<span class="a-text-bold">The #1 </span><span class="a-text-bold a-text-italic">NEW YORK TIMES</span><span class="a-text-bold"> Bestseller </span><span> </span><span class="a-text-bold">The basis for the PBS Ken Burns Documentary </span><span class="a-text-bold a-text-italic">The Gene: An Intimate History</span><span> </span><span class="a-text-bold">From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of </span><span class="a-text-bold a-text-italic">The Emperor of All Maladies</span><span class="a-text-bold"> - a fascinating history of the gene and "a magisterial account of how human minds have laboriously, ingeniously picked apart what makes us tick" (</span><span class="a-text-bold a-text-italic">Elle</span><span class="a-text-bold">) .</span><span> </span><span class="a-text-bold">"Sid Mukherjee has the uncanny ability to bring together science, history, and the future in a way that is understandable and riveting, guiding us through both time and the mystery of life itself." -Ken Burns</span><span>"Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee dazzled readers with his Pulitzer Prize-winning </span><span class="a-text-italic">The Emperor of All Maladies</span><span> in 2010. That achievement was evidently just a warm-up for his virtuoso performance in </span><span class="a-text-italic">The Gene: An Intimate History</span><span>, in which he braids science, history, and memoir into an epic with all the range and biblical thunder of </span><span class="a-text-italic">Paradise Lost</span><span>" (</span><span class="a-text-italic">The New York Times</span><span>) . In this biography Mukherjee brings to life the quest to understand human heredity and its surprising influence on our lives, personalities, identities, fates, and choices. "Mukherjee expresses abstract intellectual ideas through emotional stories ... [and] swaddles his medical rigor with rhapsodic tenderness, surprising vulnerability, and occasional flashes of pure poetry" (</span><span class="a-text-italic">The Washington Post</span><span>) . Throughout, the story of Mukherjee's own family - with its tragic and bewildering history of mental illness - reminds us of the questions that hang over our ability to translate the science of genetics from the laboratory to the real world. In riveting and dramatic prose, he describes the centuries of research and experimentation - from Aristotle and Pythagoras to Mendel and Darwin, from Boveri and Morgan to Crick, Watson and Franklin, all the way through the revolutionary twenty-first century innovators who mapped the human genome. "A fascinating and often sobering history of how humans came to understand the roles of genes in making us who we are - and what our manipulation of those genes might mean for our future" (</span><span class="a-text-italic">Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel</span><span>) , </span><span class="a-text-italic">The Gene</span><span> is the revelatory and magisterial history of a scientific idea coming to life, the most crucial science of our time, intimately explained by a master. "</span><span class="a-text-italic">The Gene</span><span> is a book we all should read" (</span><span class="a-text-italic">USA TODAY</span><span>) .</span>
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Interesting and Important
As others have stated, the writing is both clear and elegant. Modern genetics is a hugely important topic, but the future of genetics technology is murky. Mukherjee deals nicely with the complexities although there are bound to be disagreements about his conclusions and musings. More to the point, understanding modern genetics is far from easy especially for those of us without the appropriate scientific background. Toward the end of the book when he discusses many of the modern technologies the going gets rough. However, I have a fairly good lay understanding of genetics, and have read many attempts to explain how all this works. It's just hard work. There were certainly places where I didn't completely follow although perhaps a second or third reading might have done the trick. At any rate this is by far the best introduction to modern genetics although something like Genetics for Dummies would make a nice companion for help in clarification. The latter is somewhat too simplified (and now dated), but it is useful for relatively non-technical explanations. The author nicely integrates discusses individual cases including those from his own family which makes for a more interesting reading. He also does a superb job of bringing the history to life by focusing on individual scientists and their contributions. It would have been fun to read more about the various personality conflicts and rivalries, but such gossip while interesting is hardly central to the story. The early part of the book dealing with early genetics through Watson and Crick is engaging, and in fact I could hardly put the book down during the first half when the technical issues are not so complicated. The latter half is certainly less of a page turner, but there's just no way to give a reasonable explanation in page-turning mode. This book is certainly too long and too detailed for the causal reader, but it's brilliant for those of us willing to invest some time. Even the parts I didn't fully und...
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