Books for Biologists
{short description of image}Shelf 5 (Fiction)

Author and Title Reviewer's comments from:
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John Darnton
The Darwin Conspiracy

 The Darwin Conspiracy is a marvelous tour of three different timelines—Darwin's voyage on the Beagle, his daughter Elizabeth's secret notes about her father and the attempt by two young scientist-historians to decipher a secret.... (Review from Nature Genetics).
{short description of image} Kurt Vonnegut:
Galapagos		 Galapagos takes the reader back one million years, to A.D. 1986. A simple vacation cruise suddenly becomes an evolutionary journey. Thanks to an apocalypse, a small group of survivors stranded on the Galapagos Islands are about to become the progenitors of a brave new, and totally different human race. Here, America's master satirist looks at our world and shows us all that is sadly, madly awry -- and all that is worth saving.
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Roger
McDonald:
Mr. Darwin's
Shooter		 In Mr. Darwin's Shooter, Roger McDonald explores the evolution not just of flora and fauna but of friendship and belief...Covington is ... an odd-job boy and ship's fiddler on a barque named after a "beagle-hound." This boat, though, will prove his career salvation, for its cosseted passenger is Charles Darwin. The young naturalist soon marks the sailor out as an adequate aide, a "willing accomplice" to what the grown Covington will later consider "a great murder." By murder he means less the massive plundering of birds and beasts ("stopping the hearts of small life") than the undermining of Biblical truth.
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Cathleen Schine:
The Evolution
of Jane		 "You're searching for your roots," her father quips. "On a dormant volcano?" And this is only one of the thousands of witticisms on offer in Cathleen Schine's novel of lost friendship, the perplexing power of the family feud, and more than one shipboard mystery. When Jane, 25 and a brand-new divorcée, arrives in Ecuador for her ecological tour, she instantly recognizes the guide as her relative and childhood best friend. Martha, the cousin in question, however, takes several beats longer--a clear signal that both still have some evolving to do. As Jane quickly reveals, Martha was the real grand passion in her life, and now she's determined to get to the bottom of her idol's disenchantment, not to mention explore the evolutionary value of friendship. Charles Darwin is definitely much in evidence in The Evolution of Jane, and Schine has some serious fun with Jane's confusion when it comes to species survival. A sample chapter from Amazon.com.
{short description of image} Richard Powers:
The Gold Bug
Varations		 The Gold Bug Variations is a thoroughly engaging study of three vital and complex characters whose lives become entangled in a Gordian Knot of a narrative which challenges the reader who would solve it. A former pioneer in genetics research (Stuart Ressler -- aka "wrestler") is the book's protagonist, and his attempts to decipher the DNA code in the 1950s shape the motivations/desires of his two present-day friends, a quirky fine-arts doctoral candidate and a reclusive librarian.
{short description of image} Bernard Werber:
Empire of
the Ants		 In the early 21st century, in a Paris rapidly turning tropical thanks to global warming, Jonathan Wells tries to get to the bottom (as it turns out, quite literally) of his Uncle Edmond's obsession with ants. Jonathan and his family have been left Edmond's basement apartment; their benefactor's sole request is, "ABOVE ALL, NEVER GO DOWN INTO THE CELLAR." Meanwhile, in the great city of Bel-o-kan, a reproductive ant, the 327th male, is fighting for survival, having had his olfactory Identikit stripped by traitors of his own tribe. Both males--human and ant--are determined to solve their separate quandaries, and Bernard Werber cleverly juxtaposes their adventures and those of their survivors.
(A sample chapter from Amazon.com)
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Simon Mawer: Mendel's Dwarf		 Mendel's Dwarf is an extraordinary novel, a work of history, science, pure prose, and pervasive, stunning irony. Through this narrator, a geneticist who is himself a dwarf, it gives brilliant focus to essential horrors of our century, and along with its narrative perfection has at its heart a dark and luminous kinship with such tales as Beauty and the Beast and Kafka's The Metamorphosis. It is a novel of dire magnificence. —John Hawkes
(A sample chapter: from Amazon.com)

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