Inanimate Life

Reviewed by Tory Blackwell, Instructor, Clackamas Community College on 6/27/22

Comprehensiveness rating: 3 see less

The book covers a range of different areas related to non-animal life. It tends to focus on what and not as much on why or mechanisms that explain the functions/properties seen.

Content Accuracy rating: 4

There were a few content errors, but many of them were due to typographical issues or confusion caused by diagram placement relative to the text.

Relevance/Longevity rating: 5

The majority of the content is pretty evergreen (no pun intended) and actually presents the material from a different direction than most textbooks, which I found interesting.

Clarity rating: 3

The jargon isn't excessive, but sometimes the writing was harder to understand than it needed to be.

Consistency rating: 5

The author stays consistent from chapter to chapter.

Modularity rating: 4

The back 250 pages is completely modular as it is just different examples of organisms. The first 30 chapters of actual content is pretty modular, but does rely on accessing content from other chapters.

Organization/Structure/Flow rating: 3

I had trouble with the flow. Granted, it tells you from the outset that the author is using a different strategy for organizing the content, I still had trouble following the flow from chapter to chapter.

Interface rating: 3

The book was easy to navigate (I used the pdf version). A few links did not work or did not lead to useful content. The images ranged from great to difficult to navigate (some appeared to be Windows Paint images with some hand scribbles for labels). I could see some of these images confusing students.

Grammatical Errors rating: 3

I consistently found grammatical errors ranging from minor missing words that did not affect the text to spelling errors and missing words that dramatically change the meaning of the text. That required me at times to re-read and use the surrounding context to know what the correct meaning of some of the statements were.

Cultural Relevance rating: 3

I didn't see any examples of races or ethnicities, which is not surprising considering the topic. That being said, most textbooks try to connect to folks in the field to give students examples of people they might see as examples and provide aspiration. That is not present in this textbook.

Comments

I was hoping this book could serve as a supplement to the general biology for science majors 213 course that I teach. The Openstax Biology 2e book has limited plant biology and ecology content and although this book does have that content, it doesn't have the mechanistic pieces that I am looking for. It has lots of great information to pull in things like energy production, soil and nutrients, and even classification of non-animals, but there is limited information on plant hormones, details on plant defenses (i.e. signal transduction pathways related to plant defenses), details on energy production (some of the charts show some steps and enzymes, but they tend to be overview diagrams), and not much genetic information presented. It might work best as a standalone book for an introductory student as the student would not need much chemistry background to understand the content in the book.