Since the American Board of Allergy and Immunology only issues 10-year certification --and I took the exam the first time in 1991 -- I have to take a multiple choice recert exam soon. The book is helping me prepare by reviewing current basic Immunology in a very easy to understand (and therefore easy to REMEMBER) fashion.
The prose is not prosaic, it's fun! The writing describes the immune system's structure and functioning clearly and logically. It does an excellent job of tying everything together, which can be difficult with the expanding "octopus" of detail that comprises modern immunology.
I highly recommend this for physicians and students of medicine or immunology.
This book gives a good overview of the immune system, with enough detail to understand how the various cells and tissues do what they do. How does the system recognize invaders? How does it recognize self, and leave self alone? Why is foreign tissue rejected? How can the system go wrong? What is the role of the Major Histocompatibility Complex? How do we get immunity? The mechanisms cells use are molecular?protein, mostly?and the immune system is all about protein switches, detectors, and processors. The above questions and others are answered by invoking the protein mechanisms, and explaining how the cells of the immune system can do the magic that they do in recognizing and responding appropriately to the millions of different possible invaders, and why some parts of the system take longer than others to swing into action.
The only background you really need for this book is an intelligent layman?s interest in science. You should know what proteins are (chains of amino acids), more-or-less how DNA and RNA work, and the ability to follow a technical discussion. The book was written for medical students, but knowledge of anatomy and physiology is not put to use here. The discussion is chatty, informal, and repetitive. Each of the first several chapters ends in a summary diagram of the system interactions that have been discussed up to that point, and each next chapter begins by giving an extensive review of the previous one.
In spite of this, the exposition is confusing. The author is doing what he can, but the immune system is inherently difficult to follow. It consists of many sloppy loops that interact with each other in approximate and varying ways. Moreover, certain important interactions are still not understood very well (as the author emphasizes), so there is some fuzziness in the picture. But the last two chapters, on auto-immune diseases and cancer, use what went before, and give the reader some perspective on the general mechanisms.
This is a satisfying book, and a real service. It is bringing together knowledge that otherwise would be scattered in research papers, or buried in technical books, and making it accessible. The level is low enough to explain the mechanisms, but leaves out much messiness that clinicians would probably need. No one would feel when they had finished only this book that they could treat an immune system disorder, but they would at least feel that they could comprehend it.
Needing an updated refresher on the immune system, I picked up this book after reading reader's reactions to the book here.
I found this book to be excellent. I have a good undergraduate background in biology, but this book is written in such a clear, forthright manner that anyone with an interest in the subject would have no problem understanding the concepts outlined here.
The book may be short, but it is dense; there are no throwaway sentences or paragraphs here. Yet the book is written in a clear, sensible manner.
I recommend it.
