"From the author of The Emperor of All Maladies, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and The Gene, a #1 New York Times bestseller, comes his most spectacular book yet, an exploration of medicine and our radical new ability to manipulate cells. Rich with Mukherjee's revelatory and exhilarating stories of scientists, doctors, and the patients whose lives may be saved by their work, The Song of the Cell is the third book in this extraordinary writer's exploration...

A Dartmouth anthropologist whose team discovered two ancient human species explores how our evolution toward bipedalism rendered us dominant, innovative, more compassionate, and more susceptible to health problems. Human are the only mammals to walk on two rather than four legs, a locomotion known as bipedalism. This has its drawbacks: giving birth is more difficult; our running speed is much slower than that of other animals; and we suffer ailments...

Perched at the tip of Europe, gazing across to the shores of Asia, Istanbul remains as much a city of crossroads as it has been for the past two millennia. The history of this fabled metropolis--known at first as Byzantion, then Constantinople, and now Istanbul--is glorious, grandiose, and astounding. No other city has stood at the center of world events for so long, a home to great empires and diverse cultures from the Greeks to the Romans, the Italians...

"The story of civilization from an entirely new vantage point--the six raw materials that have shaped and will continue to shape humanity's destiny. Sand, iron, salt, oil, copper and lithium: The struggle for these fundamental materials has created empires, razed civilizations, and fed our ingenuity and our greed for thousands of years. It is a story that is far from finished. Though we are told we now live in a weightless world of information, we...

"From hunting and gathering to GMOs and ultraprocessed foods, this expansive tour of human history rewrites the story of our species--and points the way to a better future"-- How humankind first hunted and gathered explains our emergence as a new species and our earliest technology. Our first food systems, from fire to agriculture, tell where we settled and how civilizations expanded. The quest for food for growing populations drove exploration,...

"Over the past century humankind has managed to do the impossible and rein in famine, plague, and war. This may seem hard to accept, but, as Harari explains in his trademark style--thorough, yet riveting--famine, plague and war have been transformed from incomprehensible and uncontrollable forces of nature into manageable challenges. For the first time ever, more people die from eating too much than from eating too little; more people die from old...