A review by nate_meyers
I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life by Ed Yong

5.0

This book is outstanding! Ed Yong conducted an incredible amount of research, interviews, and site visits to gain a wealth of information about animal microbiomes. It took him six years just to land an interview with Jeff Gordon, the top microbiologist. I can attest that science writers can easily take this amount of information and create books/papers that are unreadable. That is not the case. Here, Ed Yong writes a clear, informative, well-organized, and helpfully-but-not-excessively-repetitive book. I have two minor complaints. 1) I wish the editor gave him more pages for pictures. The pictures that are included are wonderful. 2) Yong states that animals living at the bottom of the ocean returned from a surface ascent over the course of evolution. Is the evidence for this overwhelming? If not, Yong needs to at least add footnotes that are missing for this section.