I was not able to finish this book. For me, it did not pull me in. I am certain that others will find it interesting.

My apologies - because this book was not available as a mobi file, I did not have the chance to read it before it was archived.. Thank you for the opportunity - I'm sorry I missed it, because I enjoy the author's work, and I'll look for it on Amazon.

At the moment I will only give a rating to the book and I hope it is possible for me to write down my reviews on Amazon. Barnes and Noble and Goodreads. I am very grateful to you because your publications are great, especially in the topics that interest me most. Thanks and blessings.

A nonfiction book intended for a general audience about human DNA and what it tells us about our history and current existence. It's extremely up to date – I believe Rutherford even manages to cite studies from 2017 a few times – but also goes all the way back to the beginning, covering Darwin and Mendel and similar pioneers. It's nice that Rutherford doesn't spare his own field any criticism; he goes fairly thoroughly into the story of Francis Galton (the inventor of eugenics) and the problems with other scientists who have tried to use DNA to bolster their racist beliefs. He also does not have a lot of patience for 23andMe or similar 'analyze your heritage through DNA!' companies, arguing that they're too imprecise to give real answers.

The book is split in roughly half, with the first part covering human history (the evolution of Homo sapiens; how we mixed with closely related species like the Neanderthals and Denisovans; the movement of groups of people across the world, particularly Europe and Britain; and the evolution of traits like red hair and milk drinking), and the second half covering DNA in the modern world (does race exist genetically?; do genes predispose some people to becoming violent criminals?; how easy – or hard – is it to identify genetic diseases?; and the story of the Human Genome Project).

I found the writing to be dense and hard to get through, though I couldn't say exactly why; Rutherford certainly drops in plenty of jokes and references to the Simpsons or Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. He's at his best when he's telling a specific story rather than a general point of scientific principle. His descriptions of the attempt to use historical DNA to uncover mysteries like the identities of Richard III (successful!) or Jack the Ripper (hugely failed!) were very well-done, as was the chapter on why race doesn't work as a genetic concept. I think a lot of people are familiar with that general point, but he really digs into why with specific examples and many details and it was a fascinating read. But reading the rest, I often found my attention drifting, and had to yank it back to the page again and again. Unfortunately this problem seems to be worst in the opening chapter, making it hard to get into the book.

Overall, there's plenty of worthwhile information here, but the writing itself didn't work for me.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2199037355#

see online review

Unfortunately I hadn't realized that this title was not available for Kindle when I requested it. I had some problems loading it and ultimately gave up....will have to read the print edition when available from my library!

Erratum:
P345 has a tandem repeat in the footnote! A sentence fragment is duplicated! It’s a mutation! Now that there's spare DNA in the text, evolution can work on this without tampering with the original sentence! Clearly this sentence could evolve into something else! Keep an eye on it!

This book seems like it has a very ambitious title until you read the subtitle: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes, and that's exactly what this is. It might be a bit technical for some, but I think in general it's written well, clearly, and it's easy to understand, with a nice line of humor running through it. There was the usual foreword, author's note, and introduction which seem to always lard books with somewhat academic leanings. I skipped all of these as I routinely do. These are antiquated forms not most wondrous and I do not wish them to unfold, not on my time. After those, it got interesting.

I loved the way the science-free creationists are given short-shrift and sent packing. In the natural order of things, these people are parasites. They do no science of their own. Their idea of science is to sit on their lazy asses and pick over the published papers of hard-working scientists.

No, actually, they don't even do that much; they simply scan the clueless media headlines, assume that those represent the actual science paper accurately, and run with it. This book warns against taking seriously those sensationalist headlines about 'the little gene that could', but creationists are as heedless to those caveats as they are to injunctions against jumping to conclusions, and to not telling lies about evolution.

They either claim that the reported science supports the creation position (without making any effort to demonstrate how this is so), or if they dislike it, no matter how solid and well-supported it is, they claim it's all lies, and hoaxes - done by the very same scientists they previously got through praising for supporting the creation position in a different paper! LOL! These people are hypocrites at best and idiots at worst.

Bu this book isn't about creationism, which is why it's given short-shrift. This book is about the genome, particularly where it's been, and even where it's going (which is somewhat harder to assess!), and how it all plays into making us who we are, with all our peculiarities, habits, and even our looks and thoughts.

