Tears of the Cheetah: The Genetic Secrets of Our Animal Ancestors

The history of life on Earth is dominated by extinction events so numerous that over 99.9% of the species ever to have existed are gone forever. If animals could talk, we would ask them to recall their own ancestries, in particular the secrets as to how they avoided almost inevitable annihilation in the face of daily assaults by predators, climactic cataclysms, deadly infections and innate diseases.

In Tears of the Cheetah, medical geneticist and conservationist Stephen J. O'Brien narrates f...