Well, again, here is another shameless self promotion. We got another good review of the new Evolution Textbook on which I am a co-author. This one is by Dan Hartl and was in Nature OK, it is not an Open Access review, but as I have said before, I am obsessed about open access to research articles, not book reviews, etc.
In the review Hartl tells a story about an encounter with Max Delbrück at Cold Spring Harbor where Delbruck implied that molecular aspects of evolution were uninteresting. Hartl goes on to say many nice things about our book (he does get on our case about having problems on the web and not in the book – but hey nobody is perfect). My favorite from the review is the following
Textbooks in evolutionary biology have gen-
erally kept pace with these changes and several
excellent books are available. This new one by
Barton and colleagues is among the best. The
production quality is superb in layout, compo-
sition, typesetting, colour palette, illustrations
and gorgeous half-tones; and the writing is
excellent, as one might expect from such a stel–
lar cast of experts in population genetics, palae–
ontology, human genetics, bacterial genomics
and developmental biology (respectively).
Thanks Dr. Hartl. And a much belated thanks for a personal encounter that I had with you many years ago where you were MUCH more encouraging to me about working on bacterial genomes than Delbruck was to you about molecular evolution.
Jonathan Eisen's Lab 