Microbia: A Journey Into the Unseen World Around You by Eugenia Bone

Rodale, 271 pages

Microbes are everywhere. They link living and nonliving things, converting chemicals into food for all beings. We are full of microbes. If everything human was taken away from our bodies, we would still be a cloud of microbes, our skin a tenuous film of bacteria, fungi, and other tiny organisms.

I have read many books on science written for the layperson. But only a few memorable science writers come to mind. One is Santa Fe’s own George Johnson, author of prize-winning books such as The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments (Vintage) and a writer for the New York Times. Others are New Yorker writer John McPhee (The Control of Nature; Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and Charles Darwin. Eugenia Bone deserves to be added to that list. In Microbia, she takes her readers through her own study of the subject. Bone is not a scientist; rather, she has made a living as a contributor to such food magazines as Gourmet and Saveur.

Decades ago she was an English major in college, allergic to both science and math. But as a fifty-five-year-old empty-nester, she decided to study microbiology at Columbia University. Her recounted experiences of returning to college after more than 30 years are often hilarious. She explains how her age group spends its time thinking about elderly parents, three-ingredient martinis, and the perfect neck pillow. The undergraduates in her classes were “of a different ilk altogether, smelling of youth and blue jeans, their libidos as sharp as their minds.”

Her courses were a blur of anxiety. She raced through material her classmates had recently studied, and she was unable to run computer programs that everyone else treated as second nature. In her first semester, however, Bone learned to read and mostly understand scientific papers on microbiology. By her second semester, she had a breakthrough: “I started to see that life, every aspect of life, is sustained by microbes.”

As Bone explains, life on earth began billions of years ago. For much of our planet’s history, it consisted of microbial mats. Microbes invented war and sex. Multi-celled animals and plants evolved in time, incorporating microbes within them.

In addition to attending classes, doing lab sessions, completing homework, working with a tutor, and stressing about tests, Bone continued to be a curious journalist. She writes about how she attended a no-chemical-input farming gathering in the Midwest and a scientific conference in Boston. Her descriptions of the attendees of those two different meetings are amusing, but also enlightening about the schisms between scientists and laypersons.

When I saw that Bone’s publisher is Rodale, I suspected that the book would spend numerous pages expounding on the pitfalls of unnatural diets, the dangers of antibiotics, the destruction wrought by our agrichemical farm system. Those topics appear in Microbia, but they are balanced by an understanding of current pressure on food production and health care.

Her science education taught her to observe and think more clearly: “Writing lab reports is not about the language, or interpretation, or persuasion. It’s about reporting data and determining how your data fits into the greater understanding of life.”

Bone is not a stubbornly uninformed preacher on any topic. She weaves scientific facts with a clear-eyed observation of human nature and ends up with a book that is informative, amusing, and lighthearted.

— Robin Martin