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This book is one of the best books I've ever read. I learned so much and have recommended it to so many people (and have given it as gifts). I learned things I would have never known...so many pieces came together in this book. I would suggest it to anyone who needs a break from their "novel" reading. Switch it up and read this book. You'll be glad you did!
This is a prime example of the problems with science books written for a lay audience. The author regularly presents hypotheses/hunches than he believes as if they're well-supported by scienceI picked this book up because it spent time on my field of study, infectious disease. The first chapter was okay, but then it just went downhill from there. The type 1 diabetes chapter that posits that it aids in survival in a cold climate is laughably implausible. Moalem states that "some scientists" belie...
Marketing looked like a complete ripoff of Freakonomics. Style reads like Freakonomics with a personal health/medicine spin. Too boldly mixes well accepted medical observations: Sickle Cell Anemia is related to genes that provide resistance to Malaria. Get one you're good, get two you're screwed.With absolutely left field speculation: African-Americans have high incidents of hypertension and heart disease due to a artificial selectional pressure exerted on them by their ancestors' passage across...
BEST. BOOK. EVER. One fascinating page after another crammed with explanations for all kinds of stuff that goes on in a person's body. He started right out by answering a question I've wondered about for years, and got bonus points for telling me my own wild guess was correct. He got to the childbirth part and I thought, oh, great, here's where the whole book goes splat -- BUT HE HAS NOT ONLY READ ELAINE MORGAN, HE GETS THAT SHE IS RIGHT! If only this book had been twice as long!
One of the best books I've ever read. Not only do the authors have a thoroughly entertaining writing style, they seriously expanded my understanding of evolution on both a macro and micro level. If I were back in college, this book might have inspired me to switch majors!
It was not a bad book and it was a quick read, but I was a little disappointed for two reasons.The first, not the authors fault, is that I didn't learn much new -- the general principles and ideas the author was articulating about biology, genetics, and evolution, were not really new to me, although some of his examples were new.The second was that I thought the author was playing a little too loose with facts. Even though the target audience was a popular audience, I don't think that is an excu...
This is a book which is simply incredible and super entertaining .It amazes me that human beings can live through such huge changesIt talked about how specific common diseases and conditions (like diabetes and high cholesterol) actually may have been naturally selected because they provided an adaptive advantage in a particular environment.Hemochromatosis may have helped Europeans to survive the black Death ,andDiabetes may have been there evolutionary solution to avoid freezing inthe ice age, A...
It's science -- made simple! I got to indulge my inner geek without having to overexert my brain cells. (Well, okay, I did have to read a couple of pages over again to get it, but hey, I was really, really tired that night.) Seriously, I was fascinated by the subject matter -- the interplay of genetics and disease -- and the writing style was wonderfully accessible to the lay reader. If I had read this book in high school (which would have been impossible, since these discoveries hadn't been mad...
Ask the man on the street about evolution, and assuming he doesn’t connect it to Pokemon, he’ll probably identify it as something that happened long ago. But creation is never finished, either underground where tectonic plates grind against one another, producing mountains, or above where endless forms most beautiful prowling around continue to change. We know this well from medicine, because the attempt to conquer a given disease is often frustrated by the sheer pace at which a given bacteria p...
I had to read this for my summer work for AP bio. I really enjoyed it, as I love learning about evolution. This book shows amazing connections between diseases and our natural ecosystems, and analyzes relationships with microorganisms and other living things. I learned a lot and was compelled the whole time.
I suppose I judged this book by it's cover, making it a little disappointing when I read it. The author also goes off on some random tangents that I found distracting. That being said, there were some interesting parts -- particularly the discussion of how many genetic diseases are with us because they offered a survival benefit to our ancestors.
This was published in 1997 and there is a blip between chapters and musical transitions. Everything out there is influencing everything else. Dancing and consuming with my eyes/ears Moalem’s Survival of the Sickest: A Medical Maverick Discovers Why We Need Disease was not as fluid yet intrigued me as how the human species adapts to the environment. A common disease does have an etiologic relationship to the cold, and such is Diabetes he states. Erudition via the way streptococcus has molecular m...
I really enjoyed this book. So much so that I looked up other books by the same author. It's a very interesting topic, and written in a way that us laypeople can understand. If you have a background in biology of any kind you might find this elementary. As a person who narrowly failed 10th grade Biology, this was not an issue for me. If I had read this in 10th grade it might have made me more interested in the subject.
Very good.As I wrote to Dr. Moalem,Dear Dr. Moalem,I found your book, Survival of the Sickest, on a table in the bookstore that employs me. The title and concept intrigued me. The material has proved fascinating, and, for the large part, very well researched. I am concerned, though, with a statement you make on page 87, regarding psoralen production in organically grown celery. It reads, Farmers who use synthetic pesticides, while creating a whole host of other problems, are essentially protecti...
This was the most interesting book I've read in a long time. I liked the breezy style- kind of 'popular science' approach. Covered a wide variety of diseases & conditions and the genetic & environmental reasons they have remained in the human gene pool. Background on how much of the human make-up is really not human at all but largely viruses in a symbiotic relationship was creepy but interesting. Very cool book. Read again in '08 for f2f discussion group.
I wish Moalem would have taught my Genetics 101 class, he did a much better job than my professor. This is definitely more of a book to make you ooh and ahh, which is to say that its not very scientific.Moalem would be shot dead by anyone who believed in logic. The man seems to love a good conspiracy, and he's great at telling them. I'm not saying that he's wrong all the time, but the way that this book could be written, in a less persuasive way, would be:There's a 20% chance that A is true; A i...
A slick production this is. The musical transitions are snappy and the narrator converts what might have been prosaic pitfalls to satisfying conversational tidbits. Yes, the book has sentences like, "Compromises, compromises." Probably, some readers will find the tone condescending. Even worse, some readers will feel they have read everything before. So why did I rate this book so highly? This is a wonderful book because it ties together disparate facts from the world of modern biology. Books li...
The thesis sounds interesting, but the author doesn't provide very many examples, and for those he does, the evidence is speculative at best. Do people have diabetes today because it "may" have helped during the ice age? Prove it. While he tries to explain the past, he offers no ideas as to how things may change now that the ice age is over and plague is rare. He cites his sources, but if you check them out, many turn out to be ordinary newspapers like US Today. These are not valid sources of s
The interconnectedness between disease and certain populations of individuals is extremely interesting and the writing in this book is very entertaining. However, I was bothered by the author's arrogance. It was almost distracting while reading -- the subtitle says it all..."A Medical Maverick Discovers...". "Medical Maverick" is a bold statement when really, the author did a bunch of research and none of his own experiments (or if he did, that wasn't clear from reading the book). And "discovere...
With our current pandemic lives, this book feels even more important. I highly recommend it. Whether you live with chronic illness or not.