--amphibians, birds, fish, mammals, and reptiles-written by New York Times bestselling author, Simon Winchester and produced in collaboration with Theodore Gray and Touch Press, the geniuses behind The Elements and Solar System.In Skulls, best-selling author Simon Winchester (author of The Professor and the Madman; Atlantic: A Biography of the Ocean; Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded; and others)tells the rich and fascinating story of skulls, both human and animal, from every perspective imaginable: historical, biographical, cultural, and iconographic. Presenting details about the parts of the skull (including the…
This book is an elegiac meditation on the will to survive. Tor, a beluga whaler, and his wife, Astrid, a botanist specializing in Arctic flora, are stranded during the dark season of 1937-38 at his remote whaling station in the Svalbard archipelago when they misjudge ice conditions and fail to…
“Natural history” may have been my first words. As a college biology major, I came to deeply appreciate the diversity and adaptations of animal life. In medical school, I learned how human tissues, especially bone, work and fail. Orthopedic surgery residency allowed me to drill down, literally and figuratively, on living bone. I have traveled extensively on all continents and, in so doing, continue to expand my passion for learning about bone’s historical and cultural aspects along with its marvelous biological properties. In 2017, I began blogging (aboutbone.com), and in 2020, I published Bones, Inside and Out. Now I’m also biting into teeth. I love life’s hard stuff.
Skeleton Keys is de facto evidence that bone is a worthy and heretofore underreported element of natural and cultural history.
I like the author's convincing explanation of how the human body carries around much of the natural world’s history. He helps the reader unlock and interpret the story with respect and awe for his subject.
“A provocative and entertaining magical mineral tour through the life and afterlife of bone.” —Wall Street Journal
Our bones have many stories to tell, if you know how to listen.
Bone is a marvel, an adaptable and resilient building material developed over more than four hundred million years of evolutionary history. It gives your body its shape and the ability to move. It grows and changes with you, an undeniable document of who you are and how you lived. Arguably, no other part of the human anatomy has such rich scientific and cultural significance, both brimming with life and…
I am an evolutionary ecologist with a lifelong fascination with mating behavior in animals, particularly fishes. The core of my doctoral thesis was trying to understand why some males mate with females of a different species, a behavior that I thought could not be adaptive. This was the starting point of my work on male mate choice, but also mate choice more generally. Originally from Germany, I have lived and worked in the US for a long time. Most of my work is on neotropical fishes so moving to America made sense.
When Darwin proposed the two mechanisms of sexual selection, one was almost immediately embraced by his Victorian contemporaries: male competition. Female choice, on the other hand, had to wait almost 100 years to be fully recognized. This book is an account of the history of female choice and provides fascinating insights into the development of a scientific discipline and how it is intertwined with society. Well written and very accessible, this is a great read.
Why do female animals select certain mates, and how do scientists determine the answer? In considering these questions, Erika Lorraine Milam explores the fascinating patterns of experiment and interpretation that emerged as twentieth-century researchers studied sexual selection and female choice. Approaching the topic from both biological and animal-studies perspectives, Milam not only presents a broad history of sexual selection-from Darwin to sociobiology-but also analyzes the animal-human continuum from the perspectives of sex, evolution, and behavior. She asks how social and cultural assumptions influence human-animal research and wonders about the implications of gender on scientific outcomes. Although female choice appears to…
I like trying to solve problems about the mind: Is the mind just the brain? What is consciousness, and where is it in the brain? What happens in the brain during aesthetic experience? Why are we prone to self-deception? In approaching these questions, I don’t limit myself to one discipline or set of techniques. These mental phenomena, and the problems that surround them, do not hew to our disciplinary boundaries. In spite of this, someone needs to collect, analyze, and assess information relevant to the problems—which is in many different formats—and build theories designed to make sense of it. During that time, more data will become available, so back you go.
Anjan Chatterjee has managed to write a book that a) is very accessible, b) provides thorough coverage of current attempts to understand art and aesthetic experience by using information from the cognitive sciences, and c) outlines an original hypothesis about why humans evolved a love for art. That last part changes the book from a nice review of the topic to a groundbreaking attempt at an explanation of our art practices.
Chatterjee examines our judgments of peoples’ attractiveness, the brain’s system of reward chemicals, and our evolutionary history, in an attempt to understand our passion for art scientifically.
In an upcoming book on art, I refer to Chatterjee frequently. I don’t always agree with him, but his sensible, clear, and broad approach made his book very useful to me.
The Aesthetic Brain takes readers on an exciting journey through the world of beauty, pleasure, and art. Using the latest advances in neuroscience and evolutionary psychology, Anjan Chatterjee investigates how an aesthetic sense is etched into our minds, and explains why artistic concerns feature centrally in our lives. Along the way, Chatterjee addresses such fundamental questions as: What is beauty? Is it universal? How is beauty related to pleasure? What is art? Should art be beautiful? Do we have an instinct for art?
Early on, Chatterjee probes the reasons why we find people, places, and even numbers beautiful, highlighting the…
Tina Edwards loved her childhood and creating fairy houses, a passion shared with her father, a world-renowned architect. But at nine years old, she found him dead at his desk and is haunted by this memory. Tina's mother abruptly moved away, leaving Tina with feelings of abandonment and suspicion.
