Woolly: The True Story of the Quest to Revive One of History’s Most Iconic Extinct Creatures
(Atria, $26) “Step aside, Jurassic Park,” says David Holahan in USA Today. Ben Mezrich’s “breathless” new book recounts how a team of Harvard scientists is working to resurrect the woolly mammoth, and the top-selling author so eagerly promotes the team’s longshot dream that readers will be forgiven for thinking that herds of the long-extinct beasts will be roaming the Arctic tundra by the time the movie version comes out. At least Mezrich has good characters, beginning with ringleader George M. Church, a bearded, bicycle-riding genius who hopes to synthesize the DNA code of a woolly mammoth and splice a part of it with the DNA code of an elephant embryo, thus reanimating a species whose grazing habits might help combat global warming. Inexplicably, Mezrich even hands Church writing duties on the epilogue, and the professor’s prose proves “challenging, to put it mildly.”
Mostly, though, Woolly is “paced like a thriller,” says Jason Heller of NPR.org. As in his previous nonfiction best-sellers— including the books that inspired the movies 21 and The Social Network—Mezrich “dwells on close-ups before zooming out to the big picture,” and so the loving marriage of Church and fellow genius Ting Wu is almost as crucial to the story as the science, the academic politics, and the participation of big-name backers like PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and Whole Earth Catalog publisher Stewart Brand. Though the reconstructed dialogue Mezrich frequently furnishes “feels overly contrived,” his eye for characterization is “as sharp as his ability to break down scientific jargon into easily digestible chunks.”
“Woolly is by no means a textbook,” said Stephanie Hanes in CSMonitor.com. If you want to gain true expertise in modern genetics, look elsewhere, and if you want to know how the story ends, you’ll need to wait a few years at least. Mezrich clearly thinks the birth of a mammoth isn’t far off, though, and his talent for weaving together narrative and scientific detail “does much to broaden the lay reader’s understanding of the tremendous developments and aweinspiring capabilities of some of today’s most groundbreaking science.”