The Monk in the Garden

by Robin Marantz Henig, Fleet Cooper (Narrator)

Most people know that Gregor Mendel, the Moravian monk who patiently grew his peas in a monastery garden, shaped our understanding of inheritance. But people might not know that Mendel's work was ignored in his own lifetime, even though it contained answers to the most pressing questions raised by Charles Darwin's revolutionary book, On Origrin of the Species, published only a few years earlier. Mendel's single chance of recognition failed utterly, and he died a lonely and disappointed man.

Thirty-five years later, his work was rescued from obscurity in a single season, the spring of 1900, when three scientists from three different countries nearly simultaneously dusted off Mendel's groundbreaking paper and finally recognized its profound significance. The perplexing silence that greeted Mendel's discovery and his ultimate canonization as the father of genetics make up a tale of intrigue, jealousy, and a healthy dose of bad timing.

Telling the story as it has never been told before, Robin Henig crafts a suspenseful, elegant, and richly detailed narrative that fully evokes Mendel's life and work and the fate of his ideas as they made their perilous way toward the light of day. The Monk in the Garden is a literary tour de force about a little-known chapter in the history of science, and it brings us back to the birth of genetics - a field that continues to challenge the way we think about life itself.

Genres: Science, Biography, History, Nonfiction, Biology, Biography Memoir, Evolution

Audible Audio

First published May 1, 2000

About the author

I'm a long-time science journalist and a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. In addition to my most recent book -- Twentysomething: Why Do Young Adults Seem Stuck?, co-authored with my daughter Samantha Henig -- I've written eight others, including Pandora’s Baby: How the First Test Tube Babies Sparked the Reproductive Revolution and The Monk in the Garden: The Lost and Found Genius of Gregor Mendel, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award (and also, I'm tickled to report, a finalist for the Goodchild Prize for Excellent English from the Queen's English Society). My articles about health and medicine have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Civilization, Discover, Scientific American, Newsweek, Slate, and just about every woman’s magazine in the grocery store. I am vice president of the National Association of Science Writers, and in 2010 I received a Career Achievement Award from the American Society of Journalists and Authors as well as a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. I went to Cornell and have a master’s in journalism from Northwestern. I live in Manhattan with my husband Jeff, a political scientist who teaches at Columbia University's Teachers College, and have two grown daughters, Samantha and her older sister Jess Zimmerman.

Reviews

[Irena Pasvinter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gregor Mendel is a perfect example of a misunderstood genius who made his discoveries ahead of his time and received no appreciation and recognition whatsoever for his scientific achievement in his lifetime. Not only dis the illustrious scientists to whom he dispatched printout copies of his scientific article ignore him, but most didn't even bother to cut the pages.

The story of an obscure Moravian monk figuring out basic laws of inheritance while tinkering with green peas in his monastery garden is always mentioned in passing whenever the history of genetics is discussed. In The Triumph of Seeds: How Grains, Nuts, Kernels, Pulses, and Pips Conquered the Plant Kingdom and Shaped Human History, which I read recently, Mendel and the details of his life and work received more attention than usual as the author described his own attempts to recreate Mendel's pea hybridization results. This book left me wanting to read more about Mendel, and so I picked up an audiobook version of "The Monk in the Garden" on audible.com (aka the black hole that sucks in my income, slowly, but steadily:)).

All in all, "The Monk in the Garden" stood up to my expectations -- it turned out to be a well-written story, covering in detail not only whatever can be surmised about Mendel the man and the scientist, but also the history of the rediscovery of his work, its influence on the further development of genetics, the portraits and stories of the scientists involved with Mendel finally receiving proper recognition and those who fought them at the time, as well as the revisionist attempts to castigate Mendel back into the obscurity (according to revisionists, Mendel was used by the scientists who rediscovered his work to promote their own goals, while in reality he didn't really discover anything much, and if he did, he didn't grasp the true meaning behind his data).


Gregor Mendel (Credits: Wikimedia Commons)

I found very interesting the additional information about Mendel's life available in the book. Becoming a priest was the only way for him to continue his education without starving to death, even though at some stage his younger unmarried sister gave him her share of inheritance to finance his studies (years later, he supported her three sons). Still, his sister's contribution wasn't enough. During his life, usually after facing a crisis, Mendel had periods when he would stay in bed for weeks or even months in a row without an apparent physical illness. (Depression as a diagnosis wasn't a thing back then.)

