Mutants

In Mutants, Armand Marie Leroi gives a brilliant narrative account of our genetic grammar and the people whose bodies have revealed it, balancing both the science and the stories behind some of history's most captivating figures - including a French convent girl who found herself changing sex upon puberty; children who, echoing Homer's Cyclops, are born with a single eye in the middle of their foreheads; a village of long-lived Croatian dwarfs; a hairy family that was kept at the Burmese royal court for four generations (and from which Darwin took one of his keenest insights into heredity); and the ostrich-footed Wadoma of the Zambezi River Valley.