Dr. Nadler’s book is rich with the revelation of self-discovery, with lessons learned through the microscope, with eloquent observations of how human life ‘must transcend the lives of its cells.’

Nadler’s essays glow with intelligence and sympathy.

Nadler chooses to involve himself in the lives of the patients with whose renegade cells he has become so closely acquainted, and he speaks of them with sensitivity and deeply affecting respect.

Reading this book is like eavesdropping on remarkable intimacies. Dr. Nadler never forgets that his essays involve actual life, true death, and he responds to them as we should: with awe.

Nadler’s poetic language and artful description capture the subject matter and our imagination with the brush strokes of a master.

In Dr. Nadler’s deft hands The Language of Cells offers an affecting, knowing, lyrical language—a physician’s words that become collectively a wonderfully compelling ode to human inquiry, to medical knowledge as it helps us understand ourselves.

Nadler takes medical narrative to a whole different level, both in his wonderful prose and in his focus on the story playing out under the lens of the microscope.

In The Language of Cells, Spencer Nadler manages to accomplish the great novelistic feat of illuminating the whole of the human dilemma through examination of the minutia that comprise our lives. This is a book at once very small and very large; its prose is beautiful.

Spencer Nadler is the kind of scientist one always hopes exists: compassionate, articulate, hopeful, a real seeker. With a touch of the poetic, he never loses his humility in th eface of nature’s complexity and power. There used to be this fabulous ride at Disneyland that purported to take viewers inside a snowflake by shrinking them down to the size of an atom. Peeking at the eerie marvels of the microscopic world was the chief delight of that ride, and it is one of the many rewards to be found in this book.