Franklin M. Harold's "The Way of the Cell"

This is an excellent survey of cell biology for the general reader. It is full of state-of-the-art science tempered by judicious commentary to provide context and meaning. My only complaint is that the amount of detail is overwhelming. This book is like taking water from a fire hose. Lots of wonderful stuff but at times the reader is overwhelmed.

You can get a feel for the argument of the book by reading this posting by Harold on the Small Things Considered blog. This bit from the blog posting summarizes the thrust of the book where he reviews the science while discussing his opposition to the simple-minded reductionism, what he call "genetic fundamentalism" (think Richard Dawkins) which misses "the organism", the very key to understanding life:

The spatial organization of cells, including the arrangement of cytoplasmic elements and the cell's global form, is not explicitly mandated by the genome; there are no genes that individually encode large amounts of cytological information. Genes do, of course, specify the primary sequences of all macromolecules, and portions of those sequences often play a role in the localization of the product. Cell architecture, however, arises epigenetically from the interactions among large numbers of gene products. Many, perhaps most, of those interactions fall under the heading of self-organization, either by molecular self-assembly or by dynamic and energy-consuming self-construction. Now, when this self-organizing chemistry takes place in a living cell, it comes under constraint and guidance from the cellular system as a whole. New gene products, and also the output of biosynthetic processes, are never altogether free to diffuse at random; they are released into a milieu that is already spatially structured, and they find their places in that pattern under the influence of the existing order. These influences take various forms: cellular compartments, spatial markers and vectors, heritable membranes, the tracks and channels of intracellular transport, gradients and fields that supply positional information, and an array of physical forces including turgor pressure. The cytoskeleton is the chief instrument for imposing order on the construction site, and is itself a product of its own operations. Every cell is continuous with its progenitor, not only genetically but also structurally; and the new cell will, in turn, serve as a source of configurational instructions for its own daughters. Cells are not organized by the genome alone; they model themselves upon themselves, and therefore the smallest entity that can be truly said to organize itself is the whole cell. When you grind a cell into a pulp, something irretrievable is indeed lost: the organization that makes that cell alive.

Harold's book was refreshing after my frustrations with Dennis Bray's book Wetware. Both books make a lot of demands on their reader, but Harold provides the structure of argument that welds his material into a whole for the general reader. Both are immensely knowledgeable, but Harold's approach is more suitable for those without the detailed technical background.