Alive
- Author Gabriel Weston
- Narrator Gabriel Weston
- Publisher Random House
- Run Time 7 hours and 4 minutes
- Format Audio
- Genre Anatomy, Autobiography: science, technology and medicine, Medicine: general issues, Memoirs, Popular science.
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What to expect
Brought to you by Penguin.
A profound and provocative journey through the human body from the award-winning writer, broadcaster and surgeon.
What does it mean to live in a body? What stories can our organs tell?
For Gabriel Weston, there was always something missing from the anatomy she was taught at medical school. Medicine teaches us how a body functions, but it doesn't help us navigate the reality of living in one. As she became a surgeon, a mother, and ultimately a patient herself, Weston found herself grappling with the gap between scientific knowledge and unfathomable complexity of human experience.
In this captivating exploration of the body, Weston dissolves the boundaries that usually divide surgeon and patient, pushing beyond the limit of what science has to tell us about who we are. Focusing on our individual organs, not just under the intense spotlight of the operating theatre, but in the central role they play in the stories of our lives, a fuller and more human picture of our bodies emerges: more fragile, frightening and miraculous than we could have imagined.
Intimate, penetrating and original, Alive is an anatomy like no other, about our bodies and bonds, the richness and brevity of existence, and the thread of mortality that connect us all.
© Gabriel Weston 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025
Critics Review
An exceptional, beautiful and absolutely absorbing book. Gabriel Weston is one of the best writers around, and when it comes to medicine and anatomy she redefines the genre. ALIVE is a tour of human life and bodies, but she also brings her own body, in the context of her own life, into an absolutely compelling narrative; sex, pregnancy, asylum seekers, breast implants and hearts – especially the author’s own heart, in every sense. It is essential reading if you own a body and should be mandatory for all those who study them.
Beguiling and sophisticated
As Gabriel Weston demonstrates in this remarkable book, each organ of our body is a miracle of evolutionary imagination, performing tasks that are outlandishly creative and brilliant. An unusually compelling and illuminating book.
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