With his close-cropped hair and three-day stubble, Nathan Wolfe looks every bit the warrior on the front line of a crucial battle. But Wolfe isn’t fighting a conventional war against other human beings. He is fighting to save the human race, seeking to discover and neutralize deadly viruses before they blossom into an epidemic. Wolfe, a Stanford biologist, is director of Global Viral Forecasting, an organization that identifies infectious diseases before they become full-blown pandemics. He is also the author of an eye-opening book, The Viral Storm, an account of the struggle to control the spread of lethal viruses.

Wolfe’s book is startling in its revelations of just how vulnerable we are to infectious outbreaks. He attributes our susceptibility to viruses to our early ancestors who chose to consume bacteria-laden animal flesh over plant life. More recently, once-contained diseases were able to spread from the moment Columbus and other explorers brought animals, insects and rodents from the Old World to the New, and vice versa. Modern air travel and the global trade of livestock and crops have accelerated the spread of viruses today.

What makes The Viral Storm more alarming is information on just how resourceful and adaptable disease-carrying microbes can be. They must find and attach themselves to a host—animal or human—to survive, then figure out a way to spread, most often through coughing, sneezing, skin-to-skin contact or blood transmission. And these microbes are resilient, constantly mutating to survive attacks from antibiotics and other enemies.

Fortunately, Wolfe is among a number of scientists who travel the globe trying to identify new viruses and prevent their spread. He shares his experiences and discoveries in the jungles of Africa and the South American rainforests as he hunts for the origins of new deadly diseases, and identifies new technologies being employed to stop future outbreaks. The Viral Storm will scare you, educate you and leave you with a sense of hope that science and public policy can improve world health and someday eliminate epidemics altogether.

Trim, athletic and recently retired, Dave Simon enjoyed playing tennis and was working hard to take his game to a new level. During a match, as he lunged to return a ball, he collapsed onto the court; though he tried to get up, he could not move his right arm or leg, and he couldn't speak to answer his tennis partner's questions. Just as he was struggling to find his voice, the door to the examining room snapped open and his doctor's voice greeted him, shaking Simon out of his daydream of being stricken by a stroke. When the doctor asked Simon about his decision to begin drug therapy for atrial fibrillation, the patient—vacillating between his terror of a stroke and the adverse side effects of such drugs on a good friend—simply replied that he had not yet decided to commence treatment.

In Your Medical Mind, a compelling study of the ways we make our decisions about personal health care, Dr. Jerome Groopman and Dr. Pamela Hartzband show that Simon is hardly alone in his ambivalence in seeking a course of treatment whose benefits must be balanced against its drawbacks. Drawing on interviews with a range of patients who have had to make decisions regarding cancer, heart disease and the end of life, the two doctors provide a useful chart of the approaches that individuals take to medical decision-making.

Some patients are maximalists who believe that they are making the best medical choices for themselves by embracing the full range of recommendations—tests, drug therapies, surgery—their physicians make in order to preserve health. Others are minimalists who often avoid treatment, try to use the fewest medications and the lowest dosages of those drugs, and select conservative procedures. Then there are believers who approach each situation with the optimism that there will be a successful solution; doubters approach treatment with profound skepticism and are often unwilling to take risks when the adverse consequences might outweigh the benefits of a procedure or therapy. While believers are most often maximalists and doubters most often minimalists, the authors point out that there are always exceptions to this characterization. Some patients have an orientation toward naturalism and seek out natural remedies or homeopathic treatments and even then partake of those quite sparingly.

With the advent of medical sites and patient blogs on the Internet, television and radio commercials about the promising benefits and the chilling side effects of drugs, conflicting advice from personal doctors and specialists, and the promise of natural remedies and therapies, patients now have more difficulty than ever before in making decisions about how to proceed after a difficult diagnosis or which procedures or treatments might be best for them in a certain situation. Groopman and Hartzband masterfully help us all navigate these choppy medical waters.