Here are 100 books that Heart fans have personally recommended if you like
Heart.
Book DNA is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
I have been fascinated with the impact of gut health since becoming diagnosed with coeliac disease and IBS myself. As a registered dietitian, I was able to translate the complex science of gut health into a step-by-step format, which improved my symptoms, and I then went on to dedicate my career to this space and become a Consultant IBS Dietitian. I now run The IBS Dietitian, which is an online platform for people with IBS and includes online courses, a free podcast, and a book. One of the most important things you need to do to stay up to date with research in this area is to read.
I have used this book as a reference to explain gut anatomy for the past 12 years; it is amazing for anyone wanting to understand how our gut works. It cleverly explains the complex anatomy and science behind each part but in an easy-to-understand format that does not require qualifications in this area.
“Everything you ever wanted to know about the gut (and then some).” —SELF
Discover the secrets of your digestive system—and how to hone a healthy gut—plus new research on the mind-gut connection.
With quirky charm, science star and medical doctor Giulia Enders explains the gut’s magic, answering questions like: What’s really up with gluten and lactose intolerance? How does the gut affect obesity? What's the connection between our microbiome and mental health? Why does acid reflux happen? In this revised edition of her beloved bestseller, Enders includes a new section on the brain-gut connection,…
Your Heart Will Go On is the gripping tale of one man's experience of being rushed into hospital with acute heart failure.
Heart failure is a growing and huge health problem worldwide, yet this book is the first to provide a first-hand testimony of what it's like to suffer from…
Travel and writing are my two great passions. Since I was a child, I escaped reality by escaping into my own mind. I had relied on my stories of the warrior queens ever since I learned about them as a child. It was only a few years ago, when I lived in Geneva, that I had a memory flash at me of the statue of Queen Lakshmi Bai of Jhansi on a rearing horse with a curved sword held in one hand. I knew then that it was time to tell a story—my own story and that of my favorite warrior queens.
This is a surprising book because while it is certainly macabre, it’s not morbid (at least not for me) and is strangely entertaining. It demystifies the human body and the process of death and dying.
Even as the author delves into every aspect of dead bodies, she does so with compassion and humor. Rooted and backed up with science, this book held my interest from beginning to end, and I read it non-stop for over a day and a half. Despite its grave subject matter, this book is not dark or scary. It’s matter-of-fact and very educational.
For two thousand years, cadavers - some willingly, some unwittingly - have been involved in science's boldest strides and weirdest undertakings. They've tested France's first guillotines, ridden the NASA Space Shuttle, been crucified in a Parisian laboratory to test the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin, and helped solve the mystery of TWA Flight 800. For every new surgical procedure, from heart transplants to gender confirmation surgery, cadavers have helped make history in their quiet way. "Delightful-though never disrespectful" (Les Simpson, Time Out New York), Stiff investigates the strange lives of our bodies postmortem and answers the question: What should…
People, including me, can be so uptight about their bodies. Early on in my career, I found that writing about my shame (chin hair!) or embarrassment (dogs sniffing my crotch!) helped the stigma go away. Researching and learning about how amazing our bodies are helped empower me to feel confident and comfortable being fully myself. I think it can do the same for others, too. My takeaway: There is greatness in our grossness.
This book exploded my beliefs about breasts – all that they are and all that they’ve been through and where they are headed next. Williams is a fabulous guide, taking the reader on an adventure as she uncovers the anatomy and evolution of the breast, and even the pollutants found inside her own breastmilk. Knowing the vulnerabilities – and history! – of my rack made me appreciate it all the more.
Did you know that breast milk contains substances similar to cannabis? Or that it's sold on the Internet for 262 times the price of oil? Feted and fetishized, the breast is an evolutionary masterpiece. But in the modern world, the breast is changing. Breasts are getting bigger, arriving earlier, and attracting newfangled chemicals. Increasingly, the odds are stacked against us in the struggle with breast cancer, even among men. What makes breasts so mercurial-and so vulnerable?
In this informative and highly entertaining account, intrepid science reporter Florence Williams sets out to uncover the latest scientific findings from the fields of…
Your Heart Will Go On is the gripping tale of one man's experience of being rushed into hospital with acute heart failure.
Heart failure is a growing and huge health problem worldwide, yet this book is the first to provide a first-hand testimony of what it's like to suffer from…
People, including me, can be so uptight about their bodies. Early on in my career, I found that writing about my shame (chin hair!) or embarrassment (dogs sniffing my crotch!) helped the stigma go away. Researching and learning about how amazing our bodies are helped empower me to feel confident and comfortable being fully myself. I think it can do the same for others, too. My takeaway: There is greatness in our grossness.
