Hox!

Edward Ziff and Israel Rosenfield on some new books about evolution at the New York Review of Books, making me wish I were doing developmental biology (and I'm halfway through a great book by Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb called Evolution in Four Dimensions that I'm really loving, it's super-thought-provoking and interesting though specialized enough that it may not appeal to the very general reader). I feel I have recommended these before, but if you're wanting something highly readable--i.e. relatively free from technical stuff except where it can be made extremely interesting and engaging--a wonderful recent book was Armand-Marie Leroi's Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body; and surely there is no single more appealing & important book on the idea of heredity than Francois Jacob's The Logic of Life.