Vitamin C: A 500-Year Scientific Biography from Scurvy to Pseudoscience is the compelling story of the history and science behind vitamin C.

Vitamin C begins with scurvy, which afflicted Europe for four hundred years and killed millions. The reasons that a disease whose cure was known from the outset persisted over that time are at once baffling and familiar, and these trials eventually lead to invention of the science of epidemiology. Author Stephen M. Sagar MD then chronicles the discovery of vitamins at the beginning of the twentieth century, a story that encapsulates the rise of a scientific approach to nutrition but with surprising twists and turns. As vitamin science became more acquainted with the mainstream, scientist Linus Pauling reached new heights of fame and influence by popularizing the practice of taking megadoses of vitamin C to prevent colds – a claim that was not necessarily backed by data. This kickstarted the growth of the $40 billion vitamin and supplement industry, which has since prospered all while ignoring science.

This unique and engrossing narrative reveals how medical science functions in the real world and how it has changed over the centuries. Featuring swashbuckling sailors, arctic explorers, penny-pinching bureaucrats, academicians with clashing egos, and intrepid scientists working in malaria-infested jungle laboratories, the story of C is in many ways the story of how science gets done (and undone). From the trial and error of early explorers to the scientific breakthroughs made by biochemists and the birth of the modern supplement industry, this revelatory book tells the story of how cherished beliefs, self-interest, and politics often intertwine with scientific progress.

On a run through the woods outside her north Georgia hometown, defense attorney Ama Chaplin encounters a mysterious hiker and recognizes him, too late, as a sociopath she successfully defended when he was a teenager. In the intervening seventeen years, Ama changed her name and moved to Atlanta, anxious to put her past behind her. Michael Walton, her young client, grew into a ruthless and inventive murderer. And now that he’s caught her, he can put a twisted, years-in-the-making plot into motion.

Neither of them knows that someone else saw her go into the woods alone: Eddie Stevens, whose daughter Hazel vanished on the same spot a year ago. The police think she ran away. Eddie believes the truth is much worse. Grieving and desperate, he’d planned to kill himself to return attention to his daughter’s cold case, but he can’t shake the feeling that something happened to Ama, the runner he saw disappear into the trees. When she doesn’t come back out, he heads into the woods with a loaded gun to check on her.

Meanwhile, the local police department’s newest detective connects the dots between two cold cases and begins to suspect he’s dealing with a serial killer—but time is running out to save Ama, and he’ll need to make some unlikely allies to face down the dangers lurking in the woods.

The first female translator of the epic into English in over 60 years, Stephanie McCarter addresses accuracy in translation and its representation of women, gendered dynamics of power, and sexual violence in Ovid’s classic.

Ovid’s Metamorphoses is an epic poem, but one that upturns almost every convention. There is no main hero, no central conflict, and no sustained objective. What it is about (power, defiance, art, love, abuse, grief, rape, war, beauty, and so on) is as changeable as the beings that inhabit its chapters. The sustained thread is power and how it transforms us, both those of us who have it and those of us who do not. For those who are brutalized and traumatized, transformation is often the outward manifestation of their trauma. A beautiful virgin is caught in the gaze of someone more powerful who rapes or tries to rape them, and they ultimately are turned into a tree or a lake or a stone or a bird. The victim’s objectification is clear: They are first a visual object, then a sexual object, and finally simply an object. Around 50 of the epic’s tales involve rape or attempted rape of women. Past translations have obscured or mitigated Ovid’s language so that rape appears to be consensual sex. Through her translation, McCarter considers the responsibility of handling sexual and social dynamics.

Then why continue to study Ovid? McCarter proposes Ovid should be heard because he gives us stories through which we can better explore ourselves and our world, and he illuminates problems that humans have been grappling with for millennia. Careful translation of rape and the body allows listeners to see Ovid’s nuances clearly and to better appreciate how ideas about sexuality, beauty, and gender are constructed over time. This is especially important since so many of our own ideas about these phenomena are themselves undergoing rapid metamorphosis, and Ovid can help us see and understand this progression. The Metamorphoses holds up a kaleidoscopic lens to the modern world, one that offers us the opportunity to reflect on contemporary discussions about gender, sexuality, race, violence, art, and identity.