An Outsider’s Guide to Humans: What Science Taught Me About What We Do and Who We Are

First-time author Pang draws on her expertise as a scientist and on her experience as a person with autism spectrum disorder and generalized anxiety disorder to create an enlightening hybrid of popular science, memoir, and self-help. She begins by describing how, when younger, she found negotiating the world around her—and particularly the behavior of other people—baffling. Science, she writes, was “the key to unlocking a world whose door was otherwise closed to me,” and she believes the neurotypical and neurodiverse alike can benefit from looking at human nature scientifically. In tying scientific phenomena to human behaviors, she posits, for instance, that understanding thermodynamics can ease perfectionism, writing: “our efforts to create order in our lives do not exist in isolation, but in a messy context of people and inanimate objects, all with their own energetic needs”; and that cellular evolution offers a useful perspective on relationships, because, “like a stem cell, every relationship essentially begins as a generic, unspecialized entity.” By leavening scientific theory with personal anecdotes, Pang draws up a life guide that’s accessible and entertaining if not entirely applicable to all. Nevertheless, this is a unique take on life’s big questions. (Dec.)