E. E. Cummings Books

This is easily the best herpetology text book out there. It is informative, yet not full of the boringness (if that's a word...) of many textbooks. You might say that it's...fun to read.

I have just finished an undergradute course which used this book as the main text. I agree with the previous reviewer that there is considerable overlap and occasional contradiction. The early chapters tend to use a lot of technical jargon, and seem to be written for people who already understand the material. I was not so impressed with phylogenic descriptions which frequently failed to discuss unifying characteristics within families. Later sections, including locomotion, water balance, and mate selection are well written. This book would benefit from a glossary, more relevant tables and figures, and a more inclusive index. Overall, editing is rather sketchy.

It's certainly not complete or perfect, and as a reviewer notes, contains some omissions and errors. However, while a textbook should strive to be as good as possible in those areas, it's no substitute for the primary literature in peer-reviewed journals and shouldn't be viewed as such, and instead should be seen as more of a conceptual introduction, in which I feel it does well. It avoids the tempting parade-of-taxa style, and instead focuses on the important concepts uniting reptiles and to an extent all animals, such as osmoregulation, feeding, locomotion, reproductive strategies, etc.

The section dealing with my primary focus, locomotion, is rather sparse, and contains some outdated information, but nothing that can't be corrected with a quick read through the literature. With any luck, my own work will be in the next edition.

Despite some fairly serious errors and omissions, this book is the best academic treatment of the field of herpetology yet written. It is a multi-authored text which allows people to write on what they know best, rather than making authors stretch well beyond their fields of expertise. This unfortunately means there's a lot of repetition between chapters, and some flat-out contradictions. It does a fairly good of reviewing the literature in a number of sub-fields of herpetology, and so provides more up-to-date reviews than you're likely to find in "Biology of the Reptilia". It is a good choice for a herpetology course for undergraduates--in fact I plan to use it for such a course in summer 1999. Amazing omissions: dinosaurs!! birds!! biogeography!! Notable inclusions: good chapters on foraging ecology, classification (too short), & thermoregulation.

This book is for those wanting an easy reading introduction. Its very informative, well put together and easy to follow with adequate graphics. (I hated the questions at the end of each chapter though, ok lets face it they were easy you just had to really think about them).
I wouldn't recommend for a biology buff but definitely all others!

I just finished my biology class with this text book. Over all I was very disappointed in this book. I read each chapter that was assigned to us by the professor and worked my study guides but still came out of the each chapter more confused. With the jargon they put in this text book it doesn't do the student any favors in the layouts you will need to spend time to investigate some of the information on your own to obtain a better understanding of BIOLOGY.

This book was easy to follow. Unlike a a lot of other books, it does not throw a bunch of terms you dont understand at you.

Although Life on Earth is meant to be a textbook, I find it to be an excellent reference book. The design does not force the reader to begin at the first chapter and read sequentially. Terms are explained in clear english, and the glossary is very thorough. Illustrations are well-drawn and fitting, and the layout is easy on the eyes. Also, the chapter summary after each section is invaulable to students. I cannot recommend this book more to anyone who is interested in Biology or needs a reference book about the workings of life on Earth.

A previous reviewer has his facts wrong --- both Silver and Russo have PhDs in chemistry. Here's a blurb about Silver and Russo from the publisher:

Steve Russo is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Chemistry at Cornell University and the Director of Organic Laboratories. Prior to that, he was an Assistant Professor at Indiana University. While there, he designed and implemented a state-of-the-art computer resource center for the undergraduate chemistry curriculum. He received his B.S. in chemistry from St. Francis College and his Ph.D. in physical organic chemistry from Cornell University. He is a member of the American Chemical Society and has been a recipient of the Dupont Teaching Award, Clark Teaching Award, and the Amoco Distinguished Teaching Award. Mike Silver is a Professor of Chemistry at Hope College. He received his B.S. in chemistry from Fairleigh Dickinson University and his Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry from Cornell University. He is a member of the American Chemical Society, past president of the West Michigan Section, and a member of the Council of Undergraduate Research. He has received the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award for excellence in teaching and research and the Provost's Award for Teaching Excellence. Currently he is involved in collaborative research with the Dow Corning Chemical Company.

