Welcome to Litsy!

Overall I enjoyed this book. There was a lot of information but Sam Kean has a way of breaking it down and making it entertaining. I will say that this one wasn‘t quite as approachable as The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeon- I‘m not sure if it was the subject matter or the deliverance of the material. Still an enjoyable read and I have sent it off to a fellow litten to enjoy.

I‘m so excited for round 7 of #lmpbc with a nonfiction category. I‘ve been trying to read more nonfiction and there is a lot of it on my TBR to pick from as well. I‘ve narrowed it down and I‘ll tag the other books in the comments. Let me know if any of these choices stand out to you all.

Sam Kean is to science non-fiction as Erik Larson is to history, he makes it exciting, interesting, really come to life. Taking a hard subject like DNA and genetics, Kean mixes science, anecdotes and history to make the ideas easy to grasp, and see how mankind came to be what it is today. 4 💥💥💥💥 out of 5.

A customer couldn't stop telling me about Sam Kean's books... so when I ordered one for her, I ordered this one about genetics for me. Genetics are fascinating to me and I haven't read many that were very good, fingers crossed for this one! The others are from my Saturday thrift shopping. I'm so excited 'Prep' was waiting for me 😁. I finished the arc for Sittenfeld's new book last week and now I'm ready for backlist reading 👐. #bookhaul #science

1. My most recent lace bookmark
2. I bought Violinists Thumb when I visited Powells Books several years ago. Still haven‘t managed to read it.
3. Vegetarian chili over fries.
4. Right now probably #freakyfriday
5. Ragtime by E L Doctorow. Haven‘t read it.

#humpdaypost

The irony is too rich not to point out. When arranging the different human races in tiers, from just below the angels to just above the brutes, smug racialist scientists of the 1800s always equated black skin with ‘subhuman‘ beasts like Neanderthals. But facts is facts: pure Nordic Europeans carry far more Neanderthal DNA than any modern African.

100 pages in , it is a very interesting book so far , but it deals with one of the most controversial issues of the modern age .

An interesting book that covers the history of how DNA was discovered, catalogues the ways in which it can mutate and go wrong, and ponders how humans will use their knowledge of DNA for scientific or medical ends. Recommended if you like Kean's other work.

8% of our genome isn't human at all: a quarter billion of our base pairs are old virus genes. Human genes actually make up less than 2% of our total DNA, so by this measure we're 4 times more virus than human.

Amazed to read about Tsutomu Yamaguchi, who survived the atom bomb attacks on both Hiroshima AND Nagasaki, and lived to be 93. (Not without health issues, but considering he was close to the epicentre both times, he was extremely resilient.)