A Fascinating Subject

As a layperson I found this audio book interesting but heavy going at times. Enjoyed the historical outline which also informed the bases for research. Has provided me much food for thought.

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Good but lots of abbreviations

The content of this books is very interesting. The trouble is all the abbreviations. It became hard to follow when all the abbreviations were used together. It might be easier if you were reading the book but as an audiobook it was quick difficult

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Interesting but difficult to follow

Some sections are fascinating, but at times difficulty to understand and follow especially on audiobook (too much technical jargon).

I liked the performance; narrator did a great job of sounding truly excited about dozens of different chemicals and molecules!

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Who's the reader???

I nearly gave up about half way through this, as I was cooking dinner and listening to stuff like: DNA methylation is catalyzed by a family of DNA methyltransferases (Dnmts) that transfer a methyl group from S-adenyl methionine (SAM) to the fifth carbon of a cytosine residue to form 5mC. Dnmt3a and Dnmt3b can establish a new methylation pattern to unmodified DNA…. (I note, this section isn''t actually from the book, I got it from Wikipedia, but it's full of this kind of stuff.) Epigenetics is a fascinating topic and I expected this to be a high-level overview for the general, educated reader. Oh no! There's the occasional interesting paragraph but long tracts of this are indigestible biochemistry: Fine if you're a specialist, but is a specialist really going to listen to an audio book? Plus, if it's for specialists, why does the author feel she has to explain basics, like what the frontal cortex is, which she does all the time? So who's she writing for? It's as if she started off trying to write an ideas book - the intro is quite engaging - but then got bogged down in detailed scientific accounts of how it all works. We don't need this! It's like writing a book about a journey to France by describing what's happening under the bonnet of the car! Plus, the narrator (I felt pretty sorry for her) reads this as she's reading 'The Very Hungry Caterpillar' to a group of four year olds, and while she gets points for trying, her 'wow! Wasn't that exciting!" style is completely at odds with the often blindingly dull descriptions of strings of chemicals. Yes, the subject can be specialised, but if this was meant for the lay person, then it should have focused on the big ideas and themes, and generalised the chemistry, including only what was needed to make the point. The only interesting part was the introduction, but it trailed ideas that were never really picked up or got lost in the detail. This book needed a ruthless editor - or to be rewritten as two books - a short, high-level ideas book, and whatever the one with all the long, long alphabet spaghetti sections was meant to be. Sigh. Well, the dinner was good, anyway..

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A bewildering forest of jargon

If you are a fantastic scientist trying to explain complicated topics to people who don't want to study your subject intensely. please please please don't fill your book to the brim with technical terms and jargons that you have only defined once. They are your bread and butter in your work but absolutely should not be for communication with a lay audience. If I pick a random sentence from this book it will normally have at least three terms that were defined somewhere before but I can't remember because I pick audio books up for maybe 15 mins at a time and I certainly don't have perfect recall. I gave up after two hours on realising that each sentence was making less and less sense to me unless I kept re-reading parts.

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Long-winded and smug

what a mission to get through... and I'm doing a PhD for which I thought this book would be helpful for a "bigger picture" background idea but it was just so smug and empty

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