Here are 61 books that Plucked fans have personally recommended if you like
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I am a curious, passionate, and introspective woman. My values have led me to a quest to have a profound impact on the world and leave a legacy of healing. Each book on my list has profoundly impacted me and led me to challenge my values, rethink my priorities, heal my inner turmoil, and use my lived experience to help others lead a more meaningful life.
I love this book and recommend it to people struggling with negative body image.
Sonya Renee Taylor teaches that we are all connected and that self-judgment in one person extends to the judgment of all people. I found myself digging deeply into the roots of any critical views that I might have held of my own body and then challenging them. Ultimately, it helped me embrace body neutrality and, ultimately, body liberation.
"To build a world that works for everyone, we must first make the radical decision to love every facet of ourselves...'The body is not an apology' is the mantra we should all embrace." --Kimberlé Crenshaw, legal scholar and founder and Executive Director, African American Policy Forum
"Taylor invites us to break up with shame, to deepen our literacy, and to liberate our practice of celebrating every body and never apologizing for this body that is mine and takes care of me so well." --Alicia Garza, cocreator of the Black Lives Matter Global Network and Strategy + Partnerships Director, National Domestic…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
My interest and curiosity in this topic primarily came from life experience: not fitting in as a gangly Asian girl growing up in white suburbs and picked on for how I looked, working as a teen model in the late 1990s and early aughts, becoming a mother to three girls while opening up NPR’s first-ever bureau and living in Seoul, South Korea, the plastic surgery capital of the world. Ever since graduating from The University of Missouri-Columbia’s School of Journalism, I’ve been a professional journalist. Most of my career has been as an NPR correspondent, but I’ve also worked as a reporter for VICE and appeared in The Atlantic, WIRED, Slate, and numerous other publications.
As the author and philosopher Heather Widdows makes clear, one of the big reasons why appearance has come to mean so much to us, and we spend so much time, energy, and resources on upgrading our looks, is because physical beauty has wrongly become conflated with worthiness and character.
In other words, we assume if you look good, you’re a good, moral person. In this comprehensive yet fast-paced read (which laid an academic groundwork for a lot of the reporting in my own book), Widdows connects the dots between ethics and beauty and makes the case for why we should resist the increasing demands of beauty ideals.
How looking beautiful has become a moral imperative in today's world
The demand to be beautiful is increasingly important in today's visual and virtual culture. Rightly or wrongly, being perfect has become an ethical ideal to live by, and according to which we judge ourselves good or bad, a success or a failure. Perfect Me explores the changing nature of the beauty ideal, showing how it is more dominant, more demanding, and more global than ever before.
Heather Widdows argues that our perception of the self is changing. More and more, we locate the self in the body--not just our…
I’m a Rutgers professor of psychology and a body image scientist. Growing up, I was a dancer and learned to be dissatisfied with my body at a young age. These concerns inhabited so much mental space during my adolescence that I ultimately began to study these issues in college as a way to better understand myself and others who had similar experiences. I’ve been doing research on body image and eating behaviors for over 25 years now and write books about these topics to help other kids and adults who may be struggling with these issues. Can you imagine what we could accomplish if we all felt comfortable in our own skin?
I love this book for the personal stories. Virginia is a journalist who has written about health issues for over a decade (i.e., not a psychologist or nutritionist). She knows how to engage readers while teaching them a ton of valuable information about raising kids to have a healthy relationship with food and their bodies.
Virginia is unafraid to challenge the status quo and get readers to think differently about essential topics beyond parenting.
Change the way you talk about food, weight, and self-worth, forever.
We live in a world designed to make us hate our bodies. By the time children start school, most have learned that 'fat' is bad. As they get older, many pursue thinness to survive in a society that ties their value to their size. Parents worry both about the risks of their kids fixating on unrealistic beauty…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
My interest and curiosity in this topic primarily came from life experience: not fitting in as a gangly Asian girl growing up in white suburbs and picked on for how I looked, working as a teen model in the late 1990s and early aughts, becoming a mother to three girls while opening up NPR’s first-ever bureau and living in Seoul, South Korea, the plastic surgery capital of the world. Ever since graduating from The University of Missouri-Columbia’s School of Journalism, I’ve been a professional journalist. Most of my career has been as an NPR correspondent, but I’ve also worked as a reporter for VICE and appeared in The Atlantic, WIRED, Slate, and numerous other publications.
If you are looking for a character-driven novel that takes you to modern Seoul and gets into the personal and social motivations for the cosmetic procedures that go unquestioned in South Korea, look no further than Frances Cha’s debut.
