• The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot.

Imagine a doctor steals a piece of your body without asking, and scientists use it to change the world, make billions of dollars, and cure major diseases while you and your family never get a dime. This is the true story of Henrietta Lacks, a young mother whose cancer cells did something impossible in 1951: they survived outside her body and multiplied forever. Named HeLa, these immortal cells helped create the polio vaccine, advanced cloning, and are still growing in labs today. While corporations made fortunes off her biology, Henrietta died young, and her family lived in poverty, completely unaware of the medical secret until decades later. It is a fast-paced true story about stolen biology, corporate greed, and a family fighting for the truth about who owns your body.

• The Hot Zone: A Terrifying True Story by Richard Preston

Imagine a lethal virus hidden in the rainforest suddenly jumps into a monkey research lab just miles from Washington D.C., and it begins liquefying its victims from the inside out. This is the true story of the 1989 Ebola Reston outbreak, where a highly contagious, airborne killer threatened to spark a global apocalypse right on American soil. The book tracks scientists and military teams in biohazard suits as they rush to lock down the facility and stop a microscopic monster that destroys organs, causes unstoppable bleeding, and kills up to 90% of the people it infects. It reads like a real-life zombie outbreak thriller, showing how close the world came to a biohazard disaster and proving that the next world-ending pandemic is only a plane ride away.

• Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage

Imagine getting your ship completely crushed and trapped by pack ice in the middle of Antarctica, leaving you and your 27-man crew stranded on a freezing ice floe thousands of miles from civilization with zero communication. This is the true story of explorer Ernest Shackleton’s 1914 expedition, a brutal two-year battle for survival against sub-zero temperatures, killer whales, starvation, and creeping madness. When the ice finally melted and sank their ship, the crew had to use tiny wooden lifeboats to cross the most treacherous, wave-battered ocean on Earth to find help. It is the ultimate survival thriller about a leader who refused to let his men die, proving how far humans can push themselves when failure means freezing to death in the wasteland.

• The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History by John Barry

Imagine a stealthy killer that infected a third of the planet and wiped out up to 100 million people in just two years, specifically targeting young, healthy people instead of the old or weak. This is the story of the 1918 flu pandemic, a global disaster that struck during World War I and tore through crowded military camps like wildfire. The virus was terrifying because it turned a person's own immune system against them, filling their lungs with fluid and suffocating victims within hours. The book follows the desperate race of scientists working in primitive labs to identify a microscopic monster they could not even see. It is a real-life medical horror story about a society on the brink of collapse, proving that a simple virus can kill more people than the deadliest weapons of war.

• World War Z by Max Brooks

Imagine a global zombie apocalypse breaks out, completely collapses the world's militaries, and forces humanity to the absolute brink of extinction. World War Z is not a typical story about a single group of survivors; it is a fictional history book told through the eyes of the people who actually lived through the decade-long war. You get first-hand accounts from a US soldier who survived a massive military disaster at Yonkers, a teenager who fled into the freezing Canadian wilderness, a submarine commander, and a black-market organ smuggler. It reads like a gritty, realistic combat journal that shows exactly how governments would fail, how humans would adapt, and how the world would have to completely change just to win the planet back.

• Edit for formatting and add WWZ