One such episode happened when he began to perform his duties as a priest -- administering seek and dying people etc. Apparently, the misery of human suffering impressed Mendel so much that he just couldn't go on and took to bed. His abbot came up with an idea that Mendel should instead perform his priestly duties as a teacher. After the abbot's fight with the bishop, Mendel was eventually allowed to teach Greek and math in a local school. He showed himself very well there, but failed exams for teaching degree -- his lack of formal university education wasn't helped by his debilitating exam phobia.

The examination board declared Mendel could have a chance to become a certified teacher if he spent a few years in a university. He received a permission from the monastery, studied two years in Vienna, and then failed his examination for a teacher certificate yet again, nobody knows for sure why. Besides his exam phobia, it might have had something to do with him not willing to compromise his scientific opinions for the sake of one of the examinators, who held conflicting views. So this put an end to his career as a teacher.

Eventually Mendel himself became an abbot (even though he himself voted against his own candidature in the abbot's elections). This raised his social status but at the same time put an end to most of his scientific research because his abbot's duties didn't leave time for his scientific research.

The story of William Bateson (Wikipedia defines him as "an English biologist who was the first person to use the term genetics to describe the study of heredity, and the chief popularizer of the ideas of Gregor Mendel following their rediscovery in 1900 by Hugo de Vries and Carl Correns") and his partners and adversaries in battles for genetics was also very interesting.

The only part of the book I could do without is an epilogue, namely its short but rather panicky outcry about the forthcoming dreadful moral predicaments and apocalyptic horrors caused by the mankind having too much knowledge and power due to the striking advances of genetics since the days of Mendel.

The narrator of the audiobook did a good job, for the most part. Of course, as many a narrator, he didn't bother to question his instinct about such banalities as pronunciation or stress, which led to him treating his listeners to "genEra" and "fuchsia magellanIca", not to mention his creative renderings of a few French, German or Czech words scattered around the book. But otherwise "The Monk in the Garden" was an enjoyable listen.



Statue of Gregor Mendel (Brno)
Credits: T. Kebert, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Read in 2024.

[Jean · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is divided into two sections. The first is the biography of Gregor Mendel (1822-1884). Mendel spent thirty-five years conducting experiments primarily on peas. Mendel was a monk who in the last part of his life was the Abbott of the monastery where he spent his life. He is considered the father of the science of genetics. Henig reveals the strengths and weakness of Mendel in an interesting fashion.

The second part of the book focuses on the rediscovery of Mendel. The primary figure is William Bateson (1861-1926). Bateson was a professor of biology in England and was the first person to use the word genetics. In 1902 he read Mendel’s paper and realized its importance for Darwinism. Henig tells of Bateson’s work to bring Mendel’s work to prominence. Henig reviews Bateson’s research work and his use of women scientists as research assistants. The author goes into detail about the disagreement between Bateson and Thomas Hunt Morgan(1866-1945) who developed the chromosome theory which Bateson opposed.

The book is well written and researched. The story is easy to read with lots of details about the main scientist. I did notice a few historical errors, for example, Henig said Galileo refused to renounce his heliocentric belief before the Inquisition when, in fact, he did. The author states she traveled to the Monastery in Czech Republic that Mendel lived it and examined his garden and papers. Henig noted that most of Mendel’s papers were burned after his death.

The author states her interest in genetics is personal because her father died of Huntington’s disease.

Fleet Cooper does a good job narrating the book.

[Aurélien Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Accessible and with a dash of fun, the author puts the monk back into the context of his time so as to better understand all the myths that have since then been built around his work and persona.

Of course, the tumultuous story of the birth of genetics is what drives the book forwards (was Mendel really an isolated researcher? why did we have to wait decades after his death to finally catch up with his discoveries?). But, what particularly caught my attention here is the fascinating human touch Henig manages to deliver.

There is indeed something touching thinking about this eccentric, first experimenting with mice, but, facing the objections of his bishop (and more practical problems!) quickly gave up to turn instead to peas, cultivating them by the several hundreds of thousands with a obsession, a dedication that will keep him busy for so many years.

Science is not about geeks locked up in ivory towers; it's also a warm and vivid process inseparable from human contradictions and mania. Thanks to the author for reminding us so, with this generous and lively biography. A very good read.

