I wasn't sure what I was going to get when I started this book; obviously microbes, but was it going to be dry and academic, or worse, evangelical 'omg-microbes-are-the-answer-to-everything!'?

Luckily I got neither.  Instead Yong's book was, from start to finish, utterly fascinating; never too arcane and never to simplistic, he found the sweet spot of science writing, creating an engaging narrative that never talks down to the reader.  Anyone with an average vocabulary and an interest in the symbiotic world can pick up this book without feeling intimidated.  

Microbes (bacteria, viruses, etc.) are everywhere.  Everywhere.  And bad news for the germaphobes:  this is a good and necessary thing.  Life on Earth simply could not exist without these microscopic machines.  Plants and animals depend on bacteria for nutrients they can't get from food on their own, for turning on specific and necessary genes in the DNA, even for protecting them from other bacteria gone rogue.  

Yong starts at the beginning of humans' awareness that there is life we cannot see.  Typically these beginning chapters are the deadliest for me, as I get bored with the 'background' and impatient to get to the 'good stuff', but Yong made sure even the boring background was the 'good stuff'.  I was never bored reading this book.

Left to my own devices, this review would go on forever, because there's just so much worth discussing, so I'm going to short-circuit myself and say this:  I Contain Multitudes is a great book for learning how microbes help make all life possible; it's a 50/50 split, more or less, of information on microbe/human and microbes/other flora and fauna symbioses.  It's easy to read, it's entertaining, and for at least myself, it was laugh out loud funny in one part.  I finished with a much better understanding of the microbial world and my own digestive system (for now, I'm going to resist the temptation of probiotic supplements).

A very worth-while read and one I wouldn't hesitate to recommend to anyone with an interest.

I'm almost done, but I started laughing so hard on page 234, I had to take a break.

I'm never going to look at shampoo the same way again.

- John Rawls as quoted by Ed Yong in I Contain Multitudes (2016)

Talk about packing it in - the last 50 pages have been dense with fascinating information.  I loved reading about the squid, the hyenas sort of squicked me out a bit (beware strange pastes on savannah grass), and Wolbachia... what can be said about Wolbachia other than they are the feminists of the bacterial world.  

I've known for some time about the duality of bacteria, the thin line between beneficial and lethal, but I was pretty surprised to read that viruses offer humans (and other animals) that same dual nature.  I knew scientists were using modified viruses as delivery mechanisms, but the idea that they naturally exist within our physiology and that we're reliant on them to control rogue bacteria was new to me.  It really does seem that the more I learn, the harder it becomes to categorise anything in the world as purely good or purely evil.

Except cockroaches.  Nobody will ever convince me they're anything other than satan's little minions.

Jus about every book of non-fiction covering a specific subject starts off in much the same way:  easing the reader into the meat of the book by subjecting them to a broad-view history / overview / introduction.  These introductory chapters are the bane of my existence as I generally find them tedious; the tax I have to pay to get to the good stuff.

Strictly speaking, the first two chapters of this book adhere to this pattern, but they didn't feel at all tedious to me, which is a surprising and delightful change of pace.  Were I constitutionally able to mark a book, there would have been many, many underlines sections.  Right off the bat in the prologue, I finally find out what a pangolin is (and there's a picture in the middle section of my edition!). I found his condensation of the planet's history to a 1-year span brilliant; nothing puts the insignificance of the human race in perspective like saying we've only existed for 30 minutes. The last 30 minutes of the year.  Bacteria, on the other hand, have existed since the previous March.

I have mixed feelings about the microbe museum in Amsterdam; one of those times I'm both fascinated and repulsed.  I can't say for sure I'd visit on my next trip to Amsterdam - I'd like to think I would, but truthfully, eyelash mites creep me right the hell out.