I think the main reason of reading this book is because this is my chosen research problem. It's very interesting to know that cloning is one of the breakthroughs of today's technology.

I only wish I had found this book BEFORE I started Grad School. The author actually goes out of his way to be uncomplicated, which is unusual. If you want a quick but comprehensive overview of this fast-moving field, then this is the book for you.

A raggle-taggle collection of reviews and essays with no real unifying theme or drive - except a relative interest in matters Irish - this book has nevertheless done that most rare and testing of things in a collection of book reviews - it has persuaded me to buy not one but two of the books under review. Mahon's several pieces on McNeice make that out of fashion figure of interest to the non-Irish and non afficionado. There is a fun profile of Anthony Burgess and much memorabilia of literary youth at Trinity etc. There is everywhere an urbane sense of what the literary life is and how such and such a writer may have come to such or such a bad end or occasional lapse. Solid book reviews which are rewarding to dip into and a civilised, gentle tone throughout. How many essay collections can you say that of?

"This is a superb textbook for modern molecular biology. The set-up of the book is very reader-friendly. Everything is cross-referenced, which is enormously helpful. Another nice aspect of the book is the small, digestible sections separate from the main body of text. Overall Brown's book is an excellent textbook that provides a thorough account of what is known about Genomes today."

Great overview of the field. Very strong usage of diagrams and illustrations. Logical and clear progress from chapter to chapter. I had no prior knowledge in the field and after reading this book I feel I can understand most concepts challenges and research efforts on the field. A great book for anyone who wants to get up to speed on this fascinating field.

I found that "Genomes" provides the reader with a thorough yet gentle introduction to the field -- ample illustrations, well-written text, frequent sidebars describing relevant techniques or developments. I've found the book to be a good reference to have on the shelf, and have purchased copies for people when they join my lab group in order to introduce them to or refamiliarize themselves with the technologies underlying the generation of sequence data. I can very easily see this book being used to supplement lectures in an introductory course on genomics and biotechnology.

James Joyce had begun "Dubliners" in his early twenties. He wanted to satirize the problems of Irish culture. The book itself is an assemblage of smaller tales. They seem to involve drinking abuse, violence, money problems, and escapism.

My own professor, Dr. Richard Greene of the University of Toronto, had noted the prevalance of railing and fencing in the stories. There are, all over the place, imagery of rails and fences. Accordingly, says Greene, these imply constriction, entrapment. And, the characters are ones who want to 'escape' the difficulties of their lives. They want more money and a new place to live. In one story, "Eveline," the woman protagonist reflects on her abusive father. She wonders how things will change if she leaves to marry her boyfriend. Another story, "the encounter," has a pair of boys who retreat from school to an open field. They rely on their imagination, as the real world is to gross for them. Here, there are no physical restrictions. They have freedom. But they come across a perverted old man who reminds them again of the 'real world.' Also, the story "counterparts" deals with a father who loses his job and beats his son.

Now these stories are controversial. They are designed to shock us. They were meant to give the Irish "one good look at themselves " (Joyce). In due course, the book was denied publication for many years. The Irish resented the book.

The stories are easy to read. They have instances of humour, even. They have to do with the middle and lower classes of turn-of-the-century Ireland. We might call them 'labouring' classes. The reader will be interested to know how hard working people, who struglle, react to 'life.' Are the happy to be alive? Do they feel a sense of purpose? What is life to them? The existentialist, then, wants to know how the average working man tallies up 'life.'

I did not want to give the stories a full 5/5 because some of them were weaker than others. Some were boring, uneventful, and awkwardly narrated. Others, however, were emotional and blunt enough. Powerful relationships unfolded in only a few pages. They made me want to be there, in Ireland. After all, the tales convey a sense of culture.

The most famous of them, 'the Dead' involves a man who discovers that his wife may still be in love with a boy who died years ago. Of course, the story is of more than that, but I haven't the indecency to ruin things for you by telling anything more.

From the first page on, I started to love this book and to adore James Joyce's style of writing. In fact, the stories build a unity, but every single story is also convincing on its own. How James Joyce reveals the paralysis that Dublin holds upon its inhabitants, is fantastic. The story that moved me most is "The Dead". This one scene is marvellous: When Gabriel Conroy sees his wife standing on the top of the first flight, leaning on the banisters, listening to some far away sound... When he "paints" this picture of hers, calling it "Distant Music". That's something that reaches one's heart. I was really touched by this feelings which Joyce let his main character create. It's obvious that I recommend this book to everyone, especially to those who're interested in the literature of the early 19th century.

The first of James Joyce's books, "Dubliners" is a collection of fifteen stories written between 1904 and 1907. Joyce wrote the first of the fifteen stories in this collection, "Sisters," in Ireland in 1904. The story was published in August of that year under the pseudonym "Stephen Daedalus." Joyce wrote the last, longest and most famous of the stories, "The Dead," in Rome in 1907. The stories were published in the book known as "Dubliners" in 1914. While there are many editions of "Dubliners" in print, the definitive edition of the work is generally considered to be the corrected text prepared by Robert Scholes in consultation with Richard Ellman, Joyce's biographer. Random House publishes the Scholes edition under its Modern Library imprint and I recommend this edition.

"Dubliners" stands as one of the Ur-texts of modernism, a startlingly original collection of stories set in turn-of-the-century Dublin that began the Joycean literary project. That project subsequently moved through the increasingly difficult, and characteristically modernist, iterations of "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," "Ulysses" and "Finnegan's Wake." Like those succeeding texts, the interested reader can find thousands of pages of commentary on "Dubliners," the study of Joyce's works being akin to a Talmudic undertaking, an undertaking that can, if one chooses, occupy an entire life.

Joyce once commented that the stories of "Dubliners" constitute a "chapter of moral history" that represents the "first step towards the spiritual liberation of [Ireland]." He also said, "I call the series 'Dubliners' to betray the soul of that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city." The stories are, in other words, inherently critical (although also, at times, appreciative) of the Dublin life that Joyce abandoned, living and writing as an expatriate in Paris, Trieste, Rome, and Zurich for nearly the entirety of his adult life.

The stories operate on two levels. On one level, the stories are realistic narratives of every day life in Dublin. On another level, however, the stories are suffused with symbolism, with recurring, allusive images of spiritual, sexual and political meanings that mark a departure from nineteenth century literary realism and make "Dubliners" an enduring, and deservedly canonical, modernist narrative.

The first story, "Sisters," begins with a striking example of the tone of the stories in "Dubliners." A young boy stands, in the evening, looking up at the shadows flickering through the window of an upstairs room where a priest is dying:

"Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word 'paralysis'. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word 'gnomon' in the Euclid and the word 'simony' in the Catechism. But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work."

Thus, a vivid, realistic image appears in the reader's mind, but so does a collection of words that suggest meanings and themes that go far beyond the real, that capture physical and intellectual and religious undercurrents, the inner life of a young boy living in Dublin.

"Sisters" is a brilliant story, as is "The Dead" and nearly every other story in "Dubliners" (excluding, perhaps, one or two, the worst being "After the Race," a story that Joyce reluctantly included in the collection). Realistic in its narratives, richly allusive in its language and symbolism, "Dubliners" is one of a handful of story collections that truly deserves the label "classic" and should be read and studied by every serious reader.

As a computer scientist wanting to learn bioinformatics, I picked up this book to learn the biology. The book is well written, presentation is lucid, and the pictures good. In addition, Brown presents the experiments first in a historical context and then the results, which I find easy to follow.

I give the book four stars instead of five because it badly needs updating.