The topic seemed very interesting to me, not so well-worn, and I was waiting for the book, anticipating what it would probably be informative and fascinating. But... not all the books in one of my favorite series are as good as I would like, and "280 days before your birth" did not seem to be the most successful in this medical cycle. However, my claims are very subjective and lie in the area of "expectation-reality".
Compositionally, " 280 days before your birth. The report about what you forgot while being in the epicenter of events" looks the same as the section about pregnancy and childbirth in encyclopedias for expectant mothers: the chapters correspond to the periods of fetal development in weeks (except that Vestre indicates not the week of pregnancy, but the week - the age of the fetus), and inside the chapter is divided into parts according to what system of the still unformed organism is in question.
Usually in chapter 2-4 subsections, each in electronic form took from four to twenty pages, in general, everything was not so detailed, the reader will definitely not have time to get tired.
Actually, my first complaint about the book is : why is there so little? Nine months of development for 208 printed pages (in electronic form there were 195 of them at all, and this indicates that in the printed version the book was simply inflated to a certain volume)!
Since there is an opportunity to devote the book to one specific topic, why not try to tell the reader as much as possible, refute myths, answer frequently asked questions, tell about the latest achievements of science? Moreover, some of these two hundred pages are pages only with the title of chapters or a picture, and some percentage of the text tells not about the intrauterine development of a person, but about how everything is arranged in a fruit fly. So you will also learn a lot about flies, perhaps even more than you would like.
The second claim is related to the first, but it concerns not the volume, but the information content. About what Vestre wrote, she galloped through Europe, well, okay, this is not a scientific monograph, but she also wrote about little. Well, really not enough. In any case, I still have a lot of questions left.
The third claim concerns the distribution of attention to the material. It seems that Vestre herself, who, by the way, is a biochemist, is very interested in genetics and the process of conception, but general physiology is somehow not particularly, neurobiology is also not so good...
As a result, when the book talks about the genes responsible for this and that, they will tell you how they are called, and how scientists discovered them in general (and again "hello!" to fruit flies). About how the sperm and egg meet, you will read just an epic saga. When it comes to the process of childbirth, then everything comes down to a couple of sentences, schematically showing what kind of signal it sends to where.
In general, it seemed that at the beginning the author wanted to talk about everything in detail, but either her editor slowed down, or she was tired of painting everything herself, and therefore the beginning of the work is full of details, and by the end they remain at a minimum.
Okay, there are good things in this book, too, and the acquaintance with "280 days before your birth" was not in vain for me. The book contains quite interesting facts from the history of medicine, for example, about how they used to do a "pregnancy test", or how they imagined the process of the birth of life from a certain chaos.
There are new terms for me, such as vesicles. There is information about how the cells of the body recognize where the right is and where the left is (our organs are not located symmetrically, some are in a single copy), why and why we hiccup, get covered with hair in the womb and other "charms" of anatomy, such as the sense of smell in spermatozoa. I was simply delighted with the embryonic memory, it seems that with mine, like a goldfish, you can only envy newborns who have not yet developed a brain.
P.S. By the way, I just physically lacked the visualization of everything written: there are few pictures in the book, and these are not photos, but just cartoon drawings showing how an embryo or fetus looks like at a particular week of development.
436.005 SRY