Dr. Zuk is first and foremost a terrific parasitologist. The portions of the book that Zuk spends discussing her own Ph.D. thesis and her own research, especially regarding sexual selection. The central portion of the book from about page 80 to page 180 is fascinating & probably should have been released as a stand-alone book -- it is focused, it flows and the topic is fascinating (these are the chapters on sexual selection, infection differences between the sexes and sexually transmitted diseases.)

The first 80 pages drag, and are covered both more interestingly and in more detail in hundreds of other popular science books. Also, the topics in these chapters (heterozygote advantage, hygeine hypothesis) have little to do with Zuk's central themes. Theis portion of the book also is infested with what Zuk seems to think are wry little asides, which grate terribly. The concluding paragraphs are interesting, but lack the compulsive readable of the earlier chapters. ( )

A fun, readable explanation of the role that other organisms have played and continue to play in human evolution and health. ( )

Fascinating scientific information Author has a sense of humor that prevents the topic of this book from being dry ( )

This was fairly interesting, but it got to be a bit much by the end.

I read this in German, and I suspect that the style problems that caused me to mark it down somewhat are due to the translation. There are also several places where a negative sentence only makes sense in context if it should be positive. The 'breezy convenient feeling' and 'sense of humor' mentioned by other reviewers don't really come across. There are several places where a sentence seems to be fully out of place, but I suspect that the connection is actually there in English but the idiom either is not translatable or not recognized by the translator. Or perhaps these don't come over because the translator is taking the whole thing too seriously. ( )

There's a huge ick factor in this book, which deals in worms and other parasites of humanity, as well as the evolution of immune systems and infectious agents. The science is fascinating, and the conclusions amply supported by Darwinian reasoning. Perhaps we've been too hasty in trying to rid ourselves of every possible disease and parasitic hanger-on. ( )