America in Its Relation to the Great Epochs of History Book

This text is very poorly written. It is unnecessarily obfuscating and jargon cluttered. If there are three terms with which to describe the exact same thing, Raven is sure to give you four. There are much better General Biology texts out there which I had to refer to because Raven makes such a muddle of things. Better and more highly recommended texts are Sadava "Life" (Very Good) and Freeman "Biological Science" (Fantastic). Campbell is good too.

Aside from the plethora of unnecessary jargon, the book's other primary failing is a lack of unification in what is presented. Nothing is tied to anything else. This book is essentially a loose assemblage of facts about biology without any seeming connection.

I will mention that the final chapters on ecology are, however somewhat better written than the rest of the book. In these chapters (and only in these chapters) the facts are presented not as they are elsewhere, as just a string of true statements (or purportedly true statements - another failing of Raven is that he uses many speculative studies which are still being debated and after mentioning they are still disputed, proceeds to treat them as though they were established facts) connected by conjunctions and unnecessarily technical mumbo jumbo, but as a unity of interrelated, interlocking parts to a puzzle.

I cannot imagine (and I can imagine quite a good deal) any possible way this text could have been written more poorly.