I found some bits of the book a little tedious and some of them superfluous to my mind, but overall this topic fascinates me and I had an easy time reading this all the way through. There are some awesome revelations (at least they were to me!), some intriguing insights, and it's grounded in solid, rational, intelligent science throughout. For me that was the best part of it. Yes, I'm biased - and unashamedly so when it comes to science.

The chapters might feel a bit long, especially if this does seem technical to you, but they're well-worth making the effort. Around every corner is something to make you stop and think, and wonder, and marvel. Each chapter is dedicated to an aspect of the genome and how it plays out in real life (if we know that much about it - there are still mysteries to solve and maybe you or your children will solve them!), and to the most intriguing parts of it and how they work together - or how they fail and cause us problems.

This book isn't just about genetics though - it's about people primarily, and how we got to be who we are. How our genes make us work, or in some cases malfunction. How we're quite literally more or less related to all life, but especially to other humans, including extinct relatives such as Neanderthals and Denisovans, and how we're inextricably tied to all life via the evolution of the genome in assorted species that lead through time from the first cell to us and everything else alive today. As the well-known Theodosius Dobzhansky, a Christian, said, "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution." He didn't add, but maybe should have, that the dark of creationism offers only nonsense.

Even as a science aficionado, this book answered questions I had not thought of asking, and questions I have thought about asking, but never got off my butt to do the answering - such as why are men more prone to color-blindness than women? The answer is simple, and you can probably figure it out with some little thought, but in case you never got there, like me, it's in this book along with lots of other answers.

The truly intriguing part though was what an adventure the human genome is - and no: don't believe popular political announcements of how it's been finally mapped. It's mapped in the same way that old world maps of the globe were - the basic overall geography is right (near enough) but the detail is still being filled in, especially when it comes to the detail of how it all works together and how the genes (and the relatively recently discovered epigenetic markers) work together or even dissonantly.

To me, rather than a map, it was more like one of those high resolution Internet images which sometimes appears on your screen, and at first it's highly pixelated so it looks blocky and blurry, but as you watch, new scan lines are added and the image slowly comes into sharper focus by stages. That's exactly where we're at with the genome! We have that initial chunky download and now we're in the first phase of those extra scan lines being added so the resolution is slowly becoming clearer, but we still have many more 'scan lines to add' before the picture is sharp enough for science be happy with. Meanwhile the creationists still remain as idle as they are clueless.

On the topic of the increasing resolution of genetics, I learned yet more information about how humans are not binary. I mean to open minds, it's obvious to begin with, but contrary to creationist claims of perfection, we are seriously messed up when it comes to genetics and reproduction. The majority of people end up with one X and either an X or a Y, but some do not. Some get an extra X or an extra Y or only one X and no Y. There are other combinations, too.

This was intriguing to me because I learned from this book that women don't use both X's. They use only one. The other one gets those epigenetic markers and becomes methylated! That doesn't mean the same as drunk or drugged-up; it means it's muted. What I had hoped to read is that when a person gets only one X and this causes problems is it because that lone X is muted so they effectively have no X? If so, can it be un-muted and will this fix the problem? Maybe we still have to discover that, and this is why genetics is such a big industry, and such an important and massive frontier for science. There is so much more to learn, and this book is a great primer on this new ocean of discovery into which we've just begun to dip our toes.

I recommend this with the slight caveat about regarding the overall formatting. I've noticed that academically-inclined books seem to be published largely by tree-hating organizations. I'm forced to this conclusion because of the vast amount of white space I see on every page. Clearly the aim here is to use as many pages as possible and this kills trees. And such academic books tend not to be printed on recycled paper.

Chapter one begins on page 28! When we reach it, at last I can say that it doesn't start halfway down the page, but it has wide margins on all four sides of the page and the lines are quite widely-spaced. I don't know what format the print book is in (judged by the lack of links in the text, this is clearly intended as a print book.

All we amateur reviewers ever get is the ebook, which isn't always a fair representation of the print version, especially if it comes formatted for reading in Amazon's crappy Kindle app which often mangles books. But the measurements I am about to report are taken directly from the iPad screen. Since I'm going to talk percentages, it doesn't really matter very much exactly how big the print book is.

