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David A. Morrison, Biology of Evolution and Systematics: Cohesive, Concise, yet Comprehensive Introduction for Students and Professionals.— By Paul Sanghera., Systematic Biology, Volume 65, Issue 1, January 2016, Pages 177–178, https://doi.org/10.1093/sysbio/syv078
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A book with this title seems irresistible—how often do we come across a book claiming to be an introduction to systematics? A book with this particular subtitle is more doubtful, because it seems to be overly ambitious, although wonderfully clear. When the author describes himself as “an educator/teacher, researcher/scientist, technologist, entrepreneur, and author,” then we can start to wonder exactly what he does for a living, besides writing books. And when he says that he is a physicist by training, but “currently interested in biomolecular engineering and bioinformatics,” then we might wonder why he is writing on this particular topic in the first place. How could I not be enticed to review this book?
The book is nominally published by a company called Infonential Inc., which uses the CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform; in other words, the book is self published. It is roughly 200 pages of large-font text, so that it runs much less than 50,000 words. The presentation is neat enough, but the formatting lapses in places (particularly in the tables), the punctuation is often arbitrary, and there are persistent spelling and grammatical errors. The latter is, unfortunately, apparently also true of the author's other books.
