Although it might seem rather creepy, we are all teaming with microscopic organisms, collectively known as our microbiome. These organisms live on our skin, inside our bodies and sometimes inside our cells. They are way too tiny to see with the naked eye, but if our own cells were to mysteriously disappear, they would perhaps show up as a shimmering microbial flicker, outlining our vanished body.

These microbes should not be considered harmful. Microbes help unite us with our fellow creatures, connecting us to each other and the world, also known as symbiosis. In I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life, award-winning science writer Ed Yong (The Atlantic, National Geographic) takes a fascinating topic and illuminates it with attention-getting facts, descriptions and explanations. Spanning a period of two billion years, he goes from explaining how microbes helped create Earth’s first complex organisms and the ways their microbiomes have been exchanged ever since, to describing why formerly balanced environments such as coral reefs are now in danger, a disharmony referred to as dysbiosis.

Yong provides enlightening clarifications about the power wielded by these miniscule beings. Microbes are still viewed as unwanted, filthy germs by many people. But most are not harbingers of illness. The thousands of microbial species colonizing our guts are typically harmless, important components of our existence, helping us digest food, produce vitamins and break down toxins.

Scientists are discovering more and more about microbes every day. It’s a rapidly changing, uncertain and controversial field, one that includes concepts such as probiotics; a new surgical procedure known as fecal microbiota transplant (FMT), in which microbes are transplanted via donor stools; and the prospect of a terrifying post-antibiotic era due to overuse, which disrupts our microbiome and encourages the growth of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

A must-read for the curious and science-minded, Yong’s book helps guide us through this exciting landscape.

Invisible, insistent and inevitable, wind permeates our lives and cultures—from “Blowin’ In The Wind” to Gone With The Wind, from manned flight to the Dust Bowl. Bill Streever, whose earlier dissections of nature include the books Cold and Heat, begins his narrative by citing Daniel DeFoe’s account of the massive windstorm that devastated England in 1703. Still a record-holder for ferocity, it uprooted forests, sank entire fleets of ships and made windmills spin so rapidly that the friction set them ablaze.

Throughout history, Streever observes, people have aspired to learn the composition and course of winds. They were abetted in their curiosity by such technologies as the telegraph, weather balloons, anemometers and barometers, networks of fixed and mobile weather-reporting stations, radio, automated buoys, radar, weather satellites and computers. Among the forecasting pioneers he singles out for praise are Robert FitzRoy (who captained the ship from which Charles Darwin made his discoveries), William Ferrel, James Espy, Vilhelm and Jacob Bjerknes, Lewis Fry Richardson (a Quaker who abandoned forecasting when he saw it being used as a weapon of war), Jule Charney and Edward Lorenz.

To lighten his detailed explanations of how the imperfect science of understanding winds developed, Streever intersperses them with a running, present-tense chronicle of the voyage he and his wife (or “co-captain”) made in their sailing yacht from Galveston, Texas, to Guatemala, with the two of them constituting the entire crew. As one might expect, the wind figures prominently, and sometimes ominously, in their journey.

Today, data collected and transmitted through thousands of smartphones and fed into incredibly fast computers strive to make generally reliable weather forecasts even more accurate, Streever reports. But still the wind keeps its secrets.

If you liked The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, you’ll love Patient H.M.: Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets. Not only is this new book an endlessly fascinating account of medical history, but the author, Esquire contributing editor Luke Dittrich, has a deeply personal connection to the story.

In the early 1930s in Hartford, Connecticut, a bicyclist zoomed down a hill and hit a boy who had just stepped into the road. That collision was the likely cause of severely debilitating epileptic seizures that began to plague young Henry Molaison. They were so crippling—and uncontrollable by drugs—that in 1953, his parents agreed to brain surgery for their then 27-year-old son.

Neurosurgeon William Beecher Scoville removed most of Molaison’s medial temporal lobe, including his hippocampus. The patient’s seizures improved, but those “devastating and enlightening cuts” into his brain created a new problem: permanent amnesia. Unknowingly, Dr. Scoville had created “Patient H.M.,” who became one of the most important research subjects in neuroscience history. Though he died in 2008, his brain is still being studied, even sparking a custody battle between MIT and the University of California at San Diego.

Dittrich’s personal connection turns this already remarkable story into an extraordinary one: Dr. Scoville was his grandfather. Dittrich spent six years researching a saga fraught with family pitfalls. Scoville was a brilliant Yale professor with myriad accomplishments, but he was also a risk-taker whose love of cars and speed ultimately killed him. A man with a penchant for “fast results,” this gifted surgeon performed numerous lobotomies into the 1970s, well after they had largely gone out of fashion.

In riveting prose, Dittrich takes readers on an informative tour of everything from early mental illness treatments to neuroscience and neurosurgery. The result is a story filled with heartbreak and sweeping historical perspective.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with author Luke Dittrich.

This article was originally published in the August 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.