Fortunately this one came in PDF format - which I preferentially read on a tablet after the phone fiasco, in an app called Blue Fire Reader, which is a decent reading app. I tried it in the same app on the phone, but since I do not have the genes for Falcon's eyes, the text was far too small for me to read comfortably unless you turn the phone in landscape mode when the text is legible, but then you have to try to navigate up and down the page, and because the phone is so twitchy to finger movement on the screen, if you swipe or pinch or spread at the wrong point, it can flip to the previous page or to the next page and you're lost, so it's a nuisance for phone reading.

On the iPad, the page is slightly over 19.5cm tall and 13cm wide. The left margin is 2cm, the right 1.75cm, the top margin 1.5cm, and the bottom 2.5cm - when there are no footnotes - and there were lots of footnotes which in my opinion for the most part could either have been either done away with altogether, or if deemed really necessary, incorporated into the text for a much more pleasant reading experience. Didn't that last observation make for a better reading experience with it being inline with the text rather than my sending you to the bottom of the page to read it? Just sayin'!

You may guess that I'm not a fan of footnotes at all. They're simply annoying - especially when they contain more text than does the actual page they're on, which means the footnote ridiculously goes over to the next page! I can't think of anything more stupid than that, and this is in an age of: electronics, URLs, ebooks!

Don't get me started on how appallingly short-sighted it is to continue to produce books in blinkered print mode when e-mode can be employed. For a publisher to think that those print versions can be simply moved to the e-version without a second thought is idiotic. Believe it or not, footnotes/chapter notes/end notes can all be links these days!

You can say you can't blame the author for this because these are publisher decisions, but authors can choose to go with a publisher which is more reverential of trees and is also interested in keeping up with modern times. Or they can choose to self-publish.

There are of course arguments to be made for dedicated ebook readers being wasteful of resources and pollution sources themselves, but you can read a few hundred if not a thousand books before you trade in or recycle your ebook reader. That's a lot of trees saved. That's especially true if you read them on your phone which also serves as your phone, your web browser, your camera, your alarm clock, your meeting tracker, and so on.

But I digress! So the page is 19.5 x 13cm which rounds down to 250cm². The text was 15.5cm x 9cm which rounds slightly up to 140cm². This means that forty-five percent of this page is white space! The margins could have been smaller and fewer pages employed in this book while still saying exactly the same thing! And this days nothing about adjusting line-spacing.

That does not mean I advocate cramming the text in and eliminating all white space, which would be a nightmare. I had to read a book rather like that once recently, and it wasn't pleasant, but just employing a little less white space will make a big difference in a 400-some page book.

Believe me, I know this. My novel Seasoning ran to 760 pages as originally formatted, but I brought this down three hundred pages by formatting it more wisely. That's almost half the original size! It also had the effect of making it cheaper for potential purchasers. I believe I can improve even on that next time I tinker with it, yet the novel will still look appealingly formatted. You only need the will to do this, and it's done. It's not rocket science; it's caring for the environment. That's all it requires. It's well worth thinking about.

I am afraid that I will have to try the paperback. I found this too scientific to read as an ebook. If I read the print, it might help. The author mentions Anne of Green Gables, so I will definitely try to read it again!

I received the free ebook from Net Galley in return for an honest review.

I was really drawn in by this book. I loved the ideas of the stories in our genes. Now I am wondering if I do want to find out my DNA.

A wonderful well written accounting of science that will expand your beliefs and inform. I found this book captivating and well researched. The subject of DNA , history of our genes and new information not taught in schools will inspire the reader to learn further information as they read. This is a must read for all interested in science and our human history.

A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived : The Stories in Our Genes by Adam Rutherford was an interesting if somewhat long and rambling read. ( The book could have been edited better.). It examines genetics, DNA, and a history of Homo sapiens through the lens of popular science and anecdotal writing. Rutherford is a broadcaster and science writer and studied genetics at University College, London. In this book, he examines recent discoveries about our genomes and clarifies what they have enabled scientists to tell us from those discoveries, and what they have not. I learned a lot from this book and will be more discerning when seeing fallacious headlines in the news about what science has and has not discovered from mapping the human genome. If you have ever been interested in getting your DNA tested, this book will help you discern somewhat what is hype and what is not ( although you need to do your own research about the strengths and weaknesses of the various companies out there) . Thank you Orion and NetGalley for the Advanced Reading Copy of this book and for allowing me to review it.

