The cell Book

Lots of good illustrations, both schematic drawings with lumpy blobs for all the proteins and also really cool micrographs. i also liked the "key experiment" pages.

but the organization was bass ackwards. they started with chemistry, then DNA, then larger structures, until finally the cell cycle. so YOU NEVER KNEW THE BIGGER PICTURE. again and again, they would sort of hint at the larger context and then say "this is discussed in chapter 11" or whatever. the authors made the fatal mistake of so many teachers - they know the subject inside out, so they teach it from the inside out. it makes sense to them that way because they already know all the stuff from later chapters. but the student doesn't.

plus, they wrote with no personality at all. not one joke, anecdote, exclamation, etc., in the entire book.

finally, it was pretty clear that sometimes they wrote two pages and the publisher said "turn this into half a page" and so it became an ultradense series of technical sentences without explanation.

ah, well, i learned a ton, though. most interesting factoid: you can cut out two thirds of a rat's liver and it will grow back as good as new in a few days. wow.