The Lives of a Cell

The harshest reading is that Thomas is pleased with his own cleverness, “sticking in an extra tidbit after every sentence, like this,” until he reads as “the kind of guy you wouldn't want to be seated next to at a dinner party,” or “as thought provoking as a conversation with an intoxicated, college-aged biology major.” Readers with biology say the content is thin under the ornate metaphor, a critic noting the “difficulty distinguishing hard scientific fact beneath the elaborate metaphors,” and push back on his rosy symbiosis. Because it is a column collection read straight through, the themes repeat and the back half drags. And the speculative later essays end up predicting “we are surely in for apocalypse.”