Praise for She Has Her Mother's Laugh

"Extraordinary...This book is Zimmer at his best: obliterating misconceptions about science with gentle prose. He brings the reader on his journey of discovery as he visits laboratory after laboratory, peering at mutant mosquitoes and talking to scientists about traces of Neanderthal ancestry within his own genome. Any fan of his previous books or his journalism will appreciate this work. But so, too, will parents wishing to understand the magnitude of the legacy they're bequeathing to their children, people who want to grasp their history through genetic ancestry testing and those seeking a fuller context for the discussions about race and genetics so prevalent today."
-The New York Times Book Review

"Magisterial...In Zimmer's pages, we discover a world minutely threaded with myriad streams of heredity flowing in all directions, in variegated patterns and different registers."
-The Atlantic

"The strength of [She Has Her Mother's Laugh]...is its combination of accuracy, journalistic clarity and scientific authority...If the science doesn't matter to you now, it will soon."
-The Washington Post

"Zimmer is careful and well-informed... Acquired traits can be inherited. Biological time can turn backward. And monsters are real."
-Wall Street Journal

"Carl Zimmer's magnum opus, probing myriad strands of science through the prism of decadeslong, stellar reporting, and a leading contender as the most outstanding nonfiction work of the year...a lush, enthralling book that transforms the reader with its insights."
-Minneapolis Star-Tribune

"Expansive, engrossing, and often enlightening... Zimmer takes readers on a tale through time and technology, from the inbred Holy Roman Empire to the birthplace of American eugenics to the Japanese lab where scientists are reprogramming skin cells into eggs and sperm."
-Wired

"A chronicle of timeless values, and the permanent importance of bonds of kinship and the passing of generations in human culture. It is also a stark caution against human hubris, as the early decades of hereditary science show just how much damage science can cause when it's poorly done and unethically applied. Finally, it is a wondrous exposé of the rapid-fire results and advances being made in 21st-century genetics, and the social and cultural consequences that they might unleash."
-National Review

"Nuanced, entertaining and balances eloquent story-telling with well-researched science... Anyone interested in their path through history, and what they may hand on, will find much to excite them... She Has her Mother's Laugh is, as promised, a showcase of the powers, perversions and potential of what we truly gain from our past and pass on to our future."
-New Scientist

"A beguiling narrative... Whatever your views on the power of genes versus other forms of heredity, you will be in for a few surprises."
-Nature

"Into this zeitgeist enters Carl Zimmer's most enjoyable new book, She Has Her Mother's Laugh, with a sweeping overview of the history of our understanding of heredity... [He is] one of the best science journalists of our time."
-Science

"A magnificent work...Journalist Zimmer masterfully blends exciting storytelling with first-rate science reporting. His book is as engrossing as it is enlightening."
-Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"A thoroughly enchanting tour of big questions, oddball ideas, and dazzling accomplishments of researchers searching to explain, manipulate, and alter inheritance."
-Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"A wide-ranging and eye-opening inquiry into the way heredity shapes our species."
-Booklist (starred review)

"Zimmer's latest offers a comprehensive look at all aspects of heredity in readable and accessible text for anyone interested in the topic."
-Library Journal

"This massive, multifaceted account of heredity's history and possible future illuminates the subject as something much more complex th