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The Gene: An Intimate History Audiobook
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Publisher Description
2017 Audie Award Finalist for Non-Fiction
The #1 NEW YORK TIMES Bestseller
The basis for the PBS Ken Burns Documentary The Gene: An Intimate History
From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies—a fascinating history of the gene and “a magisterial account of how human minds have laboriously, ingeniously picked apart what makes us tick” (Elle).
“Sid Mukherjee has the uncanny ability to bring together science, history, and the future in a way that is understandable and riveting, guiding us through both time and the mystery of life itself.” —Ken Burns
“Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee dazzled readers with his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Emperor of All Maladies in 2010. That achievement was evidently just a warm-up for his virtuoso performance in The Gene: An Intimate History, in which he braids science, history, and memoir into an epic with all the range and biblical thunder of Paradise Lost” (The New York Times). In this biography Mukherjee brings to life the quest to understand human heredity and its surprising influence on our lives, personalities, identities, fates, and choices.
“Mukherjee expresses abstract intellectual ideas through emotional stories…[and] swaddles his medical rigor with rhapsodic tenderness, surprising vulnerability, and occasional flashes of pure poetry” (The Washington Post). Throughout, the story of Mukherjee’s own family—with its tragic and bewildering history of mental illness—reminds us of the questions that hang over our ability to translate the science of genetics from the laboratory to the real world. In riveting and dramatic prose, he describes the centuries of research and experimentation—from Aristotle and Pythagoras to Mendel and Darwin, from Boveri and Morgan to Crick, Watson and Franklin, all the way through the revolutionary twenty-first century innovators who mapped the human genome.
“A fascinating and often sobering history of how humans came to understand the roles of genes in making us who we are—and what our manipulation of those genes might mean for our future” (Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel), The Gene is the revelatory and magisterial history of a scientific idea coming to life, the most crucial science of our time, intimately explained by a master. “The Gene is a book we all should read” (USA TODAY).
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“Offers insight into both the scientific process and the sociology of science…By relating familial information, Mukherjee grounds the abstract in the personal to add power and poignancy to his excellent narrative.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Quotes
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“A magnificent synthesis of the science of life.”
— Paul Berg, winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry -
“A magisterial account…with evocative personal anecdotes, deft literary allusions, wonderfully apt metaphors, and an irrepressible intellectual brio.”
— Elle -
“Visceral and thought provoking.”
— Nature -
“Magnificent…The story [of the gene] has been told, piecemeal, in different ways, but never before with the scope and grandeur that Siddhartha Mukherjee brings to his new history.”
— New York Times Book Review -
“Mukherjee leaves you feeling as though you’ve just aced a college course for which you’d been afraid to register — and enjoyed every minute of it.”
— Washington Post -
“A comprehensive compendium of well-told stories with a human touch.”
— Dallas Morning News -
“Sobering, humbling, and extraordinarily rich reading from a wise and gifted writer who sees how far we have come—but how much farther far we have to go to understand our human nature and destiny.”
— Kirkus Reviews
Awards
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An Amazon Editor’s Top Pick for May 2016
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A #1 New York Times Bestseller
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A BookPage Top Pick for Smart Summer Picks for Audio Month
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A Time Magazine Pick for the Best Books of 2016 So Far
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A Los Angeles Times Bestseller
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A 2016 GoodReads Readers’ Choice Best Science & Technology Book Award Nominee
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An Entertainment Weekly Best Book of 2016
The Gene Listener Reviews
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ludwine casteleyn, 1/23/2020
About Siddhartha Mukherjee
Siddhartha Mukherjee is the New York Times bestselling author of four books, including The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction. He is the editor of Best Science Writing 2013. He has published articles in many journals, including Nature, New England Journal of Medicine, New York Times Magazine, and The New Yorker. He is an associate professor of medicine at Columbia University and a cancer physician and researcher. A Rhodes scholar, he graduated from Stanford University, University of Oxford, and Harvard Medical School. Visit his website at: SiddharthaMukherjee.com
About Dennis Boutsikaris
Dennis Boutsikaris is a two-time OBIE award winner. He has received five Audie Awards and seven Golden Earphone Awards for his work in over 100 audiobooks and was voted one of the Best Voices of the Year by AudioFile magazine. He has appeared in numerous Broadway, television, and film roles. He played Mozart on Broadway in Amadeus and has appeared on television shows including Shameless, The Good Wife, House M.D., Grey’s Anatomy, ER, and Law & Order.