Yeah, I am talking about Lippincott's Illustrated Review. And it fully lives up to the title: the illustrations are half of what makes this book so great.
I just "finished" Lippincott's and it took me approximately 2.5 days. I used quotation marks because I didn't read it cover to cover. Instead, I went through each chapter (completely) that is covered in First Aid, plus a few extras that I felt I needed in order to have the other chapters really sink in and make sense. There were also some paragraphs that I skipped because they included chemical structure and things that I didn't feel were really all that high yield (especially not at this point in time). It's a great text if you have a weak background because it gives you enough information to understand and develop a complete picture, but not so much that you get bogged down in extraneous details (excluding the part above about structures, etc). I went through it pretty slowly to make sure that I digested what it was saying and was able to understand the concept well enough to connect multiple concepts together. I just did all the biochemistry questions in Kaplan Qbank and got 91%, so it definitely helped me there.
I don't know that you would need to go through it cover to cover unless either 1) you had tons of time or 2) you really have no biochemistry background whatsoever. The concepts came back really quickly for me, and I think this is due in part to how succinct and clear the text is.
It is great at explaining the things FA can't. For example, glycogen synthesis. My school didn't teach this worth crap and I never really understood it. I read Lippincott's and now it's really a very simple concept and questions dealing with glycogen synthesis/glycogenolysis are very easy to work through (I never understood the process of building it up and breaking it down and how a deficiency in either the branching enzyme or a deficiency in the debranching enzyme [which is bifunctional and has two distinct actions] would manifest in the appearance of the glycogen itself). This may sound like a simple concept for many, but if you were never taught it before this can make a huge difference. All in all I definitely recommend the book.
