Hard to imagine a better book, or a more original one...writes at least as well as many good novelists...funny, and honest, and beautifully done

Her wisdom, empathy, morality and self-awareness are very revealing... Her writing is as incisive, precise and clean as keyhole surgery

A beautiful, haunting and upsetting book. Weston's prose is cool and elegant

Direct Red is Gabriel Weston's memoir of the years she spent pursuing a surgical career... She examines these with an honesty that is both brave and uncomfortable

What a terrific book. Gabriel Weston's voice is so seductive; her wisdom so fresh and earned, and unimpaired by sentimentality, and yet you sense her empathy - and scintillating honesty - behind every well-turned sentence. She leaves you feeling that if push came to shove you'd want to be operated on by her

A curiously thrilling read, written with an elegance of expression heightened by both its clarity and economy. Weston slices into sentences with scalpel-like precision

Concise, literate, truthful and often moving... as well-written and sensitive an account, by a decent, cultivated and highly intelligent person, of the glories and miseries of the practice as are likely ever to read

This is a compassionate, front-line report from what can often seem like alien territory.

The practice of medicine is a way of living: vivid and engrossing, it stimulates senses physical and metaphysical...It is a rare skill for a doctor to be able to communicate this rich sensorium in writing. It is a delight to read the words of one who does it so well

A superb account of life on the grisly front line of the operating theatre

This slender, elegantly written memoir by a female surgeon, Gabriel Weston, is a fascinating, no holds barred account of life in the operating theatre

Through this insightful book, Weston succeeds superbly in communicating the fascinating brutal reality of a surgeon's life

Gabriel Weston's story succeeds better than any I have known...more riveting and thought-provoking than any fiction

Glinting like a tray of instruments, her prose is satisfyingly precise

A curiously thrilling read, written with an elegance heightened by its clarity and economy

A valuable and unflinching account, since it so clearly tells the truth

This book is mesmerising

Her description of the struggle to remain individual and hence moral is her real achievement. This, to me, is what female writing has to do, and she does it with style and humour and beauty

Richard Dawkin's new book... gives the fact-rejecters their just deserts

The book is full of evidence, some familiar and some new. Its case is presented in a manner succinct, clear and sometimes vivid

No other book currently available approaches Dawkin's comprehensive yet accessible treatment of the extraordinarily diverse and massive body of data that drives ineluctably to the same conclusion

The Greatest Show on Earth is a lucid, thorough and often exciting survey of evolution and takes in rats' teeth, dogs, bacteria, the so-called missing link, crustaceans, giraffe anatomy, hummingbirds, chimpanzees, enzymes - you name it. It is informed in nearly every paragraph by Mr. Dawkins's irrepressible enthusiasm

The Greatest Show on Earth... is essential reading. I would currently rate it... as the best overall book on the evidence for Evolution

This is a magnificent book of wonderstanding: Richard Dawkins combines an artist's wonder at the virtuosity of nature with a scientist's understanding of how it comes to be