Angier is probably the most poetic, yet fun science writer around. She could even make the anatomy of a rug sound fascinating, so it is with a subject such as the woman’s body that she was able to truly soar. It’s a science book that you won’t be able to put down. I read it all in one day while belly flopped over my bed. Interpreting female body facts through a feminist lens – I mean, 8,000 nerve endings in the clitoris! Tell me more about that!
This book brings to the understanding of the female body the talents of one of the most gifted science writers in English. Beginning with the egg & ending with the love of the female body is the template in this witty, searching, gleefully opinionated book. 'The idea of the body as a package of discrete organs, each operating independently of one another, is fast becoming outmoded & nearly useless. In fact, the interactions between organ systems are what count; they make us who we are,' says Angier. These interactions have stories to tell about the sources of aggression & sexuality,…
As a hospital clinical lab director, I have a mission to promote the value of my profession. Are we more important than our soldiers protecting our country? Politicians who make laws? Judges who help maintain law and order? I argue that the health of our families is near or at the top of our priorities. While we ask our doctors to achieve this goal, they ask us every day to help them. The lab is not about boiling tubes and colored flasks. The 8 books I have written and the 5 that I have selected illustrate, in an entertaining manner, who we really are and why we matter.
Dr. Maisel is a media giant. First and foremost, he is a cardiologist and scientist. His work on cardiac biomarkers for heart failure laid the groundwork for clinical lab testing that is conducted in every hospital in the world today. Besides his hundreds of medical and scientific publications, he is a local stand-up comic, a social media influencer, and an author of medical thrillers.
I like this book because it shows the bad side of the dark side of medicine, i.e., where profit and ego are prioritized over ethics. Maisel interweaves numerous accurate references to the importance of lab tests into his story.
Other medical books trivialize how the lab works. Doctors really don’t just go there, randomly look at a microscope slide, and have a diagnostic “aha” moment.
I live in Madison, Wisconsin, and when I’m not reading my way through a tall stack of library books, I love to exercise and explore the outdoors, particularly in the Northwoods and in the Driftless Area (Google it—it’s the coolest!). My debut novel, Crossing the Pressure Line, is about identifying the lifeboats that have the power to save us during turbulent times. One of my own personal lifeboats is nature. I spend time outdoors every single day, even when the temperature is below zero, because I find deep peace in breathing fresh air, using my muscles, and watching for signs of wildlife.
I love books about smart and curious girls, and Charlotte, the main character of You Go First, fits the bill. She struggles with tricky middle-school friendships and her father’s declining health, but she keeps herself afloat emotionally by studying all sorts of interesting things, like sea creatures, wild animals, earthquakes, and geology. She maintains a collection of rock specimens on her dresser, and the sparkling hunks of Egyptian quartz, hematite, and feldspar remind her of her dream of studying minerals and gemstones at the base of a pyramid or volcano when she grows up. Charlotte is unapologetically herself, and her unwavering connection with the earth and its treasures is her saving grace during a very rough stretch.
Funny and poignant, Newbery Medalist and New York Times bestseller Erin Entrada Kelly's national bestseller You Go First is an exploration of family, bullying, word games, art, and the ever-complicated world of middle school friendships.
In a starred review, School Library Journal wrote that Erin Entrada Kelly can "capture moments of tween anguish with searing honesty."
Twelve-year-old Charlotte Lockard and eleven-year-old Ben Boxer are separated by more than a thousand miles. On the surface, their lives seem vastly different-Charlotte lives near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, while Ben is in the small town of Lanester, Louisiana.
I have been writing about James Baldwin for over twenty years and have been reading him since my teens. My father saw the writer debate the conservative polemicist William F. Buckley Jr. at the University of Cambridge in 1965, and I’ve been hooked since he told me about that event. I’ve written three books on Baldwin, scores of articles, and book chapters, and I co-founded the journal James Baldwin Review a decade ago. It's been wonderful to see Baldwin gain popularity over the last decade, and I hope that more people continue to read his essays, novels, plays, and poetry.
I remember reading a review of Baldwin’s fourth novel in the New York Times, which described this book as “a disaster in virtually every particular—theme, characterization, plot, rhetoric.” Ouch. For me, this novel, though uneven, is an important work in which Baldwin explores his commitments as a queer activist and artist, something that most reviewers missed at the time.
During the Civil Rights Movement, Baldwin was nicknamed “Martin Luther Queen,” and he received vicious broadsides about his sexuality from the likes of the Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver. Tell Me writes back to Cleaver and his cohort. As I’ve found with all of Baldwin’s writing, it’s worth sifting through some of the weaker writing to find passages that surprise and delight. “[If] one can live with one’s own pain, then one respects the pain of others, and so, briefly, but transcendentally,” Baldwin writes, “we can release each other from…
In this tender, impassioned fourth novel, James Baldwin created one of his most striking characters: a man struggling to become himself.