In my experience, this is one of the few chemistry textbooks which explains WHY as opposed to simply presenting isolated formulas and factoids for students to memorize. It is terrific for visual-spatial learners and for students who want the big picture as well as the details. The organization of the textbook is logical, with one subject leading into the next.

This book presents a excelent introduction to chemistry. There is no economy of space.The concepts are very well explained, in a conversational style. It is hard for you not to understand. Also it is very well and beautifully ilustrated.I hope there will be a review to include more subjects.

After using this book for my sophomore year in high school I decided to read about the authors, and the day I saw that they had PhD's in TEACHING CHEMISTRY was the day that intelligent life ceased to exist. This book does teach about chemistry, but in the most unorthodox way that you could not even imagine what they do. They give you five hundred definitions on everything. All this does is make it more and more confusing. Please, just give me a basic definition and if I need something explained I'll ask my teacher, who deserves his doctorate in teaching chemistry.

Another bad thing about this book is that is puts all the information that would take five lines up text into a long drawn out three page essay on something in real life. I do not care about that garbage! All I want is the information and I don't want to waste a half hour trying to find it in some stupid example I could care less about. 99% of the time I was reading the book I was getting a headache because all I could think was GET TO THE POINT ALREADY! One time I was making sure I wrote an acid base reaction correctly so I decided to check the book like I would in any other course. But in my fatal attempts to check my work I found out that the only acid base reaction in this text book is the equilibrium of water, and that doesn't help me one bit. If your wondering why I'm in such a bad mood right now, it's because I just stopped studying my final chemistry exam.

Stoicheometry is very a very simple concept that a cave man could understand, but the way this book does it makes half the class perplexed beyond what was thought to be chemically possible. If you're someone that memorizes math equations instead of understanding them, this book is not something to look forward to.

All it does is write out and explain the equation in the most confusing way. I did not have a problem with this because I never had to look at what they put, but when I tried to use it to explain something to a classmate I ended up closing the book and drawing out a much simpler version on a piece of paper. The only problem I ran into was that my teacher was worried about the lack of work I was showing on my free response problems, because I did not do it the long drawn out way the book tells you to. Consequently, I ended up having to do the problem my way, and then translating it on to the answer sheet the way the book tells you to do it.

This is a good introduction to the topic. It contains some interesting points. One is that even very young children are affected by marital discord. Another is that exposure to discord is likely to make a child more, not less, sensitive to it.

The book has its drawbacks. It's repetitive and heavy on fluffy citations, like "How couples handle differences is also important in marriages (Margolin, 1979; Markman & Kraft, 1989)." (p. 21). Do you really need someone else to back up an assertion that how couples handle differences is "important"?

Another example: "Spousal disengagement and withdrawal are associated with current marital distress [three citations follow]." If such statements of the vague and obvious were left out this book would be even slimmer than it is. These statements are the givens which made me want to read the book, to find out the why and how.

I think that this book lays out the critical issues in understanding the consequences of marital conflict on the lives of children. In my opinion, the balance of theory -- to get you thinking -- and actual research findings -- so that you know the big picture of what is really going with children -- is great. I disagree heartily with the previous reviewer that this book is lightweight. Also the citations are NOT just gratuitous "I'm justifying what I just said." They are also there to suggest to an interested reader **further food for thought.** That is an important distinction.

I love e.e. cummings' work. This is no exception. I don't want to review the content of this book, just a note on this edition. The newer edition from Liveright in paperback is probably much prettier, but if you're into retro 70's dustjackets (kelly green and orangy brown) and you'd like to read the poems the way they looked (because with cummings in particular, the look of the poem IS important) fresh out of the typewriter, this edition is for you.

