Review: Egg Is a Theory of Everything

The book's 12 thematic chapters are dense and rich—like flan, but good.

As a fan of the "theory of everything through the lens of a single commodity" genre, I knew I would like Lizzie Stark's Egg: A Dozen Ovatures. The timing couldn't be better for a book about the suddenly pricey staple. I do not share Stark's variant of feminism—she celebrates the egging of a statue of Margaret Thatcher and describes industrial egg harvesting for science as "the theft of a female body's labor"—but the book blends the personal and the scholarly in appealing ways.

Perhaps due to the pun in the subtitle, I unfairly assumed this would be one of the field's fluffier entries. Instead, from the "cosmic egg" of humanity's creation myths to "space eggs" struggling in orbit, these 12 thematic chapters are dense and rich—like flan, but good.