Your Owner's Manual

I was recently given a copy of You: The Owner's Manual, authored by Dr. Mehmet Oz and Dr. Michael Roizen, two big-shot physicians from U of Chicago and Columbia, respectively. It's a big, interesting, plain-language tome of everything you need to live a life of strong preventive health. What separates it (and makes it better) than many similar books I've seen is (1) its strong emphasis on simple but thorough explanation ("oh ... so that's how that works"), and (2) its enormous volume of practical and immediately applicable advice (clean your ears this way, stretch after exercise that way, take aspirin like this).

The narrative simile for the book is "your body is like a house," and the advice is structured as such: as a user's manual for the body, with advice as useful as simple as a book that might explain how your furnace works and tells you how to deal with ice dams. But in this case, the advice makes you feel younger and live longer, and it's well worth reading.

(Also worth clicking through: Roizen's RealAge site and RealAge test, but take care to avoid the sales pitch unless you want it. I just took the test and, gladly, learned I'm 6.3 years younger than my "RealAge".)