ISBN9780073209289

I bought this book to accompany a general biology course at a, shall we say, sub-par academic institution. After looking at a few other general biology textbooks, I realized why my school selected this one. Good points: It is clear, to the point, has great illustrations, and is well organized. Downside: it does not go into the sort of depth committed biology majors might like. It is listed for a college course, but I feel I covered in high school all of the information this text offers. That said, it's great if you are taking a biology course to satisfy a requirement for a non-biological sciences degree (read: an intro to science for the non-scientifically inclined). Enjoy!

I used this textbook in a biology course for allied health majors that I taught this past semester. I was teaching adjunct, and therefore had no choice but to use it this course. If I were to teach this course again, however, I would push hard for another text.

Pros: Generally good illustrations, excellent photography, and the animations provided via the supporting online materials (through Blackboard) ranged from decent to phenomenally helpful. I used the latter almost weekly in my lectures, and they really helped. The first set of review questions at the end of the chapters were good study resources for students.

Cons: This book is almost completely divorced from the process of science. In fact, the description of the process of science in the introductory chapter has glaring weaknesses/inaccuracies, as does their definition of "theory." Furthermore, almost everything in this text is simply stated with unquestionable authority as FACT, with very little discussion of the rationale and empirical/theoretical basis behind currently accepted scientific principles. In the few occasions in which experiments are discussed, those tests rarely are described with explicit consideration given to the scientific method. My philosophy, at least, is that the process of science is every bit as important as the products of science, and in that way this book falls massively short. I also think that this is a big part of the reason that other reviewers have commented that the text is boring--it misses out on almost all of the "action" (the tests!) that makes science interesting.

My other major beef is that the Powerpoint slides that accompany the text (at least the instructor's version) are among the worst I've ever seen. Massive amounts of text per slide, microscopic figures, terrible logic to the presentation, and numerous inaccuracies. The slides were literally unusable. I basically re-wrote my slides from scratch, using the originals only as a bank of graphics...and even then, I had to do a great deal of cropping and resizing of anything I ended up using. I'm not expecting a publisher to do all my work for me, of course, but they honestly would have done just as well (actually better, in terms of their credibility) if they simply provided all the figures as GIF's on the CD.

The test bank was similarly terrible. Almost entirely recall-type questions, often asking details that were beyond obscure and irrelevant (e.g. "what's the greek root of ____"). I can remember perhaps two questions in the first 15 chapters that required students to exercise reasoning skills above at the "analyze" or higher level of Bloom's Taxonomy.

I have other smaller complaints about individual passages. For example, I thought they painted with an overly-broad brush when talking about the personality characteristics of people with chromosomal abnormalities--it bordered on offensive in places in the two-dimensionality of its depictions. And I thought they often presented topics in an incredibly convoluted fashion, especially the chapters on mitosis, meiosis, and gene expression.

Ultimately, I'm giving it two stars because at least it represents what must have been a tremendous (if a bit misguided) effort on the part of the author(s). And it doesn't have TOO many mistakes. But at the same time, I would actively recommend against any colleague using this text in their classroom. Even for non- or mixed-majors, there are far better options. Sorry.