AUGUST 2018 - AudioFile
Do you like science? How about matters of DNA, species origins, and evolution? Do terms like “archaea,” “prokaryotes,” “eukaryotes,” and “horizontal gene transfer” enthrall you? If so, you are in luck. THE TANGLED TREE is a deep dive into what makes us—us. It’s about how interconnected all living things are. As narrated quite nicely by Jacques Roy, this listen offers insights into how scientists continue to build on Darwin’s theory of evolution. At times, the science concepts can be daunting. But author Quammen sprinkles in just enough human interest stories, combined with Roy’s fluid and engaging style, to create a good listen—as long as you really, really like science. J.P.S. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
The New York Times Book Review - Erika Check Hayden
Quammen's sprawling history of evolutionary genetics ranges widely…He synthesizes a large quantity of disparate material, circling repeatedly back to one scientist in particular: Carl Woese, whose work both fleshed out Darwin's tree and laid the foundations for its uprooting…Quammen, one of science writing's savviest stylists, is best when probing the human side of science…Quammen offers a readable and largely reliable Baedeker to a fast-moving and complex field of science that is as tangled as the tree of his title. He ultimately concludes that Darwin was not wrong, but that his tree of life was too simplistic. Yet, though Quammen shapes a truly fascinating tale, it's clear that this story is not yet finished.
The New York Times - Parul Sehgal
[Quammen] is our greatest living chronicler of the natural world…[and] an exemplary guide; there are few writers so firmly on the side of the reader, who so solicitously request your patience…and delightedly hack away at jargon…He keeps the chapters short, the sentences spring-loaded. There are vivacious descriptions on almost every page…Each section ends with a light cliffhanger. Quammen has the gift of Daedalus; he gets you out of the maze. And maybe to a bar. When not in the field, you can find Quammen and his subjects talking over a drink or two, over a combo sushi platter, over Turkish food, Chilean steaks and beers or just over a coke and pizza. It's a book born out of appetite and conviviality, an unpretentious delight in food and conversation—in being and thinking with others.
Publishers Weekly
★ 05/07/2018
Science writer Quammen (The Song of the Dodo), as he has so often done before, explores important questions and makes the process as well as the findings understandable and exciting to lay readers. Here, he delves into the field of molecular phylogenetics, the process of “reading the deep history of life and the patterns of relatedness from the sequence of constituent units in certain long molecules,” namely “DNA, RNA, and a few select proteins.” Although the topic might seem arcane, he brings it to life by profiling many of the field’s most important players, including microbiologists Carl Woese and Ford Doolittle, and demonstrating how it has changed “the way scientists understand the shape of the history of life.” The breakthroughs Quammen describes include Woese’s classification of the archaea, a new category of living creatures made up of single-celled microorganisms, and Doolittle’s insight, recounted in an interview with the author, that genes can be transferred horizontally, between organisms (and not always closely related organisms) rather than simply between parent and offspring. The cumulative effect is to transform Darwin’s famous image of evolution as a straightforwardly branching “tree of life” into a “tangle of rising and crossing and diverging and converging limbs.” This book also proves its author’s mastery in weaving various strands of a complex story into an intricate, beautiful, and gripping whole. Agent: Amanda Urban, ICM. (Aug.)
Science - Ivor T. Knight
"In David Quammen’s new page turner, The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life, the author reveals how new molecular techniques have come to revolutionize the way we understand evolutionary processes and how we classify life into coherent groups. In an accessible style that has won him accolades in the past, Quammen does a marvelous job of weaving together the scientific and human story of this revolution. . . . Quammen has once again crafted a delightful read on a complex and important subject."
The Guardian - Lois Beckett
[Quammen] writes like the director of a summer blockbuster: blasts of rich detail, quick cuts, not a second wasted.
Booklist (starred review)
"With humor, clarity, and exciting accounts of breakthroughs and feuds, Quammen traces the painstaking revelation of life’s truly spectacular complexity."
Elizabeth Kolbert
There's no one who writes about complex science better than David Quammen. The Tangled Tree is at once fascinating, illuminating, and totally absorbing.
Barry Lopez
David Quammen’s diligently researched and deeply considered overview of what’s been going on recently in evolutionary biology is illuminating, wondrous, and gripping. Also scary when it comes to thinking about the evolution of Homo sapiens. This is stunning, first-rate journalism.
