( 6 reviews )
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( 2 of 2 found this review helpful ) Posted: Jan 23 2008
This is easily the most boring book ever published. It literally put me to sleep last night. I have chronic insomnia. Doctors should prescribe this as a sleep aide. It is atrocious. You're selling these stupid tomes for over $60, put a few images in there. Go wild and print a page in color. You can afford it you money-grubbing swine.
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Posted: Oct 28 2007
This was the required book i needed for class. It was about 10 more dollars at the bookstore. When I started my english class I had the previous edition that my sister had used the year before, so I needed this book to arrive within a week. It was delivered pretty fast and of course in mint condition. The book itself I think is way better than the previous edition and I'm glad I got it from Amazon
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( 4 of 5 found this review helpful ) Posted: Mar 2 2007
I'm currently using this for a freshman English course, and I find it is a complete mess. There are historical mistakes (claiming Cicero was the greatest writer of the Roman Empire -when Cicero wrote during the Republic), spelling errors, and even grammatical errors (take the title of Chapter 4 for instance: "Types of Synthesis: Explanatory and Argument" -has the author ever run into the term parallelism?). The book is full of redundancies and proprietary terminology. Some of the concepts are barely explained, others are beaten to death. The writing style is not consistent, leading to the suspicion that many people had their hands in this one -perhaps "authors" in India. Some of the exercises are barely comprehensible. For instance: "Look over the preceding readings and make a list of the ways they address the overall topics of computers, communication, and relationships. Make your list as detailed as you can. Then write several lists grouping together the readings that deal with similar aspects of the overall topics" (108). We really don't want our students writing like this, so the last thing we should do is expose them to a textbook like this. Some of the reading selections are good, and others are vapid, pointless, and generally worthless. Essays about dirty dorm rooms and lack of parking spaces behind the gym -oh yes, this is really provocative. I challenge anyone to find me a worse textbook.
