Customer Reviews

Biography of a Germ

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The germ is the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi, and it causes among other things Lyme disease. Karlen is a psychoanalyst by trade and a historian of microbiology by inclination. He fell in love with the world of the very small when as a boy he was given a microscope. Karlen is also a fine prose stylist with a sharp sense of the ecological. In fact this book is really a kind of treatise on ecology, with a concentration on the environment of a bacterium. Borrelia burgdorferi is spread by ticks that bite small animals such as mice and squirrels and larger animals such as deer and sometimes humans. What Karlen accomplishes in this modest little book is to make vivid just what a "germ" is for a general readership. If you are in a fog about microbes and would like a painless, lively introduction, then this book may serve you very well.

I always imagined that bacteria split about every twenty minutes. Here I learned that some bacteria do split every twenty minutes or so, but others take hours and some even longer. I was also fuzzy about just how it is that microbes cause disease. Do they "eat" human flesh or destroy our cells with toxins or hog our nutrients for themselves? Turns out that some do one thing and some do another. Karlen emphasizes that sometimes what they do is cause symptoms: fever, muscle aches, fatigue, inflamation, etc., which are actually the result of our immune system's aggressive response to the presence of something foreign. Sometimes this can get so out of hand that our immune system continues to attack our own cells even after the microbe is gone, as is suspected in rheumatoid arthritis and possibly fibromyalgia (p. 160). And sometimes microbes commandeer some part of our system in order to better spread themselves around by making us sneeze or cough (cold viruses) or by giving us diarrhea (cholera).

There is a lot of other information in this little book, including such diverse facts as tumble weeds being native to southern Russia and not the western United States as I had always thought, or that the people of Lyme, Connecticut didn't appreciate having a disease named after their town. It is also interesting to know that microbes can "hide" in our bodies for years and then break out during times of overload or stress.

Karlen digresses nicely in spots, giving his opinion on the Gaia concept (he likes the "original, narrower version" p. 63), and how he feels about the deer population in the U.S. (he thinks there are too many). This last is directly relevant since it is on the deer that the ticks that are the vectors for Lyme disease mate and are able to reproduce. He recalls some history (the cholera epidemics in London in the nineteenth century, Spanish flu in America, etc.) and literature (Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year; the anonymous The Autobiography of a Flea), and in a footnote (p. 29) cites a story by Isaac Babel about syphilis (a bacterium related to Borrelia burgdorferi) entitled "Guy de Maupassant." A story by Isaac Babel about Guy de Maupassant is like a movie by Stephen Spielberg about Stanley Kubrick!

In summation, this is microbiology as literature, ecology as belles lettres seen in part from the perspective of a germ.

This is a slim book, simply written, easily read. But it also packs a lot of information between its pages--all that you need to know about Bb, the germ in question, in fact. It's also full of anecdotes, literary and cultural history, and even personal history. The short chapters make the book a very compelling read. Sure, this book isn't for scholars, but for the common readers who may not know much about the sciences. But I think it's all the better for it.

Okay, so I must admit... I'm not exactly an expert when it comes to understanding the scientific jargon used in most journals discussing epidemiology and other areas of interest. I love to read about the world around me, but sometimes need a translator to comprehend it all! That's the great thing about Arno Karlen's book, "Biography of a Germ"-- you don't have to have your doctorate in microbacteriology to enjoy this book as a great read. On the surface the subject may seem a bit, well, odd... but Karlen's wit makes it easy to find yourself enthralled with the life and loves of Bb, this book's microscopic hero and hellion all rolled into one tiny spirochete. Before you know it, you are actually LEARNING a thing or two... and enjoying every minute of it! Far beyond just a crack at popular science, "Biography of a Germ" just might provide a few answers not only about the world within but the world around.

I have Lyme disease, and have read tons of info on Bb. This is the first description I've found that I would not describe as dry. There's an old saying that you should keep your friends close, but your enemies closer. This book allows you to do so with a germ that's wreaking havoc in your life in a way that makes you laugh instead of cry. I'm glad Arno Karlan wrote this book.

