Michael Holdrege’s new book, From Mechanism to Organism — Enlivening the Study of Human Biology (Waldorf Publications, 2022) draws on the author’s lived experience in teaching science to adolescents for more than three decades. Written especially to the teacher (or parent) of middle or high schoolers, the 240-page hand-illustrated text succeeds in being both an engaging primer on the wondrous interwoven processes that constitute the human organism and a pedagogical advisor for creating curriculum that nurtures active learning and sound judgement. Holdrege’s chapter on the cardiovascular system, for instance, not only charts the course of blood flow in the body, but the topic also becomes a means to “help students develop more fluid, dynamic thinking that is not satisfied with easy, quick, one dimensional judgments.” In other chapters, he shows how to present students with concrete phenomena that appear to be riddles; such mysteries often awaken an eagerness to study phenomena in search of answers. With an enlivened, contextual approach to science education, the book schools an independent way of thinking as much as it does the subject of human biology. — Elaine Khosrova