The Violinist’s Thumb: And Other Lost Tales of Love, War, and Genius, as Written by Our Genetic Code by Sam Kean
Sam Kean’s first book THE DISAPPEARING SPOON was my favorite book I read last year, so I was very excited to read this one, hoping that it would be chock full of the same behind-the-scenes science stories that so delighted me the first time.
It’s not a bad book. In fact, I’m hovering between “liked it” and “really liked it”. It has a lot of amazing stories in it. The spurious theory that Stalin may have wanted to breed a half-human half-chimpanzee super-army? Nuns doing genetic research in full habits? Neanderthal genomes mixed in with modern European descendants? It’s not just great stuff for reading, it’s also great stuff for telling your friends when you need small talk.
And yet, I didn’t enjoy this as much as the first book. I found it was taking me a long time to finish it, even though I brought it with me on a vacation. That’s a sign that I haven’t been super-excited about reading it. For one thing, while THE DISAPPEARING SPOON didn’t presuppose a deep understanding of chemistry (that I recall) there was more than one section in THE VIOLINIST’S THUMB that I couldn’t understand because I didn’t know enough of the science behind it.
The first half of this book felt a little slow. The main draw of the first book was the fascinating end notes, and I was horribly disappointed when the first few chapters’ end notes read like…well, like normal end notes instead of Terry Pratchett-quality end notes. They got better after a time, and by the time I got to the section where the sailors looking for the Northwest passage died from eating polar bear liver, I had determined to plunge on.
The latter half of the book definitely picked up. Kean writes about the human genome splicing project and all the drama behind it. I loved the stories of inbred royals and the perils of having children by your first cousin when your family is already sickly. Especially fascinating was the section on the connection between microbes and human genes, and the way Kean manages to segue into cat-hoarding and cross-breeding wasps.
I recommend this book for people who liked THE DISAPPEARING SPOON, which is to say, science fans who like lots of fascinating historical anecdotes, the dirty backstage gossip behind the shining spectacle of genealogy.
