Philip R. Reilly

This is a book targeted at interested non-scientists, and the author attempts to make various concepts from genetics understandable to this audience. I think he is mostly successful, however, some of the mathematical concepts could be better explained.

I like the structure of the book, by dividing the illness into stages of life, Reilly is able to cover a breadth of disease and disorders, which follow on logically from each other.

This is an old edition of the book, so the knowledge in some areas has moved on, but that's not the fault of the author, who acknowledges the speed of development to be one of the best things about this area in the conclusion (which contains are really unfortunate typo that confused me for some time until I worked out what had to be meant). I think setting up a companion website was a really good idea.

The writing is quite dry and I found it a hard book to read, only completing it on my second attempt, despite genetics being part of the field I work in.

My major objection to the book comes, rather sadly, in the last entry. While I do not blame Reilly for including the question, and indeed, I can believe that someone wrote to him to ask this very question, the idea that homosexuality is a disorder is somewhat ... old-fashioned, I think is the politest way to put it. I am used to books which wish to not offend either side of their audience putting disorder in speech marks when discussing homosexuality, but this book does not even use that fig-leaf. I fear I will never be able to entirely recommend a book which discusses the genetic risk of being gay and includes it in the same section as alcoholism and drug addiction.… (meer)