When a Gene Makes You Smell Like a Fish

This book is very confused about its place in the world. The author uses overly complicated and jargon-y examples to explain the basic premises and theories of genetics.

If you're not familiar with genetics, it will be very difficult to understand the examples provided.

If you are very familiar with genetics (like me), you already know the basic themes of the book, and don't need the examples. However, you'll still probably find them hard to understand, even if you've studied them before.

It had a lot of interesting stuff (the placenta's origins in endogenous retroviruses was an "ooh" moment of something I didn't know) but also a lot of TLAs and other jargon, interspersed with slightly cutesy "human warmth" bits about her daughter and so forth. The various stories about people suffering from various genetically-determined diseases fitted in better and more effectively gave the human touch she was aiming for, I thought.

Overall, a slim volume with lots of interesting things packed in, but not in the top rank of popular science to keep and pass on to others.

An interesting enough look at human genetic problems, marred by unclear writing and poor editing. This is problematic in a technical discussion. Errors range from a sometimes-random distribution of commas to actually switching elements in a protein's name (fore example, writing "MeC2P" when "MeCP2" is correct) to leaving out words. In addition to these technical flaws, the author does a poor job of transitions between paragraphs and of associating each new section of content to a chapter theme. Her apparent lack of understanding of how to organize a paragraph further complicates matters. The effect is of discontinuous segments strung together. I'm sure I could make a chromosome joke about this if I were willing to work harder. The show more author slides into jargon in the later chapters, where these errors are also more frequent. Thus, I recommend the earlier chapters but not the latter. This is disappointing because topics she addresses are interesting. Ultimately, however, other authors express themselves better. show less