The Bookshelf: April 28, 2015

Trib+Health is joining with respected books authority Kirkus Reviews to bring you select reviews of books of note in the field of health care. For more book reviews and recommendations, visit Kirkus.com. 

10% HUMAN: How Your Body's Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness

by Alanna Collen

This state-of-the-science survey explores and explains what is known about the microbial community that lives within us.

In a welcome antidote to the simplistic “boost your health with probiotics” books and articles posing as science (but serving mostly commerce), Collen dares to tell the messy truth about what science knows — and doesn’t know — about the microbes that live in us, live with us, and in some ways even become us.

An evolutionary biologist with several degrees, the author is clearly an expert in the field. Happily for readers, she’s also an experienced science writer who is equally at ease offering firsthand tales from her rain-forest expeditions and parsing complex laboratory experiments … Collen never claims that she has uncovered the answers to modern health woes, but she points out the markers that may one day lead to such answers.

Everything you wanted to know about microbes but were afraid to ask.

For full review, visit kirkus.com