MUST READS   | Daily Mail Online

Primate Change

By Professor Vybarr Cregan-Reid

(Cassell £9.99, 400pp)

‘If you think you’re you, think again,’ warns Professor Vybarr Cregan-Reid in his thought-provoking history of the human body.

We all have our own unique DNA code, but the way it performs depends on our environment.

Here, Cregan-Reid lists the modern maladies unknown to our ancestors, from ingrowing toenails to sleep disorder.

We think of good health as a steadily improving benefit of modern science, but Cregan-Reid argues that our sedentary lifestyle has made us martyrs to back pain and obesity.

The message may be stark, but this book proposes simple remedies: walk more, get a dog and let your kids play outdoors.

Checkpoint Charlie

By Iain MacGregor

(Constable £10.99, 352pp)

It is almost 60 years since the Berlin Wall split the city into West and East, dividing families, lovers and even buildings.

For 3.3 million Berliners, when they woke up on Sunday, August 13, 1961, life had changed without warning. Iain MacGregor traces the story of the wall through eyewitness accounts, from the bride in her wedding dress waving forlornly to her parents on the Communist side of the barrier, to the dramatic night of November 9, 1989, when the wall came down and the famous Checkpoint Charlie crossing-point became a historical monument.

This is as convoluted and deadly as the plot of a novel by John le Carre, but all too real.

SAS Shadow Raiders

By Damien Lewis

(Quercus £8.99, 416pp)

As World War II was declared in 1939, British Intelligence steadfastly refused to believe in the superiority of German radar.

By 1942, however, the British war effort was in need of a morale-boosting success, so Winston Churchill authorised a raid by special forces on a radar installation at Bruneval, on the Normandy coast.

Operation Biting, led by Major John Frost, was a triumphant success. A Wurzburg radar array was captured and the daring raid had fateful consequences for the course of the war.

Damien Lewis’s bestselling account chronicles the operation’s brilliant planning and execution, but also the human cost of warfare.