Reading through this book was a frustrating experience. After every page I wanted more... but not in a complementary way. I was left feeling like with just a bit more effort, this could have been really great book.
The photos, are of course, the main event here. They're fascinating to look at, and some are quite beautiful. But the accompanying text feels like it goes out of its way to be unhelpful. It alternates between dropping unexplained, non sequitur factoids ("In the extreme corners of the stem, the best position mechanically, small collenchyma cells are visible"), and a rote listing of textbook labels ("The xylem and phloem are surrounded by a ring of parenchyma cells.").
I suppose I was hoping for an pithy synopsis of each image, from an expert--a botanist, biologist, or a materials scientist--but one gets the impression that an intern was hired to copy random paragraphs from wikipedia for the accompanying text.
So the words are forgettable, but who cares, the pictures are pretty, right? Except the decision was made to limit every image to half the page, leaving the other half for explanatory text (which is never more than one paragraph) and thus mostly empty! Why would you do that?!
There is always a large magnification label (e.g., 1000X) but no real sense of scale is ever given. This could have been easily done with an inset image of the subject zoomed out, or with an introductory chapter giving familiar examples for scale comparison, or with measurement overlays, or any number of ways. People are really bad at conceptualizing exponential scale; just listing the magnification power isn't really sufficient.
So, this makes a great coffee table book, but if you're looking for more depth, you'll need to find it elsewhere.
