Customer Reviews

Human Embryology and Developmental Biology, 3e

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

While the book does have a lot of diagrams that are clear and often helpful, they sometimes must be so at the expense of textual content that is very muddled, overly wordy, and difficult to follow. Topics are often discussed in an indirect, roundabout fashion that makes comprehending what the author is trying to say more of a challenge than learning the embryological processes should be. I find myself constantly becoming frustrated at having to read over passages two or three times just to figure out what exactly is going on - much more so than with any other text I've yet to come across in medical school.

Get Langman's instead, if you have the option. Much clearer and more concise. And funny enough, a lot of the better illustrations in Carlson cite being adapted from images previously published by Langman.

I use the book to my embryology class and I have to say that is the best book of embryology I find. The contents are very up-date, and handle much information of the molecular basis of the development and the genes that are expressed in every step of the human development. The book have a very good redaction and the gene information of the book is the best one. It's a very up-dated book.

I teach developmental biology and study invertbrate devlopment and evolution. For my course I use Scott Gilbert's excellent text and teach my course as a general introduction. I just became pregnant and purchased this book to exapand my knowledge on human development.

I'm rather disppointed. It's not detailed enough and while the illustrations are nice, there are several diagrams that illustrate paracrine factor targets but are never mentioned in the text or explained. why diagram them then? Even more disturbing is a underlying teological bias that many intelligent designers would salivate over reading. For instance page 209 "a master blue print" is used to describe the interactions of several tissue types to form the limbs. It's disturbing to think that our MD's might be using this text for their human embryology courses- its a very basic pass frought with poor word choices that would satisfy any creationist.

Carlson's "Human embriology and developmental biology" is a good book for biology and, most of all, medicine students, who want to understand the basical principles of development. It doesn't have a lot of developmental anatomy, but it explains clearly and simply the ultimate advances in experimental embriology. If you are for the first time studying developmental biology, you should read it. It also contains at the end of each chapter a lot references, which will help you if you want to learn more about any specific topic.