It’s an engrossing read with layered characters who are easy to root for, and a text that goes a long way to help us understand how the motivations for upgrading ourselves are not limited to just those on the other side of the Pacific.
A riveting debut novel set in contemporary Seoul, Korea, about four young women making their way in a world defined by impossible standards of beauty, after-hours room salons catering to wealthy men, ruthless social hierarchies, and K-pop mania
“Powerful and provocative . . . a novel about female strength, spirit, resilience—and the solace that friendship can sometimes provide.”—The Washington Post
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Time • NPR • Esquire • Bustle • BBC • New York Post • InStyle
Kyuri is an achingly beautiful woman with a hard-won job at a Seoul “room salon,”…
I am an award-winning children’s picture book author who writes stories about obstacles children encounter, focusing on the emotional and mental health of the character so children facing similar situations are able to relate. I have been writing poems and short stories since I was a child and all of my stories are written in rhyme. I love reading a rhyming book out loud and listening to the story unfold.
Parts is a hilarious and fun tale about a boy who thinks he is falling apart. After his toes start peeling, his tooth falls out, and he finds fuzz in his belly button, he thinks he will most likely have to be held together by duct tape. As the story unfolds, the boy’s parents realize they never told him all of these things are normal and soothe his worries. The rhyming scheme of this book is incredible and the illustrations capture the fun-loving nature of the message.
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I just don't know what's going onOr why it has to beBut every day it's something worseWhat's happening to me?So begins this uproarious new story from the best-selling creator of No Jumping on the Bed!,Green Wilma, and other popular books. The young narrator has discovered a disturbing trend: There's fuzz in his belly button his toes are peeling and something just fell out of his nose. The last straw is a loose tooth, which convinces him of the awful truth his parts are coming unglued!Parts deals with a subject of deepest interest to every young child: the stuff our bodies…
I didn’t always know that I wanted to be a doctor, perhaps because there were no doctors in my family, and I did not even realize that I wanted to (or could) go to medical school until I was almost done with college. Once I did realize this, however, it became immediately obvious to me that being a physician (a surgeon) was what I wanted to dedicate my life’s work to, and I have been passionate about it ever since. Probably the topics I am most passionate about after surgery are education, books, reading, poetry, etc., so this book lets both these passions dovetail beautifully!
This entire Magic School Bus series has also been a favorite of ours with our kids. I love the way that the bus goes inside of the human body and gets up close and personal with the cells of the human body. I remember thinking about how it made the difficult-to-see and -imagine immune system easy to picture in the mind of the reader.
THE MAGIC SCHOOL BUS PRESENTS THE HUMAN BODY is a photographic nonfiction companion book to the original bestselling title, THE MAGIC SCHOOL BUS INSIDE THE HUMAN BODY.
INSIDE THE HUMAN BODY taught thousands of kids about the incredible systems that work together to make the human body function. what makes us who we are. MAGIC SCHOOL BUS PRESENTS THE HUMAN BODY will expand upon the original title with fresh, updated Common Core-aligned content about our amazing bodies. With vivid full-color photographs on each page and illustrations of the beloved Ms. Frizzle and her students, the Magic School Bus Presents series…
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…
I’m a traditional sculptor with more than 25 years of experience. Being a dyslectic student in the 2000s, I developed a systematic approach to translating medical anatomy texts into visual information that I could use while sculpting. All the anatomy books for artists at the time were text-centered. My reference sketches became quite popular among colleagues. It was clear that visual artists perceive information best when it’s visual, and that is how I got the idea for my first book. Now the Anatomy for Sculptors handbooks are bestsellers among visual artists striving to better understand the human form.
While the West was busy with postmodernism, the Soviet world cultivated social realism based on the 19th-century figurative tradition of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. East Germany was no exception with its own figurative tradition at Dresden Academy of Fine Arts. Gottfried Bammes was a professor of art there, and he further developed classical anatomy studies by introducing a more scientific approach. Illustrations in Der Nackte Mensch are precisely measured and reliable, and each of them introduces a new way to look at human anatomy. Concepts such as wire-framing and splitting organic form into geometric shapes appear here. This book is full of ideas, and it has been a huge influence on how I perceive human anatomy. Gottfried Bammes is, in my opinion, the greatest anatomist of the 20th century!
Gottfried Bamme - The naked man. Hand and textbook of anatomy for artists VEB Verlag of Art | 1982 | ISBN: 3364000166 | German | 480 pages Shown with special reference of their own tasks, objectives and methodological problems. With around 840 individual anatomical drawings by the author, over 120 examples of masterpieces of the fine arts, model 190 single shots and many students work.