[Nicole · Rating 1 out of 5]

Henig's factual errors in background material makes me doubt the historic accuracy of the book. She covers Mendel's life but dwells on his failures as much as his achievements. In the later period after his death and in the scientific debate she focuses on the historic revisionism far more than the science of the period unless it was to show the disagreeable nature of ill funded animal work in crowded settings.

Henig develops the idea that Mendel was so test phobic he failed to get his teaching certificate, twice. That he became so corpulent he couldn't walk up hills or stairs. She uses so many petty descriptions in reference to his size it feels like an agenda on her part. Yet photos available in other books show him to be fairly typical in build. She constantly harps on his lack of genius or his genius was only in orderly counting. This is more than damming with faint praise it is dedicated denigration of Mendel.

She uses the sensational to make the book lively when she mentions Mendel's later adherents & detractors became so abusive it was rumored Weldon's heart failure was murder.

She wrote " . . . Galileo Galileo, an Italian mathematics professor and devout Catholic, faced excommunication for defending those same ideas (i.e., Copernicanism). Official doctrine had changed by then . . . but Galileo . . . refused to renounce his radical ideas . . .

Galileo was not 'devout' with his mistress and his 3 illegitimate children.
The Popes argument was with Galileo's insistence that the Church change -its- interpretation of Scripture to conform to Galileo's reinterpretations, which he had based on Copernicanism. The issue was Galileo's Scriptural re-interpretation, not his astronomy.
Galileo did renounce his radical doctrinal ideas. He was forced to keep to his villa outside Florence and not travel after wards. The threat of excommunication and torture are common exaggerations Henig should never have used.

She goes on to say "But natural scientists, if they are intellectually honest, often find themselves taking heretical positions on matters of creation and procreation, positions that challenge the very underpinnings of the Catholic Church."
That is blatantly false as science does not deal in matters of faith or doctrine only in that which has testable evidence. It is also false in terms of Mendel who was a monk who studied the natural world as was common in that era. This world view typical then would have been of great interest to explore and explain especially in view of the current fundamental versus scientific conflict.

Henig has an sociopolitical bias I do not agree with.

[Feisty Harriet · Rating 2 out of 5]

Honestly, probably 2.5 stars. Gregor Mendel, a monk in the mid 1800's, was the father of modern genetics, meaning, he figured out that there were dominant and recessive genes and the patterns of inheritance, by studying garden peas for years. Unfortunately, after he died his successor as Abbot at the monastary burned all of his notebooks and papers. The very few letters he sent that were kept, and his one scientific paper explaining his experiments, are almost all that survives. He died without the scientific world in Europe having any idea who he was, and it wasn't until several decades later that three scientists studying evolution "re-discovered" his paper and brought his experiments to light. He published his one paper on genetics about the same time Darwin published "The Origin of the Species" however there is very little evidence that they read each other's work.

Anyway, so that's Mendel. This biography.....is not great. Because there is so little primary documentation that has survived, everything is second or third hand. But Henig tried to make this read like a novel...which was REALLY irritating. And the section explaining how Mendel's work was re-discovered was beyond frustrating, she literally sets up a scientific lecture for a few paragraphs, and then spends more than 20 pages giving the biographies and life stories of all the players, and then returns to that lecture hall to explain what happened. ALSO, in the epilogue, she talks about how she has very little interest in genetics, specifically her own genetics, and doesn't think it's a worthwhile pursuit to learn so much about genes and chromosomes and this branch of science. Uh...then maybe don't spend your time writing a non-fiction book about it!? Ugh. This left a super sour taste in my mouth. Actually, after writing this review I'm demoting my "3 stars but should be 2.5" rating to "2 stars but could possibly be 2.5 if you skip the last 60 pages."

[Charbel · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn't enjoy this as much as I thought I would. I have always been fascinated by Mendel and how his work started, but I never really considered his personal life, in fact it was completely insignificant to me; all that really mattered were the results he offered the world. To me he was always this monk who had high intellectual capacities and led the world to the discovery of genes (even if he didn't know what genes are). This book didn't do it for me because I already had expectations of what it should be like. In my opinion there should have been more focus on the science and less on the historical documentations of that time. Many obviously disagree and would probably want to be more biographical, despite what I thought of as lack of evidence.

