She Has Her Mother’s Laugh

Critics Review

• Beautifully written . . . [A] grand and sweeping book.

  The Times

• Nuanced, entertaining and balances eloquent story-telling with well-researched science . . . Anyone interested in their path through history, and what they may hand on, will find much to excite them.

  New Scientist

• Fascinating . . . Absorbing . . . Deftly persuasive.

  Observer

• She Has Her Mother’s Laugh is packed full of learning, and years of work . . . The book offers clear insights into a fast-moving area, and asks big questions. Scientists can eradicate diseases, alter DNA and change human heredity. Should they? What could be at stake if they get it wrong?

  Guardian

• This is cutting-edge stuff that could be heavy-going except that it is written by Carl Zimmer, one of our best science journalists . . . He makes complex topics accessible with his sparkling storytelling and beautiful writing . . . If you want to . . . know where the DNA revolution is headed, you can’t do better than this book, which is a joy to read.

  Evening Standard

• She Has Her Mother’s Laugh is a masterpiece – a career-best work from one of the world’s premier science writers, on a topic that literally touches every person on the planet.

  Ed Yong, author of I Contain Multitudes

• Zimmer is a born story-teller. Or is he an inherited story-teller? The inspiring and heartbreaking stories in She Has Her Mother’s Laugh build a fundamentally new perspective on what previous generations have delivered to us, and what we can pass along. An outstanding book and great accomplishment.

  Daniel Levitin, author of This is Your Brain on Music and The Organized Mind

• Extraordinary . . . This book is Zimmer at his best: obliterating misconceptions about science with gentle prose.

  New York Review of Books

• Expansive, engrossing, and often enlightening.

  Wired

• Why do children look like their parents and siblings, but still differ from one another? . . . Engrossing . . . Zimmer’s book is an excellent way to get up to speed.

  Washington Post

• She Has Her Mother’s Laugh is at once far-ranging, imaginative, and totally relevant. Carl Zimmer makes the complex science of heredity read like a novel, and explains why the subject has been–and always will be–so vexed.

  Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Pulitzer Prize winner The Sixth Extinction

• She Has Her Mother’s Laugh is a superb guide to a subject that is only becoming more important. Along the way, it explains some remarkably complicated science with equally remarkable clarity–a totally impressive job all around.

  Charles C. Mann, author of New York Times bestseller 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

• No one unravels the mysteries of science as brilliantly and compellingly as Carl Zimmer, and he has proven it again with She Has Her Mother’s Laugh—a sweeping, magisterial book that illuminates the very nature of who we are.

  David Grann, #1 New York Times bestselling author, award-winning staff writer at The New Yorker, and author of The Lost City of Z

• A thoroughly enchanting tour of big questions, oddball ideas, and dazzling accomplishments of researchers searching to explain, manipulate, and alter inheritance.

  Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

• A magnificent work . . . Journalist Zimmer masterfully blends exciting storytelling with first-rate science reporting. His book is as engrossing as it is enlightening.

  Publishers Weekly (starred review)

• Fascinating . . . The book handles science and cultural history with equal verve and nuance; a rare combination.

  Sunday Times

• Elegantly written, wittily constructed . . . My science book of the year.

  Observer

• Genetics was once a deeply unfashionable – even suspect area of scientific research. But the subject produced some fine works in 2018, the best of which is the remarkable She Has Her Mother’s Laugh.

  Prospect

• Carl Zimmer takes us from tailless mice to transgenic mice as he charts how humans first understood, then mastered, genetics.

  The Times

• [A] panoramic survey of the notion of heredity . . . a guide to what it is, what it means and what comes next . . . [Zimmer’s] storytelling is excellent.

  Sunday Times