Microbial ecologists once had the luxury of no one caring about their work. My colleagues and I had been busy showing that there are more microbes than stars in the Universe, that the genetic diversity of bacteria and viruses is mind-boggling, and that microbes run nearly all reactions in the carbon cycle and other cycles that underpin life on the planet. Then came the heat waves, wildfires, droughts and floods, and other unignorable signs of climate change. Now everyone should care about microbes to appreciate the whole story of greenhouse gases and to understand how the future of the biosphere depends on the response of the smallest organisms.
The multitudes of this book are not the ones envisioned by Walt Whitman. Rather, they are bacteria, viruses, protozoa, and other microbes that each of us carries. The human body is more microbial than human, with bacteria alone outnumbering human cells by almost 10 times.
As Yong puts it, “We cannot fully understand the lives of animals without understanding our microbes and our symbioses with them.” Not just the lives of animals, but of plants too, as this book makes clear.
With advanced degrees in biochemistry and an award-winning stint as a writer at The Atlantic, Yong has the chops to get the science right and the skills of a journalist to weave the science and sketches of scientists together into compelling stories. The book’s subtitle is a nod to Darwin (“There is grandeur in this view of life”) and gets at the big-picture perspective gained by looking at…
THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER FROM THE WINNER OF THE 2021 PULITZER PRIZE
Your body is teeming with tens of trillions of microbes. It's an entire world, a colony full of life.
In other words, you contain multitudes.
They sculpt our organs, protect us from diseases, guide our behaviour, and bombard us with their genes. They also hold the key to understanding all life on earth.
In I Contain Multitudes, Ed Yong opens our eyes and invites us to marvel at ourselves and other animals in a new light, less as individuals and more as thriving ecosystems.
Ever since I traveled to Ethiopia as a child and saw its forms of Christianity, I’ve been fascinated with the ways that a religion that seems to be “pure” and ethereal actually gets mixed with folk traditions. I came to specialize in the ways that Egyptian Christianity became Egyptian. But I have also noted this phenomenon throughout religions: Buddhism, Judaism, and Islam all assimilated themselves to particular regions and village expressions. This dynamic exchange between the “great tradition” and resilient local traditions is fascinating to trace even today when many leaders claim that nothing exists except for pure religious teaching. But historians of religions know that every religion is constantly “syncretizing.”
Where most people imagine Christian belief and experience as something that takes place in the heart and mind, Cox Miller looks at the many ways that early Christianity worked through the senses.
Touch and taste, the visual experience of spectacle and image, the scents of churches and tombs, and the powerful presence of material “things” like relics all rendered Christianity a religion of physical experience more than mindful faith.
With few exceptions, the scholarship on religion in late antiquity has emphasized its tendencies toward transcendence, abstraction, and spirit at the expense of matter. In The Corporeal Imagination, Patricia Cox Miller argues instead that ancient Christianity took a material turn between the fourth and seventh centuries. During this period, Miller contends, there occurred a major shift in the ways in which the human being was oriented in relation to the divine, a shift that reconfigured the relationship between materiality and meaning in a positive direction.
The Corporeal Imagination is a groundbreaking investigation into the theological poetics of material substance in…
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
I have always been interested in the overview, the joined-up, the patterns, trends, and directions rather than the details of things. As a biologist, this led me to study animal behaviour rather than molecules. Great things come from the cross-overs between disciplines. Bridges are there to be made between islands of knowledge. Both my books (Wild Health and Another Self) are books that bridge a huge divide between knowledge acquired from reductionist research and that gained by experience. We humans use both.
I loved the way Guy Claxton joined the dots between so many separate scientific disciplines.
He is (I believe) a professor of linguistics, yet he dove into human biology with clarity and gusto, presenting an accessible description of an extremely complex concept—that intelligence incorporates our whole body, not just our brain.
An enthralling exploration that upends the prevailing view of consciousness and demonstrates how intelligence is literally embedded in the palms of our hands
If you think that intelligence emanates from the mind and that reasoning necessitates the suppression of emotion, you'd better think again-or rather not "think" at all. In his provocative new book, Guy Claxton draws on the latest findings in neuroscience and psychology to reveal how our bodies-long dismissed as mere conveyances-actually constitute the core of our intelligent life. From the endocrinal means by which our organs communicate to the instantaneous decision-making prompted by external phenomena, our bodies…
