Long a leader in microbiology, John Postgate is, luckily for us, a lucid writer. So the task he has set himself of conveying to nonscientist readers “something of the way in which our understanding of the largely invisible world of microbes is giving us new slants on life itself” is elegantly performed. In The Outer Reaches of Life (Canto/Cambridge University Press, £6.95 pbk, ISBN 0 521 55873 5), he discusses immortality, cooperation, death and survival in the most inhospitable places in the world, with intelligence, wisdom and wit.
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