[Karl Schmiedeskamp · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best and most memorable book on science I have ever read. I almost never read biography but Gregor Mendel was a hoot and a remarkable individual. I cannot recommend this highly enough!

[Katie · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was quite confusing. It is nonfiction but reads like speculative fiction at times. The author seems to have done quite a bit of research into Mendel but appears to stray into creative embellishment at times. I was also very confused by the author's choice to chronologically lay out the unfolding of Mendel's experiments with peas. She puts dates and times of the year to various experiments and fleshes out the process and timeline for how he developed his hypotheses. I assumed she was using diaries and notes, but then half way through the book she very clearly writes that we don't know exactly when he carried out his experiments or even in which order. His later writings lay out his findings as if he progressed from simpler experiments to more complex, but in reality we have no idea because he left no notes other than his final papers. Well, this was rather frustrating to me. I felt that if she was speculating it should have been mentioned earlier in the book and made it hard for me to trust anything at that point. What was gleaned from history and what was filled in from the imagination? Essentially this and several other similar instances in the book made it an unreliable read. I believe the author was trying to find the truth behind the various accounts of Mendel, but I'm not sure she struck it true simply by lack of clarity as to what was historically accurate and what was filled in by various biographers over the years.

[J. D. · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book after reading a review by someone who found it a disappointment: as I understood that reader, she was expecting a detailed biography of Gregor Johan Mendel. To the best of my understanding, Henig made no such claim. After all, data on his personal and intellectual life are thin This book is rather a speculative reflection upon Mendel's life and the development of his
own meticulous conclusions by his scientific successors. Mendel's genius was, as is often the case, careful horticultural and statistical observation. The result has been the modern science of genetics. Not too shabby!

[DD T · Rating 5 out of 5]

Textbooks don't really go into the details of Gregor Mendel and I wanted to know more of the man who opened our eyes to inheritance and the patterns therein. Good read with many side notes on those who interacted with Mendel.

[Leah Moore · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful read for anyone who is interested in how the field of genetics came to be. Very well written which makes it an easy read even for those who know nothing about genetics.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Despite a paucity of source material on her subject, author Robin Marantz Henig has written a stunning account of Gregor Mendel, a humble cleric in the Augustinian monastery of St. Thomas in Brünn, Moravia, now part of the modern Czech Republic. Henig acknowledges upfront that she has filled in gaps to the best of her abilities strictly for the purposes of effective storytelling. But her conjectures are all sound and logical, supported by contemporaneous events and reported history. Readers will not be asked to indulge incredible flights of fancy, but will rather be gently guided by Henig’s intelligent reasoning and sure hand.

Henig cleverly constructs her narrative as a two-act play divided by an interlude. In Act One, the emphasis is on Mendel’s rigorous experimental work on the biological mechanism of inheritance. Rather than humans, he used the pea plant and peas, Pisum sativum. He bred and crossbred pea plants in a seasonal routine, and with ritualistic fervor, recorded seven character traits: seed shape, seed color, seed coat, ripe pod shape, unripe pod color, flower location on the plant, and plant height. His observations of almost a decade of experimentation led to a number of startling conclusions, including the appearance or nonappearance of what Mendel named dominant or recessive particles (the word “gene” had not yet been coined) in successive generations of peas.

Mendel’s work was a solitary occupation. However, in 1865, when he had completed his experiments, he felt it appropriate to present two lectures of his work to fellow naturalists at the Brünn Society for the Study of Natural Sciences. He followed that by sending reprints of his lectures to dozens of respected European scientists, which only drew a deafening silence. It appeared nobody could see how Mendel's work laid the foundation critical to the study of modern-day genetics.

The Interlude after Act One, rather startlingly for readers, covers Mendel’s death in 1886. By that time, he had risen to Abbot himself and was obliged to transition from experimental scientist to monastery administrator. And while the Act One narrative ambles forward at a steady but gentle pace imposed by nature’s rhythm of growing and harvesting, Henig picks up the tempo vigorously in Act Two. This covers the independent, simultaneous rediscovery of Mendel’s work by three other scientists in 1900, namely, Hugo De Vries, Karl Correns, and Erich von Tschermak. It also introduces William Bateson, who becomes an ardent champion, promoter, and vigorous defender of Mendel’s work—Henig refers to him as “the monk’s bulldog.”