I am an evolutionary biologist who wrote two books on my theory that all species increase the biodiversity of their ecosystem in a natural environment (humans are an exception to this). I am a dedicated conservationist and founder and president of the World Rainforest Fund (worldrainforest.org), a nonprofit organization dedicated to saving the Earth’s rainforests. I collected reptiles and fossils when I was a child, and never out-grew my passion and love for science, biology, biodiversity, the natural world, animals, plants, ecology, and evolution. I love reading about these topics, hearing lectures on them, and learning about them. I love being in nature, traveling to natural ecosystems, and seeing wildlife.
I am working on a theory that viruses were crucial in the evolution of higher organisms and major evolutionary breakthroughs. This book is about that very topic.
It is full of incredible information and has me jumping with excitement. Seeing a scientist who shares my ideas is exciting. It is well-written and comprehensible. The examples are great. I found it thought-provoking and could hardly wait to read the part I had not yet read!
The extraordinary role of viruses in evolution and how this is revolutionising biology and medicine.
Darwin's theory of evolution is still the greatest breakthrough in biological science. His explanation of the role of natural selection in driving the evolution of life on earth depended on steady variation of living things over time - but he was unable to explain how this variation occurred. In the 150 years since publication of the Origin of Species, we have discovered three main sources for this variation - mutation, hybridisation and epigenetics. Then on Sunday, 12th February, 2001 the evidence for perhaps the…
I’m a research physicist working in fusion energy and astrophysics. To explain our work, I’ve had to overcome the misconceptions about science that are widespread in the media and among the general population. These books are the best ones I know to correct the mystification of science, especially of topics like quantum mechanics, time, consciousness, and cosmology.
This groundbreaking work, published posthumously, is the first attempt to explain consciousness as the product of the evolutionary process. In doing this, Teilhard de Chardin outlines many characteristics of the evolutionary process that have never been described before. It is his effort to unite evolutionary theory, a Marxist view of evolution, and….Christianity.
The final chapter trying to drag Christ into this scientific work did not impress me, but it does not detract from the earlier chapters either.
Visionary theologian and evolutionary theorist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin applied his whole life, his tremendous intellect, and his great spiritual faith to building a philosophy that would reconcile religion with the scientific theory of evolution. In this timeless book, which contains the quintessence of his thought, Teilhard argues that just as living organisms sprung from inorganic matter and evolved into ever more complex thinking beings, humans are evolving toward an "omega point"—defined by Teilhard as a convergence with the Divine.
I promise that will be the only egg pun I will use. Just the one. Eggsactly one. Oops.
While my debut novel, Ava, is primarily about the clash of reproductive rights with conservative politics set in the South, it is obviously also about eggs and my bias towards them as an amazing evolutionary triumph. Even the title of my book is an intentional nod toward my love of eggs as Ava means both “bird” and “life”. With that in mind, I wanted to highlight five books that I love that are very egg-centric (and I will maintain this is more of a portmanteau than a pun).
I love this book because it appeals to the evolutionary biology fan in me, as is evident in my book.
Howard traces the history of eggs from ancient single-celled organisms to dinosaurs to the emergence of mammals. He explores how eggs adapted to countless environments and how these adaptations shaped biodiversity.
It’s a deeply engaging work of nonfiction from an enthusiastic author who shows that understanding the egg is fundamental to understanding life itself.
Every animal on the planet owes its existence to one crucial piece of evolutionary engineering: the egg.
It's time to tell a new story of life on Earth.
'Jules Howard's egg's-eye view of evolution is dripping with fascinating insights' ALICE ROBERTS
'So much passion and poetic prose' BBC Radio 4, Inside Science
If you think of an egg, what do you see in your mind's eye? A chicken egg, hard-boiled? A slimy mass of frogspawn? Perhaps you see a human egg cell, prepared on a microscope slide in a laboratory?…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
As a journalist, I write about women and power. I’ve written about everything from taboos in women’s health, to the importance of reproductive autonomy, to the ability of women athletes to shape culture. Across all of these subjects, my work is rooted in the desire to explore the factors that drive gender inequity and how we can create lasting cultural changes that will close the gap. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in writing over 2,500 stories, it’s that gender inequity—from the pay gap, to the motherhood penalty—always comes back to power. And to one group’s desire to keep it at all costs.
I love books that challenge me to question established systems and science writer Angela Saini does this with tour-de-force narrative skills in Inferior.
In this book, Saini examines how gender bias influences the scientific community, and critically, the research it produces. She dives right into the idea that men are thought to be superior, and challenges readers to go a level deeper in the debate about why men dominate.
'Inferior is more than just a book. It's a battle cry - and right now, it's having a galvanising effect on its core fanbase' Observer
Are women more nurturing than men?
Are men more promiscuous than women?
Are males the naturally dominant sex?
And can science give us an impartial answer to these questions?
Taking us on an eye-opening journey through science, Inferior challenges our preconceptions about men and women, investigating the ferocious gender wars that burn in biology, psychology and anthropology. Angela Saini revisits the landmark experiments that have informed our understanding, lays bare the problem of bias…
