85 of 88 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Comparative review of 3 embryology textbooks, August 30, 2002
I needed to build an embryology reference library for my own writing purposes, and bought three books at once from Amazon.com: Sadler, Moore & Persaud (The Developing Human, ISBN 0-7216-6974-3), and Larsen (Essentials of Human Embryology, ISBN 0-443-07514-X). Of the three, I keep gravitating toward Sadler as the most useful.
Although the other two are beneficial for more detailed accounts, Sadler gives the quickest and clearest grasp of the essential points. Sadler and Larsen write with more lucid prose and have a clearer conceptual flow than Moore & Persaud, but Sadler has the advantage of brevity for readers who do not need the minutiae.
Sadler also outshines the other two books in the clarity and color schemes of the line art (although not in number of illustrations). The art and photography in this book make the complex 3-dimensional changes of embryology as easy to visualize as one could hope. I find the pink and yellow color scheme in much of Moore & Persaud's line art, and the pink cast of many of the fetal photographs, unappealing.
Larsen is the only one of these books with a glossary. Sadler and Moore are the only ones with clinical case studies to test the reader's insight and problem-solving ability; both offer an appendix of solutions to the clinical problems. All three books have clinical application sidebars or chapter sections. The clinical applications in Moore are especially numerous, perhaps even to the point of distraction as they sometimes overshadow the main text. All three books have bibliographies for further reading on each chapter, with the larger Larsen and Moore books offering somewhat more references than Sadler.
If one does not need to get very deeply into embryology but needs an efficient overview of essential points, I recommend the compact and handy Sadler book above the others. For more depth, but with comparably clear writing, I recommend Larsen. Moore and Persaud, in my impression, is the least clearly written and least well illustrated, but the richest in clinical content.
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23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
For Medical School and Beyond, November 2, 2000
This textbook, now in its 8th edition is a classic. It is extensive and rather than giving a simple step by step account of development (although this is provided in nice tables at the front of the book) it encompasses a more scientific explanation than is found in other embryology texts. It is fairly wordy, but it is easy to pick out relevent information and diagrams are excellent, being numerous, well labelled and easy to understand. This textbook, which is both easy to understand and extensive makes it an excellent buy both for a medical student just beginning embryology, and later on when a more detail may be needed. The book has beautiful photographs which captivate the reader, and there are also nice clinical boxes which break up the text nicely and are also accompanied by photographs. At the end of each chapter are problem solving exercises for which answers are provided at the end of each chapter. This is the embryology textbook to buy. I wouldn't recommend any other. It will keep you company through medical school and beyond.
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30 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
finally...., January 11, 2003
I first bought Moore & Persaud's Embryology for the colorful pictures and the easy-to-read font but I soon realised that although the illustrations were good for those of us that depend on a pictorial memory, the text that accompanied it didn't completely explain some of the more complicated concepts and a few of the pictures are also apparently incorrect. I started falling back when everyone with Larsen seemed to love Embryo and I hated it 4 weeks into session. I then got myself a Larsen but soon realised that it too wasn't the book for me (although I know many that swear by it). Larsen, I found was very repetitive and I'd often find myself reading a near-identical paragraph two pages on from one I'd just read. I also found that Larsen tends to deviate from a topic through his paragraphs and talks about other things that would happen at that particular stage of development (which is good in some cases but gets annoying when you'd like to take one structure and follow it through from the beginning to the end without being confused by OTHER things that are happening at the same time) I then stumbled across Langman in the histology lab when I saw the lab assistant using it. Since I found myself once again confused with Embryo, I bought a Langman while on holiday in Sri Lanka for half the price and never looked back. Langman clearly compartmentalizes the topics and minimizes deviating onto other structures while describing the development one concerned unless it is directly relevant. I found it much clearer and easier to understand. Unlike the clutter of images that Larsen would leave in my head, Langman left a smooth chain of thought which was easy to recall. I also found that Langman's summaries at the end of each chapter (although not being as comprehensive as Larsen's) were still pretty good. It also had some information that was not in either Larsen or Moore. But above all, it takes the biscuit for its simple yet awesome three-dimensional CG diagrams, that are unbeatable for those of us who are poor at 3D visualization (ATARI over PS2 anyday!!). The diagrams are perfect for a comprehensive picture of the 7 pages of text that I'd have to sift through if I read Larsen. It also has really good clinical correlations and photographs of numerous congenital diseases and abnormalities. Overall, I'd reccomend this book as my first choice for an embryo text book. It took me nearly 3 sessions to find out the hard way; don't make the same mistake I did. Anyone wanna buy my Moore's? Cheers...
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