Ralph Taggart

Biology - The Unity and Diversity of Life with CD-ROM and InfoTrac

2 stars (repetitive) - This book is useful and contains a lot of good information, but could have been half as thick as it is. Everything is summarized more than once, in side-bars and at the ends of chapters, and key points are even repeated more than once in the text itself. The result is patchy text that is difficult to navigate and next to impossible to find information quickly in. 1 stars (Biological Detour) - This is the book I had in my college biology course. I find this book to be quite inconsistent. While it has it's bright spots and explains some things very well, it is one of those books where you end up having to hunt for the information. Result? You spend a great deal of time deciphering the book which has the information strewn everywhere in a fashion that's not entirely organized. Not to mention the fact that it stops dead cold in the middle of explaining a concept in order to go into great detail about another related concept. Then suddenly it jolts the reader back to what it was talking about beforehand. A good and elementary example of this is in chapter 2 where they discuss hydrogen bonding. It veers off and on from what the topic is supposed to be. It would be more helpful to cut to the chase and leave the lengthly prose out of the book. As another reviewer pointed out, the fact that the book has so many different authors is just ASKING for the final product to be inconsistent. This book is not worth the 120 dollars they expect you to pay for it. 1 stars (Biology: The Unity and Diversity of Life) - This book is far too wordy and repetitive and could have been half as thick. It weights over 4 pounds and is very heavy to carry around. Very often the point of a sentence is lost in the verbiage. Some basic explanations are repeated several times, whilst many more important things are left unexplained. Many of the pictures appear to have been chosen because they are 'cool' rather than relevant to the text and just sidetrack the reader. Some of the...
Brooks Cole :: Science & Biology :: Biology :: Life Sciences :: Science&Mathematics :: Science :: Life Sciences - Biology - General :: Ralph Taggart :: Cecie Starr :: :: Biology - The Unity and Diversity of Life (with CD-ROM and InfoTrac)