The Physical Basis of Biochemistry: The Foundations of Molecular Biophysics

Rating:
Summary: One professor's opinion
Review: I bought this book just before teaching Physical Chemistry. It started with a strong development of model use which laid a strong foundation for the remainder of the book. I found it a pleasure to read, if one can imagine that in a p-chem book. A true physical chemist would find their treatment an oversimplification. I thought it was a great single step up from undergraduate biochemistry courses towards physical chemistry.

Rating:
Summary: A bad book with good intentions
Review: The author attempted to write the Feynman's Lectures of biophysical chemistry, but he failed miserably. The book has a messy structure, unclear discussions, poorly drawn diagrams, and is infested with errors, even in equations that belong to high-school level physics courses. The first third of the book is basically a review of freshman physics and hardly touches biological systems, while the rest is a combination of dry formal exposition of thermodynamics and kinetics, and overly philosophical abstract and qualitative discussion of biological systems. The three parts of the text fail to communicate as they should.

Although I doubt that anyone will benefit much from this book, I am sure that many biochemistry students would benefit greatly from a book that Dr. Bergethon actually WANTED to create. Until such a book appears, for physical basis of biochemistry buy "Physical Chemistry: Principles and Applications in Biological Sciences" by T inoco, Sauer and Wang and supplelent it with any of the better introductroy physics texts.