This is a cute little book on science which is also very informative and easy to read at the same time. I highly recommend it to anyone who may be interested in biology, medicine, popular science, or just a good story well told, as it covers not just the life of the germ, but also a little bit of its cultural and natural history.

I have read Mr. Karlens book and have heard him speak. I found the book a refreshing unbiased look at the life of a spirochete, Bb. As one who suffers from the disease it was nice to read about the ecology of the germ without all of the controversy regarding diagnosis and treatment. C. Dickey RN

This is undoubtly an interesting subject. Borrelia burgdorferi is an important pathogen and serve as a good model to explain some ways in which we have altered the environment and the resulting ecological consequences. Ecology and microbiology as the ecology of parasites in general are extremely important subjects we should all be conscientious and aware of. Particularly interesting is the ecological history of Borrelia burgdorferi and his vector.

The reason I only gave three stars to this book is that I felt it is superficial. Arno Karlen does not explain intimate relations between Borrelia and Ioxodes, nor between Ioxodes and deer, he just mentions the relations between them, but do not explain intimacies.

With so many books and products competing for your time, sometimes it is necessary to seek out a review. These useful summaries and commentaries have been aiding consumers ever since the very first reviews were written 5000 years ago in Babylon, pressed in cuneiform into clay tablets using sticks with triangular ends, which had just been invented to keep track of the already old empire's taxes, food stockpiles, and military supplies. This new technology may have given the aging empire another thousand years of life. Let us ponder, for a moment, the impact of literacy on society.

If you found the previous paragraph entertaining, and you have no particular interest in Borrelia, you might enjoy this book. If, like me, you are seeking information on Borrelia, you'll soon be pulling your hair in frustration. Karlen does not even begin to speak about his subject until chapter 8. Chapter 9 reverts to meandering elsewhere, and the entirety of chapter 10 is taken up telling us, using a variety of imaginative comparisons, that B. burgdorferi measures 20-30 microns long by .2-.3 microns wide.

The book's many digressions are well-written, and might be interesting if I had had no goal in mind when picking the book up. But the entire book does not contain much more information on its subject than a good Wikipedia entry. (It contains considerably more than the actual Wikipedia entry on Borrelia, which is one reason I bought the book.)

I read this book a few months ago for a book report I had to do in my Entomology class. I choose it at first just because it was the shortest in length out of the other book options, but when I actually got it in the mail and started reading it I loved it! I read it all in one day. Now I am not a science person by any means, I usually hate any subject science related, but this book is nothing like reading a textbook at all. The author does such a good job about making it very informative but yet simple. I never thought I would have liked reading about a germ as much as I did! I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who loves science, and even to those of you like me who don't.

"Biography of a Germ" is an engaging, sometimes even eloquent, history of Borrelia burgdorferi (Bb), the spirochete that causes Lyme disease. Its author, Arno Karlen, is a psychologist and science writer with an impressive ability to imbue his prose with the sense of wonder that inspired his lifelong fascination with microbes. This is not a biography in the sense of an account of the spirochete's life cycle and how it makes us sick. It is a biography of the species Bb and its place in "our shared ecological web", including how man-made changes in its environment and suburbanization have affected its viability and ultimately made the microbe dangerous to humans.

Karlen begins with a good-humored defense of this attempt to write a biography of a non-human, then explains his choice of Bb as a subject. He discusses the evolution of bacteria 3.5 billion years ago to the present day before getting specific about Bb. Then we learn what it looks like (a helix 20-30 microns long), its methods of reproduction, and its journey through multiple hosts, occasionally ending up in humans. At that point, the discussion turns to the discovery of Lyme disease and theories on how and when Bb came to the US. I would have liked more detail on what it does in the human body, but it occurs to me that science may have a limited understanding of that. Nevertheless, "Biography of a Germ" is a very readable history of Bb in 25 short chapters.