Reviews for Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking of Genealogy

The average rating for Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking of Genealogy based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-12-09 00:00:00 Amy Harris This book is an astounding read. Histories of sheep farming, genetic experimentation, and colonial violence all converge in a chapter called Death to explore the question of how much biology is "controlled" in the 21st century. In our "modern" era, advanced scientific technologies coexist with the basic biological reality of viruses and diseases that can bring entire industries and livelihoods to a halt. What does it mean to suggest that we live in an age of "biological control" when a pandemic is still dealt with through simple (isolation, hand-washing) and sometimes brutal (culling of entire flocks of healthy animals) methods that are the opposite of technologically advanced. The whole book was interesting, but the Death chapter and the final concluding reflection on sheep intelligence/relationships between sheep and humans are enthralling reads. The resonance between foot and mouth in British sheep in 2001 and COVID-19 among humans in 2020 is compelling and makes this text a riveting one 13 years after its publication.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-04-01 00:00:00 Karen Rubino Interesting topic, but the prose was so purple it became almost unreadable at times. Every other word has about five syllables crammed into it ("totipotency" seemed to be a favourite) and every sentence is bulging with so many qualifiers that you forget what was being said. The early chapters were worse for this than the later ones and I did enjoy the section on Australia's relationship with sheep, but overall this was simply too wordy for me and my attention kept wandering. This is probably better used as a textbook for biology students; the layman will want to look elsewhere for a less dense and multisyllabic account of Dolly's life.