Book of the week: The Violinist’s Thumb: And Other Lost Tales of Love, War, and Genius, as Written by Our Genetic Code by Sam Kean

(Little, Brown, $26)

“No one wants to meet up with an exploding nuclear weapon,” said Robert Krulwich in NPR.org. But what about two? Of all the stories Sam Kean tells in his new book about our genetic code, few top Tsutomu Yamaguchi’s. The Japanese engineer was finishing a project in Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, when he looked up to see the bomb drop. When he came to, his skin was hot, the landscape obliterated. Three days later, he was home in Nagasaki when the second bomb hit. That made him one of only a few people who were near the epicenter of both blasts, and his DNA should have been scrambled eggs. But it wasn’t. He and his wife later had two healthy children, and Yamaguchi lived to the ripe age of 93—an exemplar, Kean writes, of DNA’s remarkable ability to repair itself.

Kean’s lively book tells at least two big stories, said Jesse Singal in The Boston Globe. While detailing the miraculous ways in which DNA operates, he also shows us the long journey science has made to unwrap its secrets. “Luckily, Kean is very interested in human beings,” so he’s mixed in “a generous helping of wild human stories.” The scientists who’ve made crucial discoveries get time, of course. But so do individuals whose stories tell us about the impact of our genetic heritage—like the group of Arctic explorers who ate a polar bear’s liver and discovered the toxic effects of too much vitamin A. The book is full of surprising ideas, including why a near extinction of our species probably explains the fact that we have two fewer chromosomes than our closest primate relative. And why so-called “junk DNA” suggests that our ancestors interbred with Neanderthals and other nonhumans. The thumb in the title is the unusually flexible digit of violin virtuoso Niccolò Paganini, said Margaret Quamme in the Columbus, Ohio, Dispatch. In Kean’s “beguiling” world, there’s beautiful music in the story of Paganini’s apparent genetic disorder.

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Kean writes like “the best science teacher you never had,” said Keith Staskiewicz in Entertainment Weekly. Having used his previous book, The Disappearing Spoon, to make chemistry’s periodic table interesting, he’s now managed to do the same with biology’s building blocks. “Given the confused, headachy feeling we’ve had thanks to the recent Higgs boson discovery, we can only hope the next topic he decodes will be physics.”