From Penguin's site: "Stepping effortlessly from myth to cutting-edge science, Mutants gives a brilliant narrative account of our genetic code and the captivating people whose bodies have revealed it—a French convent girl who found herself changing sex at puberty; children who, echoing Homer’s Cyclops, are born with a single eye in the middle of their foreheads; a village of long-lived Croatian dwarves; one family, whose bodies were entirely covered with hair, was kept at the Burmese royal court for four generations and gave Darwin one of his keenest insights into heredity. This elegant, humane, and engaging book “captures what we know of the development of what makes us human” (Nature).

I read this for a book club last year, the meetings of which I somehow always skipped, even though I read the books (they caught on and kicked me out via email. dumped by lit geeks--what next?). This is an extraordinary book, vascillating from science to almost science fiction as it tracks "freaks" in the scope of evolution. I can't recommend it highly enough for people with an active interest in our human race, both its history and its future. Also, my daughter likes to flip through and look at the pictures. So there's that, too.

Leroi has a site of his own, http://armandleroi.com/index.html.