At first glance, The Gene book is hefty—and it’s certainly not a novel. It took me a couple months to finish this one. I mostly read this during classes and vacations, but I finally finished it. And. Just. Wow.

The Gene is a book about DNA, genetics, and a fair amount of science/biotech history. But it’s not just about that. Y’know how when you’re putting together a puzzle out of a box, you have this sort of reference picture on the box and you try to match up the pieces? When I was reading this book, each chapter felt like a puzzle piece being handed to me, and bit by bit I began to understand how it fit into the larger picture.

Mukherjee starts with the beginning of studies on evolution, and takes us all the way up to modern efforts in genetic therapies. Before reading this book, I didn’t really appreciate just how powerful statistics and actuarial math are in science—these are the tools that Mendel, among others, used to begin to understand genes and gene expression. From crossing pea strains to sequencing the human genome, this book spares no detail.

Despite—or perhaps because of—his optimism for the future of genetics, Mukherjee doesn’t shy away from its dark past. In The Gene, entire sections of the book focus around the horrors of eugenics, racism, and other ways that science has been used to justify man-made horrors. These aren’t pleasant discussions, but I’m glad they’re here.

If you’re interested in biology, read this book. It’s made all the richer when you have modern context and a more academic or practical understanding of the content—I had a lot of fun learning about the origins of the lab procedures that I take for granted, like gene cloning and transfection.

If you hear the words “gene” or “DNA” and you don’t quite know what it means, this book is a great place to start. Mukherjee’s style is very approachable while still allowing for a deep exploration of the book’s topics. One of my other favorite books, The Song of the Cell (also by Siddharta Mukherjee) is written in much the same way.