Physical Biology of the Cell
Overall this is a beautiful book. It is idiosyncratic, engaging, fascinating-a book that I actually enjoyed reading. While many textbooks that address aspects of the molecular and cell biology field are essentially dry descriptions of many, many facts (or alleged facts), this book focuses instead on broad principles and underlying unifying themes, describing a much smaller number of systems and phenomena, but with real depth, explaining what we know, how we know it, how to think about it in plain terms, and how it relates to one or more of the broadly applicable principles that the book is really about. This is the kind of book that I would like my students to be learning from- and that I will certainly be treating myself to learning from, repeatedly.