Really enjoyable! I would recommend this for any science book club, but also for anyone who is looking for read alikes to Mukherjee's The Gene or The Emperor of All Maladies. I might even recommend this for someone who enjoyed Neil deGrasse Tyson's Astrophysics for People in a Hurry.

I enjoyed this book. The writer paints a picture that I feel was excellent and look forward to telling my friends and family about this book

What I read of this book was absolutely enticing. Written in a way that makes one desire to soak up the knowledge. Unfortunately, I found it a little daunting to read so much from my computer, since I was unable to download this on to my tablet for some reason. Because of this, I will definitely be purchasing the book itself, and will update my reviews on other sites when I am completely finished.

Thank you to Netgalley for providing me a review copy of this book.
I love books that can present and explain scientific ideas clearly, especially when the idea in question is Human Evolution. It's a topic we usually run out of time for at the end of the year in biology, but its a fascinating topic.
There are so many misconceptions that about regarding what genetics can and can't tell us, and A Brief History does an excellent job addressing those misconceptions. This is a book I will get for my classroom (HS Biology), and refer to it when we start genetics each year.

I received an advanced ready copy of this title from NetGalley: Lots of really interesting information about genetics, but I had to give this title a 3 because it was ultimately way too much of a good thing. The author tends to get lost in the details and to go off on tangents that stray far of the path of the topic of this book. This makes it a difficult sale to a mainstream reading audience who may not be interested in the minutiae of the topic. With some strong editing to keep the writing focused and more succinct, I feel the book would be a much more enjoyable read for the everyday reader.

I was unable to read the title due to it not being accessible on my device.

"This is a story about you". It's hard to think of a first sentence more likely to engage a reader and beguile them into a 400-page dissertation on DNA and evolution. It gets right to the point and demands attention.

Soon after, Adam Rutherford sums up human evolution as "one big million-year clusterf*ck", and you know that this is not going to be just any science book. And so it proves. <i>A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived</i> is erudite and entertaining, informative and occasionally cerebral.

The book starts with the rise of hominids and the migrations of homo sapiens out of Africa, showing how DNA recovered from fossil finds enabled these migratory pathways to be better understood. For example, DNA has shown that India was settled from both the south and the north, but that both North and South America were settled from the north. Our DNA also shows that homo sapiens and neanderthals interbred.

Rutherford tackles the paradox of "family tree" thinking, which ultimately leads to a point where the number of putative ancestors exceeds the number of people on earth at the time. Oddly, this means that, around the time of Richard II, everybody in Europe was an ancestor of everybody with European descent today. We are apparently all descended from royalty and we all have Viking ancestry.

I found his account of the Hapsburg's inbreeding and the DNA identification of Richard III's remains really interesting, but Rutherford's most potent writing is on race, and he is abundantly clear that there is no genetic basis for the concept of "race". The genetic triggers for skin pigmentation are the same in African and Indian people, yet we perceive these people as being of different "races". The same goes for other characteristics that are used to label a person as being of a certain race. There is no gene for race, and only a tiny number of our 22,000 genes account for the physical differences that we typically use to distinguish between races. We are overwhelmingly more similar than different, wherever we are from.

While I did struggle with some of the concepts in this book, Rutherford's clear explanations and waspish humour kept me engaged throughout what was a fascinating read.

A brilliant introduction to how the developments in genetics in the last two decades have helped to unravel the mystery of our origins. This engaging, riveting book not only introduces us to how our ancestors spread throughout the planet but also reveals surprising truths about our own history, and debunks various myths about race.

This author is absolutely brilliant, he conveys information about this complicated topic in clear language with use of fantastic metaphors and in a manner that I a person with little scientific background can understand. Science and sometimes be funny and it is conveyed here as well. There is so much going on and the author acknowledges at the pace at which science is being challenged, changed and made with every new discovery and technological stride that there will be things that may not even necessarily be true at the time of the publication of the book, but it makes for such a fascinating read.