Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I really wanted to like and get into this this book, but it's incredibly overwritten, to the point where it's distracting. For example, here's how the author sets the stage re: the discovery of the first neanderthal bones in the 1850s. "Everyone loves a good 'how did you meet?' story. The knotty tale of our entanglement with neanderthals is tousled by threads of intuition and perplexity: birthed by the Industrial Revolution, scored by wars, glittering with treasures lost and found. From forgotten meetings tens of millennia ago when we saw each other as human, to the comparatively recent study of these ancient kin, our infatuation is perennial. Impatient for hoarfrost and mammoth breath, it's tempting to fire up a time machine and speed straight back into the Pleistocene. But we need to start in the midpoint of this grand and convoluted history, before we can clearly see a beginning, or an end." Grand and convoluted is right. I'm sure the subject is interesting, and apparently many other reviewers felt differently, but a whole book of sentences like this is way too much for me. I bought it a while ago and just got around to it now, otherwise I'd return it. Would recommend downloading the sample to see if it's to your taste before diving in.