Book of Giants

Giants have walked through human imagination since we first told stories around fires. They tower in biblical texts and Greek mythology, in Norse sagas and medieval romances, in the newspapers that chronicled the tallest people who ever lived. Lanier traces the giant through millennia of myth, history, and science, asking why every culture has created these colossal figures and what they reveal about us. The book moves from legendary beings like Goliath and the Nephilim to historical giants whose extraordinary height was documented, finally examining the medical realities of conditions like acromegaly that produced some of the tallest humans known to medicine. It's a survey of one of humanity's oldest obsessions, examining where legend ends and documented fact begins. For anyone who's ever looked up at a skyscraper, read a myth, or wondered at the boundaries of human potential.