Engaging survey of a diverse field

Kat Arney as both writer and narrator does a great job of both explaining a complex and (excuse the pun) evolving field and it's personalities, and bringing the latter to life through her engaging personality and delivery. Highly recommended PhD meets performer

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absolutely fascinating...

... but way over my head. this is a well told story but lost me in the technical parts. I will definitely be reading this against

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fabulously informative

Fascinating , well presented information. A great overview of the developments in this area of science.

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Excellent in depth look at genetics

Great book, excellently narrated. Goes into genetics in quite a bit of detail - so not for a reader who knows nothing about biology - but pays off nicely for those with a little bit of knowledge in genetics.

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3 people found this helpful

Excellent book which makes understanding genes easy

This is a great read, the author takes you on her journey of discovery in understanding genes. It's easy to follow and the examples given are easy also easy to understand and imagine.
I highly recommend this book

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2 people found this helpful

Informative and well presented

I enjoyed this immensely. It started out at a very basic level, but soon highlighted the intricacies of what we don't yet understand. The author's narration brings the subject to life with very good analogies and light-hearted banter. Never boring.

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Amazing, amazing book

I'm greatful for a great, popular explanation of the genome by a scientist. As a person who deals with scientific texts in routine, I know how valuable concise, yet intellectually honest texts are.

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Informative and current

Kat Arney casts herself well as both advocate and party pooper in the quest to open up the world of the cell and the gene. She has the healthy scepticism of the professional real world lab scientist, a world she knowable and acknowledges that she feels most comfortable in. Too frequently we hear newspaper or TV hype around this field in a frenzy of "New DNA breakthrough" or genes-as-saint-or-sinner discourse. Kat makes it very clear that we have a lot to learn and although there is a lot of promise, there is SO much we don't yet understand.
I would openly challenge whether there was actually any need to recount the content of the interviews in accented impressions all the time. At worst it was distracting, and this was content that I didn't want to be distracted from. I could have forgiven,and probably enjoyed, the occasional drift into Floridian or Californian soundtrack to emphasize a quirk or bon mot, since it suits Kat's highly engaging style to bring the interviewees to life. I was finding myself relieved when certain recollections were over and in a work which was a series of interview accounts strung together by editorial, this wasn't the intention I think.
I'd recommend Kat's work to anybody interested in this vital field, along with her wonderful podcasts.

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3 people found this helpful

Delightful! Funny, Lucid, Cutting Edge Science.

I loved this book! I last did genetics in the late 1970s, when it all seemed so simple. Yet much has happened since to show us it is anything but, so this book was a great eye-opener for me! One early chapter has a German researcher, head in hands, despairing of the impossibility of us ever understanding it all. Yet Kat Amey, herself a researcher, uses some brilliant and humorous metaphors to explain this complexity so clearly.

The title comes from the alleged fascination of Hemingway with 6 toed cats, which turns out to have important genetics implications, combined with the seemingly impossible task the cell achieves transcribing and translating the meandering diaspora of coding regions (~5%) in the genome - like herding cats. Amey uses the metaphor of an untidy garage - full of unsorted junk, that never got chucked away, mixed in with really important stuff - like the car or the lawnmower. In fact coding genes come more like bits of the car, strewn about the genome, needing to be copied and the RNA copies reassembled before it can be used i.e. translated into usable protein.

That's just the DNA, which according to another researcher is "boring"! The real fun starts with RNA: microRNA, iRNA, looped RNA are just some of the many mysterious forms explained in the book. It helps if you have some background in Biology, but her explanations and analogies are so good, no prior knowledge is necessary.

Read beautifully, with wit & humor, the explanations are interspersed with interviews with leading researchers, who themselves are interesting characters. She employs a healthy degree of scepticism about their work, as well as the old orthodox beliefs of Biology that are daily being challenged by their findings.

Overall, this is a delightful listen, and about a field of study that is burgeoning as we speak. While there are many books on Particle Physics, Quantum Mechanics or Relativity, there are relatively few on Genetics. This book is a rare gem.

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1 person found this helpful

Not often a genetics book will make you laugh

Would you consider the audio edition of Herding Hemingway's Cats to be better than the print version?

educational, articulate, amusing

Any additional comments?

A good general coverage of genetics ... we listened to it for the entire car journey through France.

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