RaveThe Wall Street Journal... fascinating ... The comparative anatomy of the heart might seem a forbidding premise for a book, but Mr. Schutt turns it into surprising entertainment, combining deep learning with dad jokes ... Mr. Schutt, a former professor of biology at Long Island University, is a natural teacher with an easy way with metaphor. He is at his most engaging when discussing the weird and spendthrift ingenuity of evolution.
Bill Bryson
RaveThe Wall Street JournalMr. Bryson’s latest book is a Baedeker of the human body, a fact-studded survey of our physiques, inside and out. Many authors have produced such guides in recent years, and some of them are very good. But none have done it quite so well as Mr. Bryson, who writes better, is more amusing and has greater mastery of his material than anyone else ... Mr. Bryson is a master explainer, with a gift for the pithy simile and all-encompassing metaphor ... Mr. Bryson’s love of language is often on display, and he can’t resist occasional indulgences on the origins of terms medical and anatomical ... Mr. Bryson’s account is enlivened by his excellent command of the history of medicine ... Mr. Bryson is brisk, provocative and entertaining throughout. As he covers vast realms of anatomy, physiology and medicine in this book, you might expect it to be rife with errors, but I am only able to find two.
Lindsey Fitzharris
RaveThe Wall Street JournalTo judge from The Butchering Art, a fine and long overdue biography of the great physician Joseph Lister by Lindsey Fitzharris, the answer might be a much more domestic corner of empire: the Victorian teaching hospital ... Ms. Fitzharris, a historian of medicine, is occasionally fuzzy on clinical matters ...she avoids the more problematic aspects of Lister’s career, most notably his opposition to female medical students... But her biography of Lister restores this neglected champion of evidence-based medicine to a central place in the history of medicine ...a formidable achievement — a rousing tale told with brio, featuring a real-life hero worthy of the ages and jolts of Victorian horror to rival the most lurid moments of Wilkie Collins.
Meredith Wadman
RaveThe Wall Street JournalDespite the importance of human diploid cell cultures to the history of science, they might seem to be the least promising of subjects for the casual reader. But Dr. Wadman, a physician who works as a reporter for Science magazine, puts them at the center of a riveting tale of scientific infighting, clashing personalities, sketchy ethics, and the transformation of cell biology from a sleepy scientific backwater to a high-stakes arena where vast fortunes are made.