Customer Reviews

The Machinery of Life

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A beautiful introduction to the cell. Couldn't put it down. Goodsell has a rare combination of beautiful illustrations and lucid, and concise text. Only complaint is that I wish that the publisher had spent the money to put all of the images in color. Goodsell's watercolors are even better and would have been worth the printing price.

Goodsell has written a deceptively simple book. The illustrations should be incorporated into undergraduate and graduate level cell biology and biochemistry classes. Goodsell's point is that the environment of the cell is not that of a test tube. The environment is densely packed with proteins and organelles that will concentrate effective concentrations of reaction constituents and potentially restrict the mobility of larger proteins and organelles. Goodsell illustrates the point that size does matter.

This is another book that, only a few chapters in, I decided was just awesome. After going through several library books trying to teach myself biology (actually, biochemistry, but I did not know that) I came across this one pretty much by accident. It has many great, great simple, simple explanations that yet still provide a road for insight into the most basic functions of life and the cell.

I purchased this book because I wanted to know more about the subject. It was described as written for the general public. I found the author's style to be excellent. The book starts out with discussions of the E. Coli, a cell with a single compartment. When the explanation of this cell type is done, it goes into a discussion of a yeast cell, a type having multiple compartments. In the process one becomes familiar with amino acids, enzymes, viruses and the like. I read and enjoyed the book thoroughly, and found another book by David Goodsell, "Our Molecular Nature", which is written in the same style.