Rating: 
Summary: Double the Intrigue
Review: Despite this society's apparent fascination with twins, it's hard to find extensive literature and research on this topic. I've been looking for some time, and I'm happy to say that this one is quality. Especially interesting if you are a twin, but even if you're a singleton you'll find this hard to put down. It's fascinating to read evidence and theories about what makes each of us who we are individually, as well as what makes us human. I lost my twin before birth, which is the only area I would have liked more information on, but regardless this gave me an insight I didn't have previously.
Very well written, fairly easy to follow. I definitely plan to re-read this a few times and I've passed it on to friends & family.
Rating: 
Summary: Though the book is interesting, the research is incomplete!
Review: Dr. Bouchard's & Dr. Segal's twin study was indeed fascinating, but I feel compelled to mention an obvious omission:The study is incomplete, as long as they haven't studied THREE angles: (1) MZ [related] twins separated at birth (which they studied)
(2) DZ [related] twins separated at birth (which they studied)
(3) Non-Related lookalikes (which they did *not* study) For example, many people have heard of "celebrity lookalikes" (doppelgangers). Does anyone have any idea how very many look-alikes there are in the world? Though they're not "related" (let alone twins), maybe they're GENE-RELATED? Why has no scientist thought to do a Doppelgangers Study, to check for possible similarities in lookalikes' tendencies, voice pitch, food preferences, music preferences, hobbies, health issues, and so on?
Rating:
Summary: Superbly written and brimming with twin/human revelations
Review: Dr. Nancy Segal has further drawn back the curtain shrouding the mysteries of human behavior with this enduring observation. I found the book reveals an enormous amount about ourselves through the study of twins. Dr. Segal is a gifted researcher with an exquisite writing style. She takes elaborate research topics and explains them in ways that we all can understand. Page after page, the book reveals new information about how we humans develop through nature and nurture, the end result being that our genetic design has more to do with who we are than we every imagined. The book gives us significant insight far beyond the surface interest most have in twins. I found the book also very entertaining with its numerous ancedotes and real-life stories about twins. Being a twin myself, the book helped me gain new perspective about my twinship and eliminate many eroneous perceptions/myths about twins.
Rating:
Summary: A Twin Book with More than Most
Review: I am very impressed with this book. It discusses several topics on twins that so many other books on this subject seem to miss. It also goes into great detail about often overlooked discussions on twins. It includes statistics, interviews, and a variety of research on twin studies. This book is not easy reading, though. It is written, I believe, for fellow professionals and twin researchers. It's not a "cozy, get through quick" book written for the average mom-of-twins like those that line the shelves of so many local bookstores. However, the extra time I took to read (and sometime re-read the statistics)the book was well worth it as this piece of literature left me with more information than I have received from dozens of other books on twins.
Rating:
Summary: Fascinating book about twins, family ties, genetic influence
Review: I bought this book because I am an identical twin and I was curious about recent research on twins. Segal is certainly the expert here. However she goes beyond just the facts of the studies and ties in lots of interesting information and theories about how genetics influences our behavior and our attachments to the people in our family. Her theories on the reasons for the closeness of a mother to her children were very interesting to me. This book has much to offer to different people - it discusses general interest topics like why we behave the way we do and end up a certain way. It should also be a "must read" for any identical twin or parent of a twin. Segal does an extraordinary job of describing the special relationship that exists between identical twins.
Rating:
Summary: An informative and enjoyable book on twins for everyone!
Review: I love this book! It is a gold mine of information, of anecdotes, of insightful observations. Twin research to Segal is "bliss." She reveals this in the very personal "Afterword: Part of Me". Her enthusiasm is infectious. Her bliss in contagious. Entwined Lives is a monument to twinship. Segal's book comes with glowing tributes on the back from Professor David Lykken and Professor Irving Gottesman. Their enthusiasm for the book is surpassed by the enthusiasm of the author for her subject and all the twins she has met. The book is described with exclamation by Thomas J. Bouchard, Ph.D. in his Foreword as a "book extraordinaire!". It certainly is. Nancy Segal writes about twins with verve and enjoyment in a style which will appeal to the general reader. All readers, including academics, will learn. There are extensive notes and references for each chapter and a Glossary to explain more technical terms, although these are avoided where possible. The personal style of the book intentionally and very successfully allows easy translation of the technical into the generally comprehensible.
