Books like Letters from the Field 1925-1975 — picked by fans

I picked up The Hot Zone at 9pm and put it down at sunrise.

What gripped me wasn't just the terror—it was knowing every word is true. I found myself genuinely afraid in a way fiction has never affected me. Preston made me feel the fragility of the invisible line between a remote African cave and my own neighborhood.

I loved how the scientists became real people—flawed, brave, and completely unprepared for what they were facing—Ebola virus. When I wrote my own fact-based medical thriller, I strove to create a fact-based thriller using prescription drugs to create the relevance I found in The Hot Zone.

The book is still timely and relevant. It puts biological risk into perspective and highlights both human vulnerability and courage under extraordinary pressure.

Feynman reinforced my belief that curiosity is a superpower.

Relentlessly asking "why" and refusing to pretend I understand something I don’t is how I’ve lived my life. I never expected a Nobel laureate in physics to champion “fun." I felt vindicated by his willingness to question assumptions, challenge conventions, and loved that he followed his interests wherever they led.

As a learning curve junkie, I found a soul-mate in his curiosity-driven discovery and love of learning. I enjoyed that he approached complex problems with humor, creativity, and a refusal to take himself too seriously. His book reinforced my belief that some of the best insights come from asking unexpected questions and exploring beyond traditional boundaries, which I captured in the Lessons Learned after each chapter of my book.

I approached this book with dread and finished it with gratitude.

I didn't expect to enjoy a book about cancer, but I did. I loved how the book drew me into the morass of medical research. I felt disappointment with every setback and triumph with each breakthrough during a century of desperate and often futile efforts to tame cancer. At the end, I understood how science zigzags through obsession, heartbreak, and hope. I had these same experiences doing my fieldwork in Melanesia on Hepatitis B virus.

Reading The Emperor of All Maladies reinforced that my struggles are integral to science and gave me the confidence to tell my mistakes and what I learned from them to bring new light to the natural history of Hepatitis B virus and novel ways to reduce its transmission.

As an anthropology graduate student, I’d uncovered the story of Henrietta Schmerler’s murder by investigating an oblique reference to a student of Ruth Benedict’s who was murdered by the Apache.

No professor ever talked about the dangers of fieldwork and the risks of getting romantically involved with the people being studied. I toyed with this taboo while doing my fieldwork, like a moth to a flame, and fortunately survived.

I was thrilled when her nephew published the book detailing the complexities and nuances of her murder. I was troubled by the reflexive self-protection reaction of her sponsoring anthropology department—filled with professors who were famous pioneers in anthropology.

Henrietta’s story is complicated, and the retelling is honest and forthright—it was a model that I tried to honor in recounting my romantic experiences during fieldwork.

This collection of essays by one of the greatest anthropologists of the last century inspired a whole generation of historians—for example, Joan Scott and William Sewell, Jr. as well as myself. The essays also should appeal to the general reader because of their well-wrought style and wit. Drawing on Max Weber, Geertz treats cultures as symbolic systems and shows how they helped ordinary people make sense of the world. Far from wandering off into abstractions, he offers fine-grained descriptions of actual events, notably a Balinese cockfight in an essay that has been cited and debated endlessly among social scientists.

I found this to be an authentic voice of a Hopi girl and woman. She tells of her journey from village to boarding school and beyond into the mainstream culture. It is highly descriptive of traditional Hopi daily life activities. But, on a deeper level, it reveals the authentic emotions of a young Hopi woman who comes to see the value to be found in both worlds while enduring the heartache of not belonging wholly to either one.

What I learned from my research is that, for some, the boarding school experience was irredeemably destructive. For others, like Sekaquaptewa, it was a mixed bag. It offered her the skills to survive and ultimately help her community survive the lifelong onslaughts of the dominant culture.

A classic of ethnographic description and symbolic analysis based upon fieldwork among the Ndembu of Zambia—a must read for anyone interested in sociological and psychological implications of ritual belief and practice in a small-scale, non-literate, kinship-based society. 

A stellar example of what is lost by cancelling "colonialist" literature and discarding the very concepts of "culture" and "religion" as relics of Western intellectual imperialism. 

In 10 essays on color symbolism, circumcision rites, rites of passage, social dynamics, and more, Turner lays the groundwork for his proposition that ritual is the key to religion and religion is the key to culture. 

This book consists of two exquisite essays, "The Collective Representation of Death" and "The Pre-Eminence of the Right Hand: A Study in Religious Polarity," written by an "armchair" philosopher searching for the origins and essence of human existence in exotic places: he looked for the meaning of death in the mortuary rites of the Dyak in Borneo; and the source of dualistic thinking in human anatomy. 

The excitement of these works comes from recognizing ourselves in others, distant in time and space. They serve as a corrective and departure from the current exaggeration of cultures' uniqueness and national identities that lead, ultimately, to indifference about the fates of other peoples.

Malinowski's pioneering work on people of the Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea still holds a thrill because, after a century, it remains unique in its depth and precision. 

Malinowski was an aristocrat and a snob who, like the armchair thinkers he admired, considered himself a scientist after Darwin. But when World War I broke out, as a Pole in London, he risked deportation to Austria-Hungary or internment as an 'enemy alien'.

Instead, Malinowski remained 'stuck' in the Trobriands for the duration of the War where, with the scrupulousness of one trained in math and physics and the intensity of an 'imprisoned' participant-observer, he produced the first firsthand accounts of indigenous life.  

Though I am not an anthropologist, I devour ethnographies with a gusto that can only be attributed to disciplinary envy. There are several fascinating ethnographies of emotions and how they differ across cultures. Beatty’s book stands out among them for its rich ethnographic description as well as the sophistication with which he treats the relationship of emotion and culture.

He spots the limitations that lab experiments impose on studying emotions and suggests instead that we have to pay attention to the narratives in which emotions are situated, made, and deemed meaningful. And I rather like how he punctures “affect theory.”