Over time, enough interest built in Mendel’s work for it to be recognized for its profound importance, and for it to provide the launching pad for further work. Though fame came posthumously, it was nevertheless well-deserved. Henig’s book does a huge service to the work and legacy of Mendel. The Monk in the Garden is an enormously satisfying read, and the author’s storytelling is all the more interesting for how thoroughly she has mined the limited resources on her subject to tell a compelling story.

[Edith · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 1/2 stars. This is more than a biography of Gregor Mendel, about whose life and research in fact there are many missing details—it is also a history of the science of genetics. It is by turns fascinating and annoying.

Ms. Henig is not a great stylist, and she can be repetitive and a little sloppy. She also tends to wander off occasionally.

In trying to make up for the relative paucity of biographical data, she sets Mendel very firmly in his physical settings. Helpful and interesting up to a point, but it becomes almost hokey after a while. To the degree that it also inevitably involves a fair amount of speculation, it might have been better to have written a shorter and more straightforward account.

But the author’s object in writing is clearly not only to describe Mendel’s contribution to the science of genetics, those of the men whose shoulders Mendel himself stood on, and those who argued it out after him. It is also to depict their personalities and something of the tenor of the times they lived in—Sometimes to a fault.

On the whole, however, if you have an interest in the early days of genetics and how it developed, this book will be of interest. You may have to trudge a little and be inclined to roll your eyes now and then, but the journey is worth the struggle.

[Kat V · Rating 4 out of 5]

My dad bought this for me a while ago and I’ve been meaning to get to it. I also have my dad to thank for my love of genetics. Excited to read a biography for a man whose work I’ve loved since 4th grade. This is really good. Definitely more of a biography than an explanation of genetics. 4 stars

[Brooke Broder · Rating 2 out of 5]

Pretty boring. Read for class. Mendel had depression and was smart

[Jennifer · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book was hard to get through, short as it is. Because of a lack of source material, we really don't know much about Mendel other than that he was a monk who experimented with pea plants and made some important hereditary discoveries. Henig makes up for this lack by using her active imagination to fill in the gaps (sometimes it works and sometimes it falls spectacularly flat) and filling the book with a whole lot of "related" information. The last 80 pages or so are devoted to Bateson and some other scientists who sort of rediscovered and promoted Mendel's findings. Although it is mildly interesting to know a bit about the men who helped Mendel rise from just a lowly, plodding pea gardener to a famous scientist, I was not interested in their love lives, homes, pets, and deaths. It was really feeling like Henig was just padding to make the book a respectable length. The author was in a predicament, having to write in length about an obscure historical figure, but I don't really think she handled it with skill or class. Ultimately, I was happy when I reached the last page (got that over with...whew!).

I also did not appreciate the author's extremely dismissive view of the creationist perspective.

[Judy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have been interested in the work of Gregor Mendel since I first learned about him in a high school biology class and was thrilled to stumble across this biography. Mendel had an interesting life. He failed the examinations several times to become a high school teacher and he was finally led into the religious life where the humble, plump, and very michievous monk found himself interested in science and the traits that parents pass down to their children. He began his work with mice, but the bishop overseeing his monastary objected so he began to work in the garden with sweet peas. Mendel became the abbot of St. Thomas Monastery in Brunn and died there in 1884. While he had published his genetic findings in the papers of a local scientific society, it wasn't until 20 years after his death that Mendel was "discovered" by the larger scientific community. A very interesting biography of a pioneer in the field of genetics. Talk about religion and science being compatible--Gregor Mendel combines the best of both worlds.

[Courtney · Rating 3 out of 5]

The father of genetics is discussed in almost every general biology class and genetics class, but rarely do I think about how truly brilliant his way of thinking was for the 19th century. This book covers Mendel's life in great detail, but also provides information on scientists working at the same time as Mendel, and scientists who rediscovered Mendel's work. I find the scientists of this particular time period to be especially brave in their thirst for knowledge and understanding of life, as they had to battle claims of heresy and had few people who were willing to listen or try to understand their ideas/experiments. It is a shame to think that Mendel spent close to 8 years cultivating and experimenting with pea plants, and at the time of his death his research and relevance was not recognized.

[Margaret · Rating 4 out of 5]

I feel a bit inadequate reviewing this book. I really can't tell if it's accurate or not, or where any mistakes are. So I'll just say it was mostly interesting and well-written. There was a good bit of "fictionalizing" in the book as the author speculated on what might have happened at various times. But I was expecting that, as the recommendation I'd received for it warned that the book is not perfect.

