Chance in the House of Fate

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by Jennifer G. Ackerman

Houghton Mifflin

Due/Published June 2001, 288 pages, cloth

ISBN 0618082875

This is the alchemy of art with solid science - the real thing," said Edward Hoagland in praising Jennifer Ackerman's Notes from the Shore. An award-winning science writer, Ackerman combines the gifts of vision and language with in-depth knowledge to explore how human heredity links us to the rest of the natural world. Chance in the House of Fate is an elegant and fascinating natural history of humanity seen through the microscopic lenses of our genes and cells.

With reports on the most up-to-date research in the field, Ackerman pieces together the puzzle of genetics in a luminous narrative that reveals the meaning of this new information for our daily lives. Her voice is rich in imagery and poetry, vivid and deeply personal, and she uses her own experiences as telling touchpoints. Pregnant with her first child, she anxiously calculates the odds that her baby will inherit the gene that caused her younger sister's profound retardation. When discussing cell growth, she describes the heartbreaking cancer that claimed her mother's life. With her daughter on her hip at the crack of dawn to observe the millennial orbit of a comet, she contemplates the circadian rhythms that measure the passing of time.

Ackerman's remarkable skills of description lend wonder and awe to the striking connections between our microcosmic makeup and the macrocosm of the visible world. Her unique voice and encompassing vision inform Chance in the House of Fate, a magnificent addition both to literature and to science.