Praise for She Has Her Mother's Laugh

Extraordinary...This book is Zimmer at his best: obliterating misconceptions about science with gentle prose. He brings the reader on his journey of discovery as he visits laboratory after laboratory, peering at mutant mosquitoes and talking to scientists about traces of Neanderthal ancestry within his own genome. Any fan of his previous books or his journalism will appreciate this work. But so, too, will parents wishing to understand the magnitude of the legacy they're bequeathing to their children, people who want to grasp their history through genetic ancestry testing and those seeking a fuller context for the discussions about race and genetics so prevalent today. -The New York Times Book Review

A beguiling narrative... Whatever your views on the power of genes versus other forms of heredity, you will be in for a few surprises. -Nature

Into this zeitgeist enters Carl Zimmer's most enjoyable new book, She Has Her Mother's Laugh, with a sweeping overview of the history of our understanding of heredity... [He is] one of the best science journalists of our time. -Science

Magisterial...In Zimmer's pages, we discover a world minutely threaded with myriad streams of heredity flowing in all directions, in variegated patterns and different registers. -The Atlantic

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)

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 wide-ranging and eye-opening inquiry into the way heredity shapes our species. -Booklist (starred review)

Carl Zimmer's magnum opus, probing myriad strands of science through the prism of decadeslong, stellar reporting, and a leading contender as the most outstanding nonfiction work of the year...a lush, enthralling book that transforms the reader with its insights. -Minneapolis Star-Tribune

In his expansive, engrossing, and often enlightening new book, She Has Her Mother's Laugh, Zimmer takes readers on a tale through time and technology, from the inbred Holy Roman Empire to the birthplace of American eugenics to the Japanese lab where scientists are reprogramming skin cells into eggs and sperm. -Wired

The strength of [She Has Her Mother's Laugh]...is its combination of accuracy, journalistic clarity and scientific authority...If the science doesn't matter to you now, it will soon. -The Washington Post

Zimmer's latest offers a comprehensive look at all aspects of heredity in readable and accessible text for anyone interested in the topic. -Library Journal

This massive, multifaceted account of heredity's history and possible future illuminates the subject as something much more complex than genes passed from generation to generation. -Shelf Awareness

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, author of Killers of the Flower Moon and The Lost City of Z

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-winning The Sixth Extinction

Humans have long noticed something remarkable, namely that organisms are similar but not identical to their parents-in other words, that some traits can be inherited. From this observation has grown the elegant science of genetics, with its dazzling medical breakthroughs. And from this has also grown the toxic pseudosciences of