The Wall Street Journal - David Barash
David Quammen proves to be an immensely well-informed guide to a complex story. . . . Indeed he is, in my opinion, the best natural history writer currently working. Mr. Quammen’s books . . . consistently impress with their accuracy, energy and superb, evocative writing."
The Boston Globe - Thomas Levenson
Quammen has written a deep and daring intellectual adventure. . . . The Tangled Tree is much more than a report on some cool new scientific facts. It is, rather, a source of wonder.
Scientific American - Andrea Thompson
"A lively account of how new genetic research is upending the fundamental history of life."
Nature - John Archibald
"In The Tangled Tree, celebrated science writer David Quammen tells perhaps the grandest tale in biology. . . . He presents the science — and the scientists involved — with patience, candour and flair."
Carl Zimmer
"One of the central insights in Charles Darwin's theory of evolution was that life branched like a tree. And one of the revolutionary discoveries of molecular biology over a century later was that the tree of life was, in fact, a far more complex maze of branches. In The Tangled Tree, David Quammen offers the definitive chronicle of this profound development in our understanding of the history of life."
From the Publisher
One of Science News’ Favorite Books of the Year
Barbara Kiser
"Quammen is one of the great science journalists, and this is a monument of a book—a masterful retelling of how the ‘tree of life’ was recast in the twentieth century by a band of original thinkers."
The New Republic - Adam Gaffney
DNA, it turns out, can also be passed laterally, between individuals, including those of different species. This discovery represented a tectonic shift in our understanding of nature, a story that David Quammen tells wonderfully in his exhaustively researched book, Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life.
NPR - Scott Simon
"Utterly absorbing. . . . Changed the way I see life."
Ed Yong
"The Tangled Tree is a thrilling story of some of biology's most incredible discoveries, and a rich portrait of the fascinating people behind them. This is David Quammen at his best: funny, tenacious, lucid, charming, and relentlessly compelling."
Booklist
"With humor, clarity, and exciting accounts of breakthroughs and feuds, Quammen traces the painstaking revelation of life’s truly spectacular complexity."
Booklist
"With humor, clarity, and exciting accounts of breakthroughs and feuds, Quammen traces the painstaking revelation of life’s truly spectacular complexity."
AUGUST 2018 - AudioFile
Do you like science? How about matters of DNA, species origins, and evolution? Do terms like “archaea,” “prokaryotes,” “eukaryotes,” and “horizontal gene transfer” enthrall you? If so, you are in luck. THE TANGLED TREE is a deep dive into what makes us—us. It’s about how interconnected all living things are. As narrated quite nicely by Jacques Roy, this listen offers insights into how scientists continue to build on Darwin’s theory of evolution. At times, the science concepts can be daunting. But author Quammen sprinkles in just enough human interest stories, combined with Roy’s fluid and engaging style, to create a good listen—as long as you really, really like science. J.P.S. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2018-05-16
A masterful history of a new field of molecular biology that has wide-ranging implications regarding "human identity, human individuality, [and] human health."In their evolution from a common ancestor, multiplying species branch and branch again, forming a "tree of life": a mainstay of biology teaching for two centuries that turns out to be wrong, writes bestselling National Geographic contributing writer Quammen (Yellowstone: A Journey Through America's Wild Heart, 2016, etc.) in this impressive account of perhaps the most unheralded scientific revolution of the 20th century. It's the result of a new area of study called molecular phylogenetics, which involves "reading the deep history of life and the patterns of relatedness from the sequence of constituent units in certain long molecules, as those molecules exist today within living creatures. The molecules mainly in question are DNA, RNA, and a few select proteins." After admitting that this is a mouthful, the author describes three surprising discoveries that paved the way. The first revealed that genes don't always move from parent to offspring. Sometimes organisms pass them back and forth, which is called horizontal gene transfer. Then researchers, led by the book's central figure, biophysicist Carl Woese (1928-2012), while comparing bacterial RNA, identified a group so different that they weren't bacteria at all but an entirely new kingdom: the Archaea. Finally, studies kept showing that bits of hereditary material simply float independently inside cells and regularly move to neighbors, other species, or even other kingdoms. No exception, the human genome is speckled with bacterial and viral DNA. The tree of life looks more like a web. An indefatigable journalist covering a revolution whose participants are mostly alive is an irresistible combination, and Quammen seems to have interviewed them all. A consistently engaging collection of vivid portraits of brilliant, driven, quarrelsome scientists in the process of dramatically altering the fundamentals of evolution, illuminated by the author's insightful commentary.
