The cytoskeleton in cell differentiation and development

The proceedings of scientific meetings rarely translate into good books but few make as bad a job of it as this volume. The Cytoskeleton in Cell Differentiation and Development is, frankly, pretty awful. The presentation is awful, the organization is awful and the illustrations are awful. This is a pity since the contributors include some notable figures in cytoskeleton research and a number of the individual chapters are well worth reading. The topic is also clearly an important one, although anyone expecting to find profound insights into the role of the cytoskeleton in either differentiation or development in this book will be severely disappointed.The Cytoskeleton in Cell Differentiation and Development had its origins in an international meeting in Granada, Spain in April, 1987. I hope for the sake of the participants that the symposium was organized in a more coherent and logical fashion than this book. The volume begins with the text of three plenary lectures, all interesting in their own right but none of which bears more than a superficial relationship to the topic at hand, nor to what comes subsequently. The remainder of the book is divided into seven sections, each of which comprises three or four 10-15 page articles and about the same number of two-page contributions, which are essentially extended abstracts. This curious organization, coupled with the fact that the book is produced in ‘camera-ready’ form (more of which later), with the inevitable wide variation in type, results in a highly disjointed and unsatisfactory effect; in fact, it looks a mess. Four of the sections are primarily concerned with microtubules and one with intermediate filaments. The others are a rather bizarre mixture of papers on teeth, mitosis, protozoa, Xenopus and so on.