'Everyone wishes to be loved, but in the event, nearly no one can bear it'
At the height of his theatrical career, the actor Leo Proudhammer is nearly felled by a heart attack. As he hovers between life and death, we see the choices that have made him enviably famous and terrifyingly vulnerable. For between Leo's childhood on the streets of Harlem and his arrival into the world of the theatre lies a wilderness of desire and loss, shame…
I've been in love with biology since first playing with earthworms and marveling at the sprouting of radish seeds as a five-year-old. Further interest and curiosity led me to positions as nature counselor at summer camps and an eventual college degree in biology. Medical school was at times tedious, but the efficient, compact, durable mechanics of the musculoskeletal system totally engaged my interest. A residency in orthopedic surgery and a fellowship in hand surgery were natural follow-ons. My other passion is a love of teaching, taking a learner from where ever their understanding is presently and guiding them to what they need to know next. And they should have fun in the process.
Since zoologist Bill Schutt previously wrote the very popular Cannibalism, A Perfectly Natural History, you might expect that his more recent expose of the heart would be equally wide-ranging, engaging, and touched with macabre. It is.
With clarity and wit, Schutt describes circulation from worms to bats to whales along with the curious adaptations that explain why frog hearts can freeze solid and resume function and why the blood of horseshoe crabs is favored by researchers. Schutt not only describes this living pump across the animal kingdom but also through time as philosophers and scientists have pondered, and eventually discovered, its true function.
If you have an interest in biology, history of science, or your own inner workings, Pump will make your heart throb.
"Fascinating . . . Surprising entertainment, combining deep learning with dad jokes . . . [Schutt] is a natural teacher with an easy way with metaphor.”—The Wall Street Journal
In this lively, unexpected look at the hearts of animals—from fish to bats to humans—American Museum of Natural History zoologist Bill Schutt tells an incredible story of evolution and scientific progress.
We join Schutt on a tour from the origins of circulation, still evident in microorganisms today, to the tiny hardworking pumps of worms, to the golf-cart-size hearts of blue whales. We visit beaches where horseshoe crabs are being harvested for…
All my life, books have been a safe space for me to explore emotions, recognize that what I’m experiencing is universal, and see that we can cope with difficult situations. As I pursued my MFA in Writing, I studied and wrote books that address heavy topics in hopeful ways. As Matt de la Pena says, “I can’t think of a safer place to explore complex emotions … than inside the pages of a book.” The picture books I have chosen address the heavy topic of loss in sensitive, hopeful, and empowering ways. I hope these books will touch your life as much as they’ve touched mine.
Oliver Jeffers is a master storyteller. Like the girl in this story, when I lost my father, I wanted to build walls to protect myself from the pain of grief so my heart could never hurt so much again. It took time to find a way to open my heart again and continue to find wonder.
Reading The Heart and the Bottle felt like reading my own story, like Jeffers understood me. With sparce text and simple, but poignant, illustrations, Jeffers clearly shows the process of healing from loss.
Award-winning picture book star Oliver Jeffers explores themes of love and loss in this life-affirming and uplifting tale.
Once there was a girl whose life was filled with wonder at the world around her... Then one day something happened that made the girl take her heart and put it in a safe place. However, after that it seemed that the world was emptier than before. But would she know how to get her heart back?
In this deeply moving story, Oliver Jeffers deals with the weighty themes of love and loss with an extraordinary lightness of touch and shows us,…
As well as being an author of romance and an upcoming thriller, I am an avid reader. I’ve been passionate about books since I was a little girl, and I read a ton every year…often reading several at any given time. Books are my favorite pastime and my favorite subject to talk about, hands down. I did a podcast for several years—Living in the Pages—where I talked to authors from all over the world about their books and their process in writing. My TBR (to-be-read) list is never-ending.
Reckless Memories is the first book in the standalone Wrecked series. Ford and Bell will capture your heart with their second chance at love. There’s angst and tension and a swoon-worthy love story brewing amidst suspenseful moments. If you love a good romance with Nora Roberts’ feels, you’ll enjoy this story!
I loved him before I knew what the word meant. From skinned knees to first dates and everything in between. But he was never mine to love.I settled for friendship, even though I always wanted more.That was before. Before he ripped my world apart and didn’t bother sticking around to help me pick up the pieces. I knit every last shred back together all on my own. And I’ve all but forgotten his name.Now, he’s back, and everything is torn apart once more. But he’s not the only one doing the tearing this time. And there might be no stopping…
