Before the Dawn

Derbyshire reviews a new book by Nicholas Wade:

Before the Dawn is beautifully done, a grand genealogy of modern humanity, rooted in fact but spiced with an appropriate measure of speculation and hypothesis. Even for a reader to whom the material is already familiar — one who, for example, has been following Nicholas Wade’s reports in the New York Times — it is well worth the trouble of reading this book for its narrative value, for the elegant way Wade has put it all together as a single compelling story. This is a brilliant book, by one of our best science journalists.