PositiveLondon Review of Books (UK)In Winegard’s punchy presentation, humankind has long been locked in deadly conflict with the bug ... There are better books on malaria—notably, Sonia Shah’s The Fever from 2010—but Winegard’s peppy style, and some aggressive marketing, have made his a bestseller ... Winegard is a Canadian-American military historian: the notion of mosquitoes as an enemy army comes naturally. So too do the passages of history he selects to illustrate the role of mosquito-borne disease in shaping world history ... Winegard isn’t wrong to see the mosquito as an actor in military history, but there’s a case for thinking about it in the context of environmental history and political history too.
Venki Ramakrishnan
PositiveLondon Review of Books\"Ramakrishnan’s account of the discovery of the ribosome has aspects of the picaresque ... [The book] is personal in a different way [from other sciene-driven accounts]. There are eccentric ‘personalities’ ... There is drama in the telling of the story, but the excitement doesn’t reside in the vivid personal narrative that made The Double Helix a bestseller; it is in Ramakrishnan’s descriptions of the often frustrating extended labour of ribosome research and the dogged persistence of ribosome researchers.\
John Donovan & Caren Zucker
PositiveThe New Yorker“In a Different Key is a story about autism as it has passed through largely American institutions, shaped not only by psychiatrists and psychologists but by parents, schools, politicians, and lawyers. It shows how, in turn, the condition acquired a powerful capacity both to change those institutions and to challenge our notions of what is pathological and what is normal.
