I Contain Multitudes

byEd Yong, Charlie Anson (Read by)

The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life

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Your body is teeming with tens of trillions of microbes. It’s an entire world, a colony full of life.

In other words, you contain multitudes.

These microscopic companions sculpt our organs, protect us from diseases, guide our behaviour, and bombard us with their genes. They also hold the key to understanding all life on earth.

In I Contain Multitudes, Ed Yong opens our eyes and invites us to marvel at ourselves and other animals in a new light, less as individuals and more as thriving ecosystems.

We learn the invisible and wondrous science behind the corals that construct mighty reefs and the squid that create their own light shows. We see how bacteria can alter our response to cancer-fighting drugs, tune our immune system, influence our evolution, and even modify our genetic make-up. And we meet the scientists who are manipulating these microscopic partners to our advantage.

In a million tiny ways, I Contain Multitudes will radically change how you think about the natural world, and how you see yourself.

Super-interesting... He just keeps imparting one surprising, fascinating insight after the next. I Contain Multitudes is science journalism at its best
Bill Gates

[A] marvellous, thrilling and richly annotated book… I call it marvellous: everything about the microbial world is to be marvelled at. And it is a page-turner in a very old-fashioned sense. All life is here, and death too, and sex and violence, including deviations of which you had never dreamed ... We have an inner life, in every sense, and are the richer for it: richer still for this witty and compelling book.
Tim Radford, Guardian

I Contain Multitudes has a terrific story to tell … Ed Yong is a talented British science writer … his first book covers a huge amount of microscopic territory in clear, strong, often epigrammatic prose … He is infectiously enthusiastic about microbes and he describes them with verve … Even the book’s endnotes are rich with interesting asides, swarming with interesting sidelights, a teeming microbial world.
Jonathan Weiner, New York Times

About Ed Yong

Ed Yong is a Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist and an internationally bestselling author. His first book, I Contain Multitudes, was a New York Times bestseller and shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust Prize. His second book, An Immense World, won the Royal Society Science Book Prize and was a Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller. He won a Pulitzer Prize and a George Polk award in 2021 for his coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2024.

His work has appeared in The Atlantic, New York Times, National Geographic, New Yorker and Wired, among others. He also regularly gives talks and interviews, and his TED talk on mind-controlling parasites has been watched by over 1.9 million people.

He lives in Oakland, California, with his wife Liz Neeley, founder of Liminal Creations, and his corgi, Typo. He is almost certainly looking at birds right now.

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