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.

Konner is an anthropologist and physician who spent time with the !Kung hunters and gatherers studying children. This book is based on the PBS show Childhood, and it is everything you might want to know about childhood because it traverses both biology and culture. A dense read, but worth it.

Nieboer did groundbreaking research on slavery outside the Atlantic world, and not the least on Southeast Asia. He was the first to propose a universal economic theory for the occurrence of slavery, namely that its existence was the result of a scarcity of labour in relation to the availability of land. After Evsey Domar expanded this argument to serfdom, it became known as the Nieboer-Domar hypothesis and has been widely cited both by historians and economic historians. In any talk about slavery and bondage in Southeast Asia I refer to this thesis to explain why slavery had practically disappeared in densely populated Java in the eighteenth century whereas it probably increased almost everywhere else in the Indonesian archipelago.

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.

I am deeply persuaded by psychoanalysis as a rational scientific theory of the unconscious mind which, if it exists as Freud describes it, has a determining role in nearly every aspect of individual and social life among ourselves and exotic others. 

But most scholars, feminists especially (of whom I consider myself one), even when they acknowledge Freud's genius, "then proceed to dismiss the whole business as hopelessly out of date and culture-bound." 

This collection of essays, a series of paired expositions by classic thinkers and eminent scholars in many fields in dialogue with each other, provides an in-depth overview of the debate about 'women and analysis.'