The most recommended books on genes

Have you ever been camping, or to a party, and heard the immortal phrase, "Hold my beer and watch this"? If so, you know you are about to witness a tale you’ll be retelling for the rest of your life, or you will soon be assisting police with their inquiries. The stories in this book fall into the latter category. 

It is hard to believe that Matt Ridley’s grand tour of the human genome was published back in 1999. Yet even today, more than two decades later, Ridley’s engaging, chromosome by chromosome investigation of our genetic make-up remains a marvel that has never been equaled. From the genes that enable the most basic chemical processes in our cells to those that determine our height and eye color, the mysterious “junk DNA” that lives between our genes, and speculation about the ways that genes affect personality, behavior, and society, Ridley brings science to life in this engaging and timeless book.

How could I not love this spry elderly widow who self-describes as an "LOL" ("Little Old Lady")? Especially when she pulls a solo midnight stakeout after the police won't follow her advice? I love how Ivy turns a senior's apparent "invisibility" to society into a strength—and a crime-fighting attribute.

Ivy's struggle to find her place in the aging process, her strong friendships, and her "mutant curiosity gene" appeal to my heart.

I sobbed my way through this one! I was a few chapters in when I discovered that it was a sequel to The Last Days of Rabbit Hayes, but I was so invested by then that I couldn’t stop and go back.

Anna McPartlin has the enviable skill of combining comedy and tragedy to great effect. The Hayes family are a mess of grief and confusion and misplaced blame, but their love for one another, and their wonderful humour, meant that I took them to my heart immediately.

A book that makes me laugh out loud one minute and blub like a baby the next is always a winner for me. I would read anything that this author chose to write. (I read Rabbit Hayes immediately afterwards and loved that, too!

I’ve been personally teaching and coaching women about transforming their relationship with money with my work at the Institute on Holistic Wealth, including issues such as financial trauma and money/wealth mindset and one of the major issues women face is a lack of confidence.

A fear of failure, negative thought patterns as well as environmental factors all play a role in women’s lack of confidence.
Here are the 3 most empowering lessons I got out of this book: confidence is a connector between what we think and what we do, stereotypes and innate differences between men and women cause women to hold back, and confidence can be learned, even if we’re not predisposed to it.

Katty Kay and Claire Shipman were also recently named Holistic Wealth Trailblazers by the Institute on Holistic Wealth because of their work in empowering women. 

This book about a tiny creature different from the rest touched my heart in a big way.

Like the scientist whose discovery inspired this book, I pay attention to small things. What small thing did the scientist notice? A snail shell that spiraled the opposite way of most snails–left instead of right. This one-in-a-million snail had inverted organs–his heart and other organs were on the right side, and he couldn’t reproduce without a mate who also had inverted organs.

Through crowdsourcing, two snails with right hearts were found–and eventually, baby snails were born!

Genetics, diversity, evolution, and love all fit into this book, tenderly and beautifully told in sparse language that somehow helped me understand these big concepts–and encouraged me to look for and appreciate the diversity in our world.

Elegant, deep—I learned many things here. 

This book will help you develop your own good ideas because the author respects you too much to give a jumble of just-so stories wrapped in glib human interest. Instead, he explains, often with brilliant metaphors from everyday experience. I especially liked the chapters on embryos, organs, the microbiome, and scaling, which are particularly fresh, insightful, and beautifully clear.

Also, unlike so many popularizations, this one is full of graceful but precise illustrations that pull you in and actually clarify key points—not just eye candy. This book will help you have your own ideas by interconnecting physics and biology ideas that are hardly ever mentioned in the same breath.

I loved this book. The second nine months is the true story of Vicki Glembocki's journey into those first few months after childbirth. Although the story is a memoir, Glembocki writes it so well that it reads like a novel—a novel you won't put down until you are finished. From beginning to end, Glembocki bravely bares her soul for the new mom's benefit and cleverly manages to hit all the "new mom" topics through her personal experience. From breastfeeding, to newborn crying, to changes in relationships, to new mom bonding, to finding other new mom friends, to back to work issues, Glembocki manages to cover them all with wit and candor. I found her new mom tale "spot on accurate." It is so exciting that truth is finally coming out. Take advantage of the gift this author has created, New Moms, and read about her experience. Moms will find that… show more.

This book made me think even fruitflies might have minds. Before reading this, I didn’t have a good grip on how we could even start to connect whole-body behaviors with specific genes. I was drawn in by the elegance of the early experiments with fruit flies. I remained mesmerized by the fact that when these investigations began in the early twentieth century, scientists were not sure what a gene was or even whether they were really real.

To understand how genes relate to traits of whole fruit flies, such as eye color and wing shape, scientists had to figure out what genes were simultaneously. This is the kind of book I want to memorize in a way that makes the book somehow part of me, stitched into the fibers of my body, shaping how I think and perceive.

I love this book because it turns the most impactful science discovery of the 21st century–CRISPR gene editing–into a page-turner. Isaacson combines a biography of Jennifer Doudna, who shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Emmanuelle Charpentier, with lucid accounts of the science and sequence of research breakthroughs that underlie CRISPR editing, as well as the intrigues and jockeying among powerful scientists and personalities vying for prizes and patents on the technology.

I came through this book to appreciate the enormous potential of CRISPR gene editing for good (curing hereditary diseases) and not-so-good (designer babies or, in the words of Vladimir Putin, “a soldier, an individual who can fight without fear or compassion, mercy or pain”). CRISPR promises to make human selection as important as natural selection in the evolution of many species, including humans.