An informative and readable book for those who want to learn the basics of the cell, how it was discovered and the recent advances in cell biology.

This book has one great strength and one great weakness. The strength is the author's deep knowledge of cell biology, chemistry and physiology, which he communicates clearly. If your knowledge of cells is limited to high school or one semester college biology, there is a lot left out. Also if your education was more than a decade ago, a lot has been learned since.

I had a pretty good general science education, but cells were treated only on the surface (with interactions that mediated larger scale physiologic processes) and nucleus (reproduction and genetics) with only a few names to memorize for the rest--which makes up nearly the entire cell volume. Cells were important only as constituents of larger entities either in space (multi-celled organisms or masses of single celled organisms) or time (evolution).

Unfortunately, the weakness is the author connects these ideas using dramatic but highly misleading metaphors. No one but a cell specialist is going to remember the thousands of facts in this book without metaphors to connect them. A dull teacher will just give the facts, and let the students come up with whatever picture occurs to them naturally (or more likely forget the facts as soon as the exam is finished). A great teacher connects the ideas with memorable and useful metaphors, while warning against overreliance on metaphors. This author is good at constructing striking metaphors. They work to connect the facts, but also suggest too many non-facts, and there are no warnings.

One random example is:

"Your first reaction is certainly amazement at everything that's going on in here and the speed at which it's all happening. Cells are busy places, crammed full of vesicles, enzymes, and organelles all fluttering around in a frenzy of activity. Motor proteins can carry cargo around at a speed of one micron per second. Considering that vesicles--which are little cargo containers--can be as small as 50 nm across, that would be like a car that is 15 feet long moving 200 miles per hour."

That is a memorable picture that is important for picturing many of the facts in the book. But is it accurate? A vesicle moving 20 times its length in one second is fast for a car, which more typically would move around 5 times its length. But it's barely moving for a housefly that can fly 1,000 times its length in a second. On the other hand, the Great Wall of China would have to accelerate from zero to 3% of the speed of light to match that.

Of course, there is no exact analogy between microscopic events inside a cell and familiar macroscopic events. Should students think of a cell as a busy place, like a racetrack with 200 mph cars and pit crews doing complex maintenance in seconds? Or as a lazy place like a summer meadow with flowers growing and bees gently buzzing?

Multiplying dividing speed by length is not a reliable guide, and one that I think the author chose for drama--which makes him seem like a good teacher--rather than careful analysis. It suggests many false things. For example, if two race cars crash head on at 200 mph, they will fly into pieces. But two motor proteins that crash head on at 1 micron per second will be completely unaffected. Comparing momentum to the binding forces that hold the things together might be more relevant than length. On the other hand the one micron the vesicle moves per second is an appreciable fraction of the diameter of the cell, say about 1% for typical human cells; where the 300 feet a car moves is trivial compared to the size of the earth.

I don't have a better metaphor myself, but the point is the author serves this one up without qualification. Students will remember the picture long after they're forgotten the numbers, and in many cases will be misled.

I have some other objections. The author uses four different length units. Microns to nm is an easy conversion, but is would be even easier with consistent names. But why convert at all, why not do everything in microns or nanometers, at least in the same paragraph? And feet and miles are more challenging to convert, either to each other or to metric length units. And "crammed full" is not accurate. Even collectively those components are a negligible fraction of the volume of a cell.

I realize I've spent nearly the entire review on two sentences of the book, but there are dozens of similar examples in the book, and they are likely the parts that will stay with students. On the good side, there are so many of them that even without warning, most readers will realize they are individually unreliable. But I would have much preferred a few well-chosen illustrations and discussion of when they can and cannot be applied.

The author of this book claims, in the introduction, that he'd like to counter the "anti-science" movement, and provide real insight into the world he lives in as a cell biologist and microscopist. He then proceeds to write a book filled with long paragraphs, sparsely populated with line drawings in black and white, and expects the lay person to read this thing. I am also a biologist and microscopist, as well as a professor. My students, let alone a lay person not interested in science, would be so turned off by this book that it defeats the entire purpose.
Today's world is filled with images. Microscopy produces many of those beautiful images. Why not use some of them to illustrate this book? Why not use color in diagrams to make it more visually stimulating? Even as a biologist, I can't bring myself to enter this world of "all text" to see what the author has to say. So, I will admit, I did not read the book. But, neither will the general public, if it is this unattractive to the eye.

Great nonfiction storytelling

I loved this book. In it, author Joshua Rappoport explains the workings of the cell in a plain language way and makes great use of analogies to explain things. Rappoport also displays a good sense of humor which is important in an otherwise detailed (but not too detailed) book. Some biology background is useful to understanding the material. Biology changes quickly and it is good to have an up-to-date book. My favorite part of the book is towards the end, the section titled “The profession of cell biology” that gives a more societal look at cell biology. If the book had one weakness, it would be the part on the mechanics of microscopy, but this was, nonetheless, interesting and important in the context of understanding how the cell works. I strongly recommend this book for anyone with an interest in science and since Rappoport is such a good storyteller, this book will be fun even for people with a strong background in biology who will already be familiar with the material.