"The rarest of books about the experience of a science writer uncovering and investigating a cell line that changed the world, all while being thrown into a transformative journey of discovering race and racism in America, the culture of African Americans in the USA, and the painful reality of loss and family. A truly remarkable read—and I failed at science. Fascinating and phenomenal, heartbreaking and utterly compelling."

While I was stimulated by the Communist Manifesto, I was exhausted by Das Kapital. But I found myself strongly drawn to the idea of a classless society, which, to my mind, was similar to traditional African culture where life was shared and communal. I subscribed to Marx’s basic dictum, which has the simplicity and generosity of the Golden Rule: “From each according to his ability; to each according to his needs.

"The first novel I read that held together on a regular plane as well as thematic one - as story as well as a symbolic journey. There could be others that work like Jude, but something about this book - the way the author is dealing with ideas like evolution along with the collapse of class culture - made it feel like a precursor to modernism. Like the birth of modernism."

"Brian DePalma’s breakthrough thriller pays homage to several Hitchcock classics—Rear Window and Psycho, mostly—in a genuinely innovative manner, with jittery, counter-culture-ish New York wiseass humor rather than Hitch’s British wryness, an interesting set of mirror image antagonists in peculiar twins played by Margot Kidder (with a seductively odd French-Canadian accent), and nosy reporter Jennifer Salt. It has graphic shocks but also stretches of hallucinatory strangeness."