What was good about it: it made genetics a little more interesting and understandable to my homeschool students, including one who would prefer not to think about science at all. So for that it was very valuable.

[Eric Bingham · Rating 5 out of 5]

Biographies are always a toss up because it seems to me that whether the book is enjoyable depends more on the author than it does on the subject matter. This book was a very pleasant surprise for me. I got it at a secondhand store, and I didn't have high hopes for it, but it turned out to be one of those rare nonfiction page turners. I learned a lot about the life of Gregor Mendel, and there were also various other scientists that are discussed as side stories. Mendel really was an interesting character, and I had no idea that he died not knowing that his research made an impact at all. Well worth the read!

[S. · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book was all over the place. The author didn't seem to know to what audience she was directing the book. The result was part historical fiction, part academic analysis, part memoir...she made odd decisions like taking time to parenthetically explain the difference between "homo" and "hetero," but then left entire German phrases untranslated. I REALLY wanted to like this book, but I found myself forcing my way through to the end.

[Birdie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Easy, fun read. If you are a nerdy biologist like myself, and enjoy the story of Mendel and his peas, this is a good book. I also enjoyed learning about the other scientists who helped give Mendel his deserved credit around the turn of the 20th century.

[Marisa · Rating 2 out of 5]

I finally finished this book. Now I can read other books. I bet if I were more into genetics, it would have gone better. Now I'm just ever so slightly resentful that I know so much about Mendel, and not as much about, say, Schubert.

[Claudia · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is basically broken into two parts - the first being about Mendel's actual life (as much as is known) along with his experiments that yielded the results he is still renowned for. While the second is the rediscovery his sole scientific article published in a German journal and the disputes between what became Mendelian and non-Mendelian genetics.

Overall, Mendel's story is that of disappointment as he never was able to pass the in-person testing to become an accredited teacher (he remained a substitute for all of his teaching career) and youthful depression (he would sometimes take to his bed for, literally, months at a time) Eventually, in order to not worry about a livelihood, he joined the Augustine monastery of St. Thomas in Brno where monks were 'collected' and encouraged to be scholars as well as brethren. They were allowed books and to dabble in scientific research as the spirit so moved them. The Abbot even arranged for an orangery (tropical greenhouse) to be built and a separate garden for Mendel and his pea experiments.

It was thirty -five years later - and after Mendel's death in 1884 - that Mendel's lone article regarding the rules or laws of inheritance was re-discovered by three separate scientists in three different countries at relatively the same time. These three botanists basically fought a battle over the theory of heredity - genes were still relatively unknown although dominant and recessive characteristics were familiar due to plant hybrids - even as William Bateson fought to have Mendel's work recognized for the ground-breaking achievement that it was.

The end of the book talks about the genetic manipulation of various crop seeds and the introduction of what is called terminator genes which sterilizes the plants, forcing farmers to buy new stock every year. I'm sure the industry considers it appropriate since they often modify plant genes to make them disease resistant as well as more productive but . . . . I'm sure that farmers find it greedy on the part of the seed companies.

Overall, a book that attempts to relay history of this (new at the time) science that has become such a major part of our lives and in a way that just about any reader can easily understand.

2021-200

[Scott Pearson · Rating 5 out of 5]

An outsider’s view of scientific history deems that stories of scientific discovery are boring. After all, how could readers be interested in narratives about how people work in laboratories? To that, Henig pens her eloquent reply in an interesting tale of how an obscure monk in Eastern Europe transformed modern biology… after he died. Thus goes the all-too-human tale of humble Gregor Mendel.

After joining a monastic order in the 1800s, Mendel studied science and grew peas systematically in a monastery’s courtyard. Certain traits would skip a generation and would consistently recur in 1/4 of the offspring. From this observation, he found what are now known as Mendel’s Laws of genetic inheritance. He published his findings… and received no acclaim. Barely anyone even read his publication. He later became abbot of the monastery and then died in obscurity.

A few decades later, he was “rediscovered” by three scientists looking for a means for Darwinian evolution to proceed. Mendel’s Laws soon became a central point of scientific proof for evolution and are now universally taught wherever scientific education occurs. Mendel’s statue is presently erected overlooking the monastery in Brünn, Moravia.

