The great thing about book reviews in the NYRB is that they’re gold mines of information in and of themselves. For example, Matthew Meselson’s article in the current NYRB is ostensibly a review of Germs: Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War, by Judith Miller, Steven Engelberg, and William Broad. However, in reality it’s so much more. Meselson reviews the 20th century history of biological weapons, and discusses ways to enforce the Biological Weapons Convention which bars the creation of biological weapons in countries that have signed it. The article is chock full of so many interesting tidbits of information that I’m not going to talk about any of them specifically — read the whole thing.