In an afterword to "Xaipe," the book of poems by E.E. Cummings, George James Firmage notes that the title is derived from a Greek word whose simplest transliteration is "khi-ra" (with accent on the first syllable). Firmage further notes that the book was published by Oxford in 1950.

Xaipe is a curious collection of sequentially numbered poems. Many of the poems are very visually oriented; Cummings plays with with word division, punctuation, and the arrangement of words on the page. He often warps and reshapes language like a sculptor using clay; reading some of these poems is like deciphering a series of strange hieroglyphics.

Much of the book is also ear-oriented. Cummings demonstrates his mastery of rhyme, meter, alliteration, and repetition. He even includes a number of sonnets; sonnets, that is, as channeled through his experimental sensibility.

The tone of the book varies: cynical, satiric, revelatory, even tender. Cummings often uses seemingly invented words: "livingest" (from poem #1); "unteach" (#5); "fingeryhands," "whying" (#14); etc. One of my favorite poems is #22, a sonnet that begins "when serpents bargain for the right to squirm."

But is there an overall theme to "Xaipe"? I'll leave that to each reader to answer. But I sensed in the book as a whole a distrust of officialdom and a wariness of war, and a sense of skepticism about humanity; I felt at times that Cummings was resisting the rationality and formality of language and seeking a pure experience and attentiveness that actually transcends the written or spoken word.

"Xaipe" feels like a prolonged experiment, and while the experiment may not be wholly successful, it is nonetheless marked by flashes of genius. Definitely a volume of poetry worth exploring. For a stimulating companion text, try something by the philosopher J. Krishnamurti.

This book is a study guide to accompany the textbook, Biology -- ISBN 0805330445. The study guide offers more in depth questions than the book and is meant to prepare you for tests and test your knowledge over the material you've read in the book. I like most study guides in general, so I decided to get this one. It definitely helped me, I would recommend it to someone who is willing to take the time to use it.

Only 4 pages shorter than volume 1, this book continues the series of (eventually) 5 books on the history of Buffalo hunting. The biggest diference in the two books is that this one refers back to volume 1 occasionally, and- I think- some of the entries are much longer.

My only real complaint is that the editing of this edition could have been better, several times you're directed to see a person on page _ to _ only to find the count is a little off, that and two or three entries making reference to a group photo as if it is on that page ( the photo has it's own page, nowhere near them ).

Good reference book, worth having. I wish Amazon stocked the series.

As a long time ee cummings fan, I found this book to be just as wonderful as the rest of his writing, although this one isn't as well known. If you can appreciate his artistic use of words, you will not be disapointed by etcetera.

This workbook is a required book to go along with my regular textbook for my introductory biology class. It is well laid out and easy to work with.

In the Halloween thriller hist whist, e. e. cummings' poem is beautifully illustrated into a timeless children's picture book. Amazingly, a single poem comprises this book. While some that are unfamiliar with cummings' style may be confused by his nonsense vocabulary, syntax stretches, and other irregularities, the veteran reader will acknowledge this as yet another wonderful free verse accomplishment of cummings. The alliteration in this poem superiorly extends itself to young audiences. The excited mood created by such phrases as "tip-toe/twinkle-toe" and "eyes rustle and run and/hidehidehide" transport the rushing, dancing reader to through the scary lines.

However, this would likely not make the children's book list without the expert watercolor and colored pencil drawings of Deborah Kogan Ray. Her illustrations wonderfully enhance cummings' already vibrant poem. The autumnal drawings are dark, but still somehow glow with life and vivacity. Ray well understands the concept of positive and negative space, and her artwork demonstrates this. The frightening creatures described are accurately and creatively drawn, and just when one is beginning to fear, the cheerful, grinning faces of the costumed children relieve the reader.

This amazing and beautiful book is a wonderful addition to children's literature; e. e. cummings and Deborah Kogan Ray together created a terrific Halloween story, hist whist.