Rating: 
Summary: Useful book - only slightly neurotic
Review: This is not one of those alarmist books that is meant to keep you up at night worrying about impending doom. Surprisingly, this is a realistic guide to understanding the real risks and benefits of germs and learning how to protect yourself. Probably the highest compliment I can pay this book is that I have changed some of my own hygiene strategies based on what I learned.Despite the fact that Tierno has spent most of his life studying germs and infectious diseases, he comes across and only slightly neurotic about hygiene. Maybe a third of the advice in this book is common sense, another third is probably over-ambitious, and a third is really useful and interesting. I would have found the book a lot more interesting, but less useful in an every day sense, if it had focused more on the epidemiology and microbiology and less on hygiene. I probably even would have forgiven him for throwing in a few more sensationalistic stories about epidemics and drug-resistant microbes. But then again, there are plenty of books out there that already have that covered.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting and scary but also flat and preachy
Review: Unlike some of my fellow reviewers, I was not so impressed with Tierno's The Secret Life of Germs. While a lot of what he has to say is fascinating, and I learned a lot from his writing, I found his style to be off-putting. The author certainly seems to have the credentials to talk about his subject (and the media exposure as an expert to boot, as he repeatedly tells of his television appearances). And he does a very thorough job of showing the history of and the reach of germs in our world. And for the paranoid, he certainly gives enough credence that the clean world around us is just teeming with dangers. But I found much of the book seemed to be written by not a germ adversary but a germ-aphobe. Tierno seems to go out of his way to show the simple things are deadly, citing X thousand of death from this microbe or that one. And how we must maintain vigilance in our daily life by washing constantly. If you believe his courses of action you would be constantly scrubbing your hands during the course of preparing dinner. While yes, there is unmistakable dangers our there to be careful of, Tierno seems to lack tradeoff in balancing the dangers with everyday life. He is also very fond of citing statistics - how many death are caused, and such, yet for someone with the background he has, the lack of a single source for his statements undercuts his arguments. No footnotes. No endnotes, No bibliography. Just his "Protective Response Strategy." As an overview of germs in our world it is a good read. But as the wakeup call to arms that the author seems to want it to be, if falls flat.
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