Three weeks away from the publication of Microcosm, and another kind review has come out, this time from Library Journal:

To display a broad swath of the people, scientific processes, and discoveries involved in biology, science writer Zimmer (Soul Made Flesh: The Discovery of the Brain-and How It Changed the World) describes a common, luxuriantly growing, usually benign gut bacterium, Escherichia coli, or E. coli. Easily grown in petri dishes, the species has alter egos that can kill its hosts, making the organism a useful laboratory model to explore the basis of heredity. Zimmer recounts the ingenious experiments performed over the last century, garnering Nobel prizes for those scientists who outlined the textbook diagrams of the biochemical processes that