Books like Fantastic Voyage

What does it mean to be human, and what happens to us when we don’t receive unconditional love?

The two main characters in this Gothic novel, a human and a "monster," are presented in such a way that I questioned which main character was more human. There’s a warning of what can happen when we deny the basic human need for unconditional love.

Shelly’s use of a frame story pulled me in from the first page.

This is my favorite book in the world.

In someone else’s hands, the tale of a global Nazi conspiracy to restore the Third Reich to its former glory by cloning Adolf Hitler would probably come off as utter insanity. But Levin makes you believe every word of it, funneling the story through the eyes of Nazi hunter Yakov Liebermann (based on Simon Wiesenthal) and infamous doctor of the Auschwitz concentration camp, Josef Mengele.

I really enjoyed this book firstly because of the complete plausibility of the scenario, an extraterrestrial pathogen that comes to earth about which we are powerless to do anything.

Crichton’s medical background is on solid display here, and it is intriguing to experience the author’s very first fiction effort, knowing, as we do, the many great stories to come in the ensuing years (Jurassic Park, etc.). I also very much enjoyed the idea of a group of talented people from a wide range of disciplines working together to tackle a challenge of immense importance. 

This is the novel that birthed television icon Steve Austin of The Six Million Dollar Man. It represents everything that makes the merger of man and technology worth reading about. As a young boy, I loved The Six Million Dollar Man—to the point that I wanted to write something like it. But as a young writer, I was enthralled by the technological expertise and human psychology that author Martin Caidin brought to the novel. This is the standard by which the melding of man and machine should be measured in literary fiction.

Steve Austin is practically the best that mankind has to offer: athlete, intellectual, astronaut, and test pilot. And while flight testing a sub-orbital lifting body, Austin is horribly injured. With skull and skeletal damage, the loss of both legs, an arm, an eye, and numerous other injuries, his life is essentially over. And it is only… show more.

Experimental Medicine is a classic, a clear and simple account of physiological research, well-illustrated with comprehensible examples (no molecular biology needed).

It is well worth reading if only because so many of the principles that French physician Claude Bernard pioneered have been largely forgotten. Most important is his demand for certainty: “Science permits no exceptions,” an injunction now more often forgotten than obeyed. Bernard would have been appalled by, for example, a famous choice experiment in which 60% of a large group of subjects choose a less-profitable option.

The experimenters concluded that individual humans (not just groups) show risk aversion, ignoring the 40% who did not. In a similar situation, Bernard would always seek the conditions that yield a 100% result. He gives an example where he was able to resolve uncertainty concerning the sensitivity of spinal roots.

We’re still waiting for any serious effort to achieve a Bernardian… show more.

Known only to true devotees of medical ethics and the history of human research, Jay Katz’s hefty volume (1,150 pages) is a comprehensive encyclopedia of humans used as research material. Information-packed chapters cover everything from Chester Southam’s use of senile hospital patients in cancer cell injection studies during the 1960s, and the legal fallout from such indiscretions, to the ethical obligations of researchers, and the evolution of informed consent as a pillar of ethical human research. Impressive in both detail and scope, this imposing piece of scholarship is a valuable resource for anyone looking to learn the many moral and legal issues inherent in experimenting on humans. 

In this gripping courtroom drama, an explosion in Miracle Creek, Virginia, destroys the business of South Korean immigrants Pak and Young Yoo and puts their daughter Mary into a monthslong coma. As arguments mount against the woman accused of starting the fire, Young struggles with a question many immigrants must face. Maybe she shouldn’t have brought her child to the US, where Mary struggles as a teenager and where she was almost killed. The tension between the two generations resonated with me as a parent and immigrant. As Young hopes to discover who caused the explosion that killed two other people, she must also help Mary imagine a future in their adoptive country.

This book was such fun to read! It's really unusual in that it's told entirely by letters, emails, and text messages. It has no chapters and invites lots of flicking pages back and forth to go back and check things, so it's super interactive (I was glad I got the paperback!). I really liked that most of the characters are unlikeable, and none of them seem to like each other very much, either. I LOVE unlikeable characters.

On top of that, much of the information they give in the letters is unreliable at best or completely untrue at worst. This book is a murder mystery, but it takes ages to find out who's dead, and by the time I found out, I'd wanted most of the characters to have been killed off–they really are a nasty lot! This book was totally original and very clever, and I adored it from… show more.

Rothman was one of the first to examine the culture of research medicine and its relationship to science and American culture at large. Doctors on the cutting edge of new procedures, much desired medical elixirs, and scientific advancement used a utilitarian calculus to determine what was ethical and what the public was willing to accept. Scientific breakthroughs were celebrated with few - certainly no one of renown - taking notice that the breakthroughs were coming at the expense of vulnerable, powerless populations.

This book is about an unexpected meeting of minds. De la Cadena intended to write an account of a peasant campaign for land led by indigenous peasant leader Mariano Turpo during the 1950-60s. But early on it became clear that she and Mariano were talking past each other, for Mariano understood his successful activism in terms of his relationship with animate places in the landscape (“earth beings”). The book contains a moving account of how the urban intellectual and traditional Andean leader learned to appreciate and communicate with each other. De la Cadena argues that attention to cultural difference—far from perpetuating false consciousness—might open the way to radically new politics. Some readers may wish to pass over some dense theoretical passages, but the book is organized so one can do this without losing the larger picture.