'TRY to skim this book and you'll find yourself drawn into reading every word. Eye-opening and entertaining, this is cutting-edge history of science that everyone should read ... Throughout his gripping narrative, Jim Endersby shows how today's right answer is almost always tomorrow's wrong one.'

Endersby's technique is a wonderfully roundabout way of telling some of the great stories of modern biology.

Jim Endersby has come up with a fresh and rewarding approach. He illuminates the story of our understanding of life since 1800... easily readable account of the remarkable progress biologists have made over the past two centuries.

A highly entertaining and original book...Endersby provides a new perspective on the history of genetics.

With an enviable lightness of touch, Endersby weaves his scientific threads into a much broader tapestry of cultural history...[an] accessible and engaging account to find out how we got here.

A must for anyone even remotely thinking of getting a monkey, a sea lion, or, heaven forbid, a dog

A fresh, strange, and wonderful new voice in nature writing

A lovely little book. After all we've done to them it's great to see the animals getting their own back

I wolfed it down

First-rate, unsentimental writing about nature and about the ways that human beings try to cope with the most terrible cruelties that nature offers up

Elegant and wryly funny

The most polymathic science writer of our time

An engaging and lively account of an endlessly curious man

A fascinating window into the complex emergent urban future. This book is an extremely sophisticated, often devastatingly witty and ironic, interpretation of what is possible over the next two decades

Throw out your old atlas. The new version is here

Kasarda ... and Lindsay convincingly put the airport at the centre of modern urban life

Highly recommended