As shown by the book becoming a National Book Critic’s Circle Award finalist, Henig tells this story well. She captures the personalities involved and the human and scientific sides of an interesting tale. This saga is filled with inherent irony, and she does her best in drawing it out from the few historical sources. Obviously, Mendel’s discoveries have had a huge scientific impact as they have led to modern biology and a fount for medical research.

Mendel’s life was lived with little fanfare. Fortunately, Henig’s book does not live in such a state. It is masterfully told, well-received, and reminds us that the “little guy” sometimes wins in the end. Her imagination and creativity impress as she spins this intellectual drama. The human twists and turns about how trait inheritance occurs in species brings the science to life. Her work would make the ever-curious and ingenious Mendel proud.

[Fern F · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mendelian genetics explains so much of inheritance (but not everything, hence the existence of non-Mendelian genetics) and was instrumental in supporting Darwin's theory of natural selection, so it's surprising to realize that you only know the bare bones of Gregor Mendel's biography: he was a monk and, though he sent his paper about pea crossing's to Darwin, it was never opened.

Robin Henig's incredible biography of Gregor Mendel is, therefore, an incredible corrective to my lapse in knowledge . Henig manages to not just give the reader Mendel's biography, but she also discusses where science was at the time of Mendel's experiments (focusing quite a bit on the furor Darwin's work created), but also what was in the scientific air when Mendel was rediscovered in the early 1900s. There's also a good deal about the personalities of the re-discoverers, particularly William Bateson, and what drove them. What came as a surprise to me was learning that after the reverential treatment Mendel received in the beginning of the 20th century from his supporters, there was a backlash, and those scientists/historians painted Mendel as less aware of what he had actually discovered and more of an easy recipient for the needs of the re-discoverers. Personally, I think Mendel is still a genius even if there were parts of his results that he couldn't explain (like the units of inheritance) and, he was also, a model scientist: careful and methodical, which is a different kind of genius.

[Amanda Borys · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was always kind of curious why a Roman Catholic monk was conducting experiments on heredity. It seemed very progressive and involving scandalously talk about plant sex, for someone in that line of business. But this book cleared that all up for me.

I very much enjoyed finding out that Mendel was a flawed human being, not some scientific super-brain that puts the rest of humanity to shame. Like finding out the girl was saved by Joe Ordinary, not the Man of Steel. Mendel's struggles with self confidence, public speaking, and test anxiety is something I think most people can relate to. And his courage in stepping beyond the boundaries of his fears to do something he considered important was very inspiring. It definitely earned him a higher place on my list of top 10 favorite geneticists. :)

I thought the book was well paced and a good mix of history and biography. And reading between the lines, I think Robin Marantz Henig also came to appreciate the kind monk who changed how we saw the world.

[Chris Maska · Rating 5 out of 5]

Revealing and Insightful

Gregory Mendel was an amazing man. With no credential higher than assistant high school teacher, he became founder of genetics. But he was a monk who lived in a monastery that honored science. He was provided with a high quality education and the freedom and resources to experiment. He was a humble man who achievement was not recognized during his lifetime. The Monk in the Garden, working with the few records we have, does an excellent job of displaying Mendel's life. It also presents the story of the discovery of Mendel's achievement. Scientific disputes are not always civil. This one was not. Politics and ego were on full display.

[Juniperus · Rating 2 out of 5]

im not gonna finish this beacause im failing the clas i was reading it for anyway but this is a bad book

this is what happens when you don't have enough information on a subject. it feels like some kid whos trying to reach a word count for a school essay but its an entire book.

theres like very little information about mendel's life in this and the author takes unrelated digressions for pages and pages and it's kind of painful to read.

I feel like this could have made a really good like, article, or shortform piece, but to make it into a whole damn book is extremely extra.

[Janellyn51 · Rating 3 out of 5]

I kind of had to plow through this, even though I thought the subject was interesting. Mendel has cropped up in a few books I've read lately, and I've had this book for quite a while, so why not? I kept thinking that the authors descriptions of Mental reminded me of the character in A Confederacy Of Dunces! I don't know if Mendel was a genius, but he certainly was on to something. It's too bad he wasn't credited in his lifetime, but it seems to me he still had a mostly pleasant life in his glass house, and fine library.