Scan barcode
A review by carrie562
The Violinist's Thumb: And Other Lost Tales of Love, War, and Genius, as Written by Our Genetic Code by Sam Kean
2.0
UPDATE: I couldn’t help myself; I got the audiobook and finished it. The problem really is that the tone is all over the place. There is no clear sense of what the book is trying to do, or who the reader is. Sometimes he gets deep in the genetic weeds - I enjoy those parts - and sometimes he goes for cheap laughs and juvenile humor. There’s no through-line connecting the narrative from start to finish; it’s kind of all over the place, like a set of quirky “did you know?” anecdotes that (usually) relate back to genetics in some way.
7/8/23 It's time for me to admit defeat. As a genetics writer, I wanted to read this for professional reasons, but it's just not working for me. The attempts at humor often came across as forced and juvenile. There's no organizing principle running through the chapters, although I found some of the historical stories very interesting. He finally lost me for good in the chapter describing a Soviet project aiming to create a human-chimpanzee hybrid, in which he repeatedly refers to chimps as "monkeys." No, no, NO! That level of inaccuracy is not acceptable in a book purportedly about biology.
7/8/23 It's time for me to admit defeat. As a genetics writer, I wanted to read this for professional reasons, but it's just not working for me. The attempts at humor often came across as forced and juvenile. There's no organizing principle running through the chapters, although I found some of the historical stories very interesting. He finally lost me for good in the chapter describing a Soviet project aiming to create a human-chimpanzee hybrid, in which he repeatedly refers to chimps as "monkeys." No, no, NO! That level of inaccuracy is not acceptable in a book purportedly about biology.