Non-fiction

For most of human history, death was a common, ever-present possibility. It didn't matter whether you were five or fifty - every day was a roll of ...

Over the past twenty years, evolutionary biologist Herman Pontzer has conducted ground-breaking studies across a range of settings, including pione...

'We're not Christians, Christ stopped short of here, at Eboli.' Exiled to a remote and barren corner of Italy for his opposition to Mussolini, Carl...

After all the books that have been written about sex, all the blogs and TV shows and radiO Q&As, how can it be that we all still have so many q...

With Expecting Better, award-winning economist Emily Oster spotted a need in the pregnancy market for advice that gave women the information they n...

Life expectancy in the United States has recently fallen for three years in a row--a reversal not seen since 1918 or in any other wealthy nation in...

Physician and biochemist Cate Shanahan, M.D. examined diets around the world known to help people live longer, healthier lives—diets like the Medit...

Across the world, 44 million people live with dementia. Hundreds of millions of people are affected by the dementia of parents, partners, siblings ...

illustrated by Landis Blair As a practising mortician, Caitlin Doughty has long been fascinated by our pervasive terror of dead bodies. In From Her...

Starting from the premise that lasting health requires a lifestyle that is counter to the short-term thinking and instant gratification prevalent i...

A generation gap has emerged between parents and their daughters. Mothers and fathers have little idea about the pressures and expectations they fa...

The coronavirus pandemic taught us something we ought already to have known: that care workers, supermarket shelf-stackers, delivery drivers and cl...

The heart lies at the centre of life. For cardiologist Sandeep Jauhar it is an obsession. In this fascinating history he interweaves gripping scene...

Why rely on drugs and surgery to cure you of life-threatening disease when the right decisions can prevent you from falling ill to begin with? How ...

Every month seems to bring a trendy new diet or a new fad to try in order to lose weight - but these diets aren't making us any happier or healthie...

Sontag wrote Illness as Metaphor in 1978, while suffering from breast cancer herself. In her study she reveals that the metaphors and myths surroun...

The story of medicine in India is rich and complex: uniting cutting-edge technological developments with ancient cultural traditions. Aarathi Prasa...

Modern medicine is exceptionally powerful, and has achieved unprecedented successes. But it comes at a price; individuals suffer from medicine's fa...

translated by A. N. D. Haksar Little is known about Vatsyayana, who is reputed to have composed the Kama Sutra "while observing a celibate's life i...

Illustrated by Philippe Bercovici In the Middle Ages, surgery was performed by barbers, owing to their skill with sharp instruments. In the mid-19t...

Mescaline became a popular sensation in the mid-twentieth century through Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception, after which the word "psychedeli...

During the US book tour for his memoir, Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens collapsed in his New York hotel room to excoriating pain in his chest and th...

Disease is the true serial killer of human history: the horrors of bubonic plague, cholera, syphilis, smallpox, tuberculosis and the like have clai...

New Aging invites us to take everything we associate with aging--the loss of freedom and vitality, the cold and sterile nursing homes, the boredom-...

For centuries mankind has waged war against the infections that, left untreated, would have the power to wipe out communities, or even entire popul...

Humanity has always been struck by pestilence and pandemics, from the plagues of ancient Egypt to the pox that ravaged Europe in the Middle Ages, t...

“People come to us for help. They come for health and strength.” With these simple words David Mendel begins Proper Doctoring, a book about what it...

If the post-war period was called the 'Age of Anxiety' and the 1980s and '90s the 'Antidepressant Era', we now live in Bipolar times. Mood-stabilis...

This comic by award-winning graphic novelist Sonny Liew and Hsu Li Yang from National University of Singapore Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health...

Our immune system is one of the great marvels of nature – and it holds the key to human health. Here, Professor Daniel Davis charts the groundbreak...

The effects of trauma can be devastating for sufferers, their families and future generations. Here one of the world's experts on traumatic stress ...

Ever since the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic, scientists have dreamed of preventing such catastrophic outbreaks of infectious disease. Yet, despi...

'It's a foreboding,' she said. 'A knowing that something is looming around the corner. Like how when the seasons change you can smell Fall in the a...

A deadly virus suddenly explodes into the population. A political movement gathers pace, and then quickly vanishes. An idea takes off like wildfire...

Forget the world that came before. The author of American Vertigo serves up an incisive look at how COVID-19 reveals the dangerous fault lines of c...

Simply put, forest bathing is the practice of walking slowly through the woods, in no hurry, for a morning, an afternoon or a day. It is a practice...

Anti-fatness is everywhere. In What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat, Aubrey Gordon unearths the cultural attitudes and social systems th...

For too long, women have been told that debilitating conditions following pregnancy are normal, to be expected, and something to just put up with. ...