So Very Small

“An elegant, wide-ranging history” ( The New York Review of Books ) of the centuries-long quest to discover the critical role of germs in disease thatreveals as much about human reasoning—and the pitfalls of ego—as it does about microbes. “Levenson takes readers through an entertaining . . . journey of missed opportunities in microbiology and the eventual advances that arose in this field.”— Science Scientists and enthusiastic amateurs first confirmed the existence of living things invisible to