Dennis Bray's "Wetware: A Computer in Every Living Cell"

This was a disappointing book. It was a topic that sounded interesting. The author was well qualified. But the book was dull reading. Too much repetition and too much unorganized detail.

The structure of the book was promising: work from the details inside a cell up to an organism like a human (with a quick compare to robots). That was all good stuff, but the delivery was deadly dull. A book like this must decide: either it is a collation of fascinating details or it is a coherent story that builds to a climax. This book does neither.

The material was potentially very exciting. There was lots of details but the never got beyond "lots of details". The organizing principal behind the book never provided enough oomph to make it matter. The details became repetitious. The didn't gel. I know that biology these days is seriously complex and detailed, but for an interested reader from the general public, there needs to be more of a "story" to make the parts gel. A framework is a structure but not glue. The author forgot this simple fact.

It wasn't a complete waste of time. The author is knowledgeable. I did learn some details of biology and got an appreciation of the complexity of "circuits" in biology and how they differ from those of electronics. Maybe it is meant to be of interest of a specialist rather than general reader. But it doesn't have the feel of an academic text. It is too superficial for that. But as a guided tour for the non-specialist, the author forgets that a reader needs a sense of a developing story into which the facts that are thrown at him fast and furious find a home. Otherwise, it is just a lot of detail for what?

I guess I should have realized the book wasn't going to live up to its promise when the blurbs on the cover were from people I had never heard of before. Usually publishers cheat in the other direction: they get famous names to put anodyne compliments on the cover to lure in readers. Here the publisher put impressive quotes from unknowns on the cover. I should have known that was a bad sign. I won't be duped again. I'll also put Yale University Press on my list of publishers you can't trust.