A fascinating look at the attempt to understand all the different kinds of life and to place them into categories. Starts back with Antony van Leeuwenhoek, who first made microscopes capable of seeing bacteria, and moving forward to recent developments in extremophile life and genetic analysis. I highly recommend it.This is the first book I've read by someone I know - Rob's daughter is in the same preschool class as my daughter. And I found myself staggered that he had time to write at all, what with raising a child and being a full-time professor. Plus, that he had such interesting things to talk about. And interesting stories: he and his wife (a medical anthropologist) spent time in a small village in the Amazon, cataloging the medicinal uses of various plants and watching the local children's pet monkey ride on around a pet pig. Among other things.
Every Living Thing: Man's Obsessive Quest to Catalog Life, from Nanobacteria to New Monkeys
Rob Dunn
2008
Available from Amazon
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