Rating: 
Summary: At times interesting but more often long-wided and anecdotal
Review: In Entwined Lives, researcher Nancy Segal draws upon hundreds of case studies to explore the physical development of twins, and to tackle the thorny nature-versus-nurture question. Segal is competent and often interesting when she sticks to the former; her forays into the latter, on the other hand, are long-winded and anecdotal, and clearly highlight her shaky grasp of statistical methods, not to mention the benefits of editing. Among the more interesting ideas raised in the book is a detailed description of the different ways in which twins develop in utero from conception onward. I also found intriguing a description of a third type of twin, one in which both siblings share their mother's, though not their father's genes. This second topic, though, is barely developed, and there is little mention of how twins of this type are identified. This is typical for the book - interesting ideas are raised and then promptly abandoned, leaving the reader with little understanding or context. At the same time, Segal does not hesitate to make broad generalizations about genetics and socialization from small collections of anecdotes. Much of the book is devoted to demonstrating the influence of genetics upon intelligence, behaviour, and athletic ability. A chapter on twins separated at birth is well-written and its methods well-described, but it's the exception. On the whole, this section is filled with dozens of case studies and stories from which Segal draws a multitude of conclusions, some better founded than others. She has ample data to support her uncontroversial claim that genetics play a large role in determining intelligence and similarities in abilities, and belabours this obvious point for several chapters during much of the book. (Do we really need several paragraphs explaining that height and weight play a role in determining athletic ability?) But she is just as prepared to base her theories on a story here, a fact there: one identical pair's preference for very rare meat, for instance, prompts Segal to hypothesize that not only do identical twins share preferences, but that the things they enjoy are likely to lie outside the mainstream. She also ponders at length the significance of one athletic twin claiming an Olympic gold while his cotwin ended up with the silver. After a paragraph of grade-school-level speculation, she raises the (most likely) possibility that the medal discrepancy doesn't mean anything. This book is filled with these sorts of useless, irrelevant tangents (the most bizarre involving a mention of the wholly theoretical "twins paradox" from special relativity in a section on a pair of identical astronauts) that go absolutely nowhere, and that should have been edited out of the first draft of the book. She devotes virtually no space whatsoever to explaining which of her data are statistically meaningful, but rambles at length about very minor aspects of her methodology, such as choosing the most suitable acronym to denote biologically unrelated same-age siblings. The stories in Entwined Lives make for entertaining, if light, reading, and would have been more enjoyable if Segal didn't keep interrupting them with unsupported generalizations, or with the dozens of "see? Genetics ARE important" assertions that appear over and over again. And the scientific data would have been more useful had it been better, or more rigorously developed. As a book about human behaviour, which it claims to be, it is too long, and explains too little.
Rating:
Summary: Nature trumps nurture!
Review: The extraordinary point about this book is that the twins research proved very decisively that nature is definitely the overwhelming deciding factor of our IQ, character, personality, etc., and not nurture. So, this book puts an end to the debate of "nature vs. nurture." This is a book that is better than a thousand other books. Before reading this book, I wasn't clear whether nature has more effect on human development or nurture. There are so many theories and arguments for one or the other from ancient to the modern times. After reading this book, I am cleared that the research results from the identical twins separated at birth showed that nature is the most important factor in our human development. Why does a person become a carpenter, a plumber, or a professor? The enviroment may have something to do with it, but the biggest factor is his/her inborn traits/talents. This is a book that must be read by all educators, politicans, social scientists, and above all, parents. We will save ourselves from wasted energies, financial resources, frustrations, and useless social engineering if we try more to find out what nature has given us. Please don't get me wrong. Nurture is important, but it has to be done according to the nature's gifts to a person. In other words, "Nuture accoording to nature." We should nurture what is in the nature, not what is not there, or what is there but faintly. I highly recommend another book, "Your natural gifts" (A new edition is published in 2002). It should be read together with this excellent book on twins.
Rating:
Summary: Too Technical - Could have been condensed into 2 chapters
Review: The first 2 chapters were informative and enlightening - much of what is exhibited by twins is genetic - however it just went on and on for the next several chapters. I have 1yr. old identical twin boys and thought that I would get more insightful information, it was too clinical and "research-ie" in tone. I would not recommend this if you are looking for a pleasant read.
Rating:
Summary: Too Technical - Could have been condensed into 2 chapters
Review: The first 2 chapters were informative and enlightening - much of what is exhibited by twins is genetic - however it just went on and on for the next several chapters. I have 1yr. old identical twin boys and thought that I would get more insightful information, it was too clinical and "research-ie" in tone. I would not recommend this if you are looking for a pleasant read.
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