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I have this tendency, when I read a book as brilliantly informing as this one, to wipe the froth from my mouth, shuffle the pages of notes I've written contemporaneous to the reading, and plunge into the cocktail party which is this forum, grabbing each of you by the virtual lapels, and launching into a lecture about one of the hundreds of things I learned in the process. As if, you know, I missed some of the froth.

So, imagine me back from some journey, casting pleasantries aside, and launching wild-eyed and, yes, maybe a little frothy, insisting that you grasp the fraction of what I've learned via the fraction of my ability to explain, as if it is the most important thing in the world. Until next week's book and next week's cocktail party, that is. Passionate and off-putting. Aware, but unable to stop myself. Yup, that's me. But I have a defense.

There's probably a gene that makes me so.

Seems I got more than blue eyes from Mom, more than dark hair from Dad. There are many chambers of the human heart and many caverns in the human mind, but they are all there somewhere pinned onto the genome which is Tony.

--This book is worth the read just for the section on sickle-cell anemia, or the one explaining the genetic basis for sexual identity, or the story of Mitochondrial Eve.

--Did you know that when the Allied forces entered the Nazi death camps, they found an inordinate number of twins among the survivors. This was so because Mengele was fascinated by Zwillinge? These survivors, sharing as they did identical genetic markers, served as the subjects of much subsequent genetic research.

--The problem with racial discrimination . . . is not the inference of a person's race from their genetic characteristics. It is quite the opposite: it is the inference of a person's characteristics from their race. But, I've now learned, "the vast proportion of genetic diversity (85 to 90 percent) occurs within so-called races (i.e., within Asians or Africans) and only a minor proportion (7 percent) between racial groups..."

--I knew the story of Carrie Buck, legally sterilized after an Opinion by Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes stating "Three generations of imbeciles is enough." But Mukherjee lets that story hover over us as he takes us to a lecture he attended in 2013, a lecture given by a fifteen year-old girl named Erika, who suffered from a severe, progressive degenerative disease, causing muscle tremors that progressively worsened. She tried new drugs, clinical trials. Nothing worked. Yet there she was speaking to this hall of scientists, "by far, among the most articulate, introspective teenagers that I have ever encountered." A prenatal test to find the mutations that caused Erika's condition is theoretically possible. We could, bluntly, prevent future Erikas. Mukherjee lets us ponder this as he watches Erika being pushed by her mother across a parking lot in her wheelchair, "her scarf billowing behind her, like an epilogue."

It's that last little bit, that fragment of a quote like a piece of DNA, that I hope exposes why this book had such a purchase on me. It's not just that Mukherjee can take a very complicated scientific subject and make it understandable. It's that he does so with really gorgeous writing.

At one point he is explaining how 'we' got here, how 'humans' began on an arid mesa in South Africa and, from there, "went west, as young men often do..." The migrants made it to the northeastern edge of Ethiopia or Egypt, "where the Red Sea narrows to a slitlike strait." And then he writes this:

There was no one there to part the ocean. We do not know what drove these men and women to fling themselves across the water, or how they managed to cross it. . . What is certain is that every perilous ocean-crossing left hardly any survivors--perhaps as few as six hundred men and women. Europeans, Asians, Australians, and Americans are the descendants of these drastic bottlenecks, and this corkscrew of history too has left its signature in our genomes. In a genetic sense, nearly all of us who emerged out of Africa, gasping for land and air, are even more closely yoked than previously imagined. We were on the same boat, brother.

The same but different; different but the same.

I'll stop there, having no doubt expressed my enthusiasm better than my understanding of human genetics. I'll stop even though the clicker below says I have 15,480 characters left, or about 500 less than the number of genes in one of my cells. But one of the truly entertaining parts of this book was the author's use of quotes. So, since I'm feeling epigrammy, I'll add my favorites to the comments.

Bye. I have to go.