I am sure you have heard of that book. The musical is legendary, the character has been used for so many stories, everyone has heard about "The Phantom Of The Opera" - even if it's because of the Animaniacs or the Duck Tales or Sherlock Holmes. 

 

But have you read the book? 
Yes? Fine! Did you like it? I guess...

 

No? Then read it! No matter if you like the musical or not - I love both but many people like only one of them. 

 

Do you like to read on long afternoons or evening, watching the storm, rain or snow on the other side of the window, drinking tea, coffee, hot chocolate or wine and eating bisquits or other treats? Well, I personally do, so that book is just perfect for me.

 

It is interesting. It shoes happenings (both fact and fiction) from different points of view. Most of the characters are a little silly, yet still lovable. Christine is kind of my idol. The persian is fascinating. And Erik, poor, poor Erik...

 

I know, I should hate him, but I can't. I have mixed feelings about him in the musical (depending on the actor, mostly), but I mainly like him there. But book Erik... oh my poor, Erik. He is even a bit more evil there - but he is a thousand times more pitiful! I'm not like "Aaaah, Gerard Butler is so smexy, Erik is kewl", not at all (by the way, I can't stand the 2004 movie),. I like him as a character. 

 

 

Characters: Really good. It's an old novel, so don't expect the trendy, modern [insert random number here] dimensionality, you might be used to. But the characters are not flat at all. 

Writing style: Very beautiful. Very rational at some points, pretending it was real. At other points very flowery and poetic. 

Lenght: Not a big book, but also not thin. Long enough, but not too long. Between 300 and 400 pages, I think. 

Plot: Well, we know most of it right? But it's rather different from the musical and has some unexpected twists. Not many, but they are there.

 

It will follow you. Some bits of it are actually unforgettable.

 

And it has some unbelievably lovely quotes. I won't tell them - I don't want to spoiler. And I only have a German copy of it, I don't want to search all of the English quotes on the internet.

 

My rating:

five stars out of five.

 

Microcosm is a history of E. coli but more than that, it’s a history of modern biology. So much of what we do in the lab today depends on these little bacteria that looking at biology through the lens of E. coli lends itself well to discussing almost all of modern microbiology. It also includes a few philosophical musings and, at the other end of the spectrum, some practical insight into the job of a microbiologist.

I picked up Microcosm in part because the description compares the book to Lives of a Cell, which I loved. So when they Microcosm turned out to be less elegantly written, less thoughtful, and clunkier in its transitions from philosophy to real world observations… let’s just say this book and I started out on the wrong foot. Fortunately, the rest of the book, while different from what I expected, was still able to mostly win me over.

Some of the introductory material was explained very well, with analogies that captured the important information without implying anything inaccurate. Although I can’t be sure, I felt like other parts of intro weren’t explained well enough for someone without a science background to pick up on the important things. However (and this is the part that makes this a 4 star reviews) the more cutting edge information and all of the fun facts later in the book were very well done. I already know something about the basics of E. coli and I still learned all sorts of new things about how they function and about how they contribute to science. I also thought it was brilliant and unusual to include some details of the lab work which involves E. coli. For that reason, I would particularly recommend this to someone considering work in microbiology, since it gives some insights into what that’s like.

This review first published on Doing Dewey.

Referenced in an article by Zimmer in BBC Knowledge magazine about Richard's Lenski's work with E.coli bacteria. He set up 12 identical lines in separate flasks 21 years ago and then watched them evolve. Some really interesting stuff happened including one line's ability to use citrate for sustenance something E. coli could not do. His work is giving the creationists fits because it's living proof of the mechanism of evolution and natural selection.

Full article in Mar/Apr 2009 issue of BBC Knowledge "Evolution in Action"

References:http://www.actionbioscience.org/evolution/lenski.html

Zimmer writes clearly and well. I've been reading his blog for some time and was glad to pick this up when it came out. It's a huge subject, and Zimmer does a fine job of giving enough information about many facets of the science happening around E. coli without swamping one in data. He's engaging and obviously passionate about his subject. I learned a lot about genetic engineering from this book. Highly recommended.