Review #59 - Seven Daughters of Eve by Brian Sykes

The Seven Daughters of Eve is part of my biomedical reading list this summer. It's about mitochondria and their genetics. Mitochondria are only in the eggs, not sperm, so everyone's mitochondria are pretty much identical to their mothers. As a result, Europe has seven mitochondrial ancestors - the "Eves" of the world. (n.b. if you're wondering why there are seven ancestors and not one 1) read the book 2) mutation)

This book goes over the research that Brian Sykes has done over the years. It was really interesting to read about and this was probably the strongest point of this book. If you're really interested in research and specifically research in DNA I would really recommend it.

The pacing in this book is weird. It takes 250 pages to get to the actual "daughters of Eve" and the research is the only bit that is really "exciting" to read. Also the end quickly declines into fiction and how the seven eves may have lived. Honestly the ending just made me feel like I was reading rubbish and took away from the quality of the book.

I feel like a few extra diagrams could have made it more interesting as the book went along just really to break up the text. It could have been much more visual.

The book is quite old which isn't always great for science books but it's still interesting none the less.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed this but I feel like I could have got the same amount out of just a summary of the main findings of the book. Often it felt like Sykes was just padding.

I would recommend this if:

You are really interested in genetics

You want a book focused on research

You like learning about caveman history 

I gave this three stars

Buy it here