Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death

Context: I've read this and The Vital Question and watched several interviews with Nick Lane, so a lot of his ideas have blended together in my mind. A lot of the detail in this book went over my head, but it was well written enough to overcome my shortcoming in biochemistry. Similar in depth to Siddhartha Mukherjee's Song of the Cell and The Gene.

This book was a fascinating walk through evolutionary history and the way that different organisms handle energy, and how earlier, less efficient metabolic paths were limited but sufficient to bootstrap the much more efficient and flexible Kreb's cycle. I remember the term and the loop diagram from high school biology, but to actually dive into the elegant chemical pathways felt like discovering the rocket equation or the path from radioactivity to atomic bombs. If you're at all interested in Biology or Chemistry, I highly recommend this book.

To try to stay in topic: Nick Lane is a top tier biochemist who can even make the Krebs cycle riveting (aka the citric acid cycle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citric_acid_cycle ) His book “Power, Sex, and Suicide” is probably a better book to start with.

Don't love when books try to SEO optimize by hijacking another more popular term (the transformer which has nothing to do with this). Just pick a nice classy title instead. Seems like an interesting read though.