Ridley, M. 2004 (3rd Edition). Evolution. - Malden, Blackwell Publishing

Abstract

Text books: they are big, heavy, so dense with information that you’ll need a machete to get through, and expensive. As Bill Bryson says in his ‘A short history of nearly Everything’: “There seemed to be a mystifying universal conspiracy among textbook authors to make certain the material they dealt with never strayed too near the realm of the mildly interesting and was always at least a long-distance phone call from the frankly interesting (p. 22)”. And as students often won't have the diligence nor the time to actually read them from cover to cover, why spend the money? Read more...