Seeking investigative / medical stories
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Anonymous
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Hi all,
I just finished Hidden Valley Road and really enjoyed it. I also enjoyed The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, The Ghost Map, and Empire of Pain. Can you recommend more books with a medical / investigative topic? Thanks! |
Anonymous
| The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down - one of my favorites of all time. |
Anonymous
Oooh, good one! Not investigative, but Atul Guwande is a fantastic writer on medicine. |
Anonymous
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OMG, just came in here to recommend the spirit catches you. So wonderful.
More a story of malfeasance, but Bad Blood is an absolute banger of a book—you won’t be able to put it down. I love And the Band Played On—poignant, heartbreaking. |
Anonymous
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And any Oliver Sacks if you like neurological mysteries. Mary Roach (if you are a little squeamish, read the synopses). Mountains Beyond Mountains (more international development, but still a wonderful book), Emperor of all Maladies.
I did not enjoy the Code Breakers (Walter Isaacson on the women who invented CRISPR), although the story of that discovery is amazing. I also have Breath on my list, but haven’t read it yet. |
Anonymous
Do you have an opinion between And the Band Played on and How to Survive a Plague? I heard the former was great but there was a lot that was corrected in the later. I don’t know enough to know if that’s true. |
Anonymous
| Ingenious Pain (1996) by Andrew Miller. Fiction though, not fact. |
Anonymous
I didn’t read How to Survive a Plague. I’ve heard it’s excellent. What’s clear in Randy Shilts’ writing is that it feels so immediate—he was writing it within a decade of the first cases, and it was published in 1987. And so it’s therefore incomplete, and there’s a lot we know now that we didn’t know then (honestly, even as he was finishing the book the science, the sociology and the political and cultural environment of AIDS was changing). So in that way, it’s a little dated. But the immediacy and poignancy comes through and that’s what I love about it. |
Anonymous
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I loved Working Stiff by Judy Melinek -
Here's the AI overview: Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner is a memoir by Dr. Judy Melinek and her husband T.J. Mitchell that chronicles Melinek's two years of training as a forensic pathologist in New York City. The book provides a behind-the-scenes look at the daily life of a medical examiner, including autopsies, death scene investigations, and counseling grieving families. It also includes firsthand accounts of some of the most harrowing deaths in New York City, including the September 11 terrorist attacks, the anthrax bio-terrorism attack, and the crash of American Airlines flight 587. |
Anonymous
I love this genre and these suggestions. I love Abraham Verghese's nonfiction. I recommend My Own Country and The Tennis Partner. |
Anonymous
| The Radium Girls |
Anonymous
| The Emperor of Maladies |
Anonymous
| The Best Minds |
Anonymous
| Radium girls is heartbreaking but memorable and important! |
Anonymous
+ Infinity |