A review by renbooks
Life's Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive by Carl Zimmer

2.0

I read this book with my science book club and well.... I am whelmed by this. This is a topic I have been extremely interested in since I first read the textbook description of "what is life" in my first college bio classes. I'll start with the good: there were some very interesting chapters in here and case studies that really gave me a lot to think about. It's more obvious than ever after reading this that scientists do not have a good definition for what life is. I think the author did a good job presenting that. The bad: this book was very disorganized. I thought the author did a poor job of articulating why certain boring historical accounts were included. He was not clear about making sure the audience knows what topic he is discussing (and I'm a biologist so I should have known what he was getting at but often didn't). If he was having each chapter display a quality of life from the "standard definitions", he needed to express that better.

Also, a personal pet peeve of mine that I wish people would stop doing: STOP DESCRIBING WHAT THE SCIENTIST IS WEARING OR WHAT THEY LOOK LIKE, NOBODY CARES. He literally describes the brand of sunglasses a scientist puts on. That is not relevant to the story. He also describes a scientist as another scientist's wife when that isn't relevant to any part of the narrative, and I take issue with that. The other scientists he mentioned in that section were "grad student, post doc, etc" and this scientist was "other scientist's wife".