Book Review: I Contain Multitudes

I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life
Ed Yong
Biology

Sometimes you get a book that demands adjectives. I'm talking "mind-blowing," "wondrous," "astounding" . . . you know, the usual tepid endorsements you've come to expect from this blog.

Part of the wondrousness of I Contain Multitude is simply a matter of content. For anyone with even a passing interest in biology, it would be hard to write a dull book given Yong's factual starting points. Did you know that . . .

• There's a species of mite that contains no less than five bacterial symbionts, none of which can survive without the others (or the mite itself)?
• Your personal biome influences how attractive you are to insects?
• The desert woodrat can digest the toxic leaves of the creosote bush because of its gut microbes?
• The microfauna on your left hand are probably quite unlike what's on your right hand?
• It may be possible to prevent the spread of viruses using mosquitos' own bacteria?

And that's just the start.

Life, in other words, is gloriously amazingly complicated. We humans tend to view it simplistically: it's a pyramid, we're at the top, and microbes are enemies to be eliminated. I Contain Multitudes effectively and enthusiastically demolishes that view. Along the way it treats the reader to an unending cornucopia of wonders, even as Ed Yong conscientiously documents the ways in which science is ever-changing and tentative and unsettled (especially in new fields such as this). Yong's writing is chatty, often sly, always clear, sometimes surprisingly eloquent. He has no choice, given the scope of his subject matter, to jump around somewhat--from researcher to researcher, from problem to problem, from organism to organism--but he's usually pretty good about reminding us where he's coming from.

I find it hard to imagine any reader who wouldn't enjoy this book, except possibly for the pathologically science-phobic. How much you take away from it, in terms of facts, is a separate question; there's just too much information for anyone to remember it all. Trust me: you won't care.

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Though wildly different in tone and structure, Siddhartha Mukherjee's The Emperor of All Maladies is similar in that it's a great read full of can't-miss content.  

An interview with the author is here.