We use this text (now in its 7th edition) for both our Analytical I (chemical analysis) and Analytical II (instrumental analysis) courses. They are both 1-semester courses at the sophomore year, and this text is just the correct level and length to cover both courses. There are a number of broad sections, each of which is divided into several chapters. Roughly the 1st half covers chemical methods and the second half covers the instrumental methods. There are also a few chapters devoted to statistical analysis.

The sections are reasonably independent and can be done in pretty much any order, giving a great degree of flexibility. The text itself is easy to read with numerous descriptive diagrams. I say this for second-year level courses - the text is too superficial for higher levels. There is a good mix of descriptive chemistry to give the student a feel for the chemistry behind the analyses. Finally, there are adequate exercises at the end of the chapters, some of which are cumulative with previous sections. There is also a very handy tutorial on the use of Microsoft's Excel for use in a course like this, including some specific exercises in using the spreadsheet. I find it very helpful, and not at all exclusive for those using Excel since Quatro-Pro (and Lotus?) is very similar and contains help files that translate from Excel parlance.

My biggest issue is lack of a section on mass spectroscopy. Skoog's own "Instrumental Analysis" text has a fine section on mass spec, but this text contains virtually no mention of the technique, in spite of the fact that it is an increasingly important technique for both quantitative and qualitative trace analysis. However, that's the only real negative point - this text is very good and useful for 2nd year level analytical courses. (P.S. students find it straightforward and clear as well.)

I want to buy OHP film of this book. But I could not find the way. Please let me know to order OHP for this book. If OHP for Instrumental analysis is avaliable, I want to order that too.

This text is a worthy contender to the classic "Fundamentals of Analytical Chemistry' by Skoog and West. I feel it is easier to read, and the examples given in the inserts should provide students with a "real world" need for the topics covered. The coverage is very similar to Fundamentals of Analytical Chemistry. The example problems and homework problems are illustrative and challanging. The experiments presented in the final chapters are well documented. My only observations for improvement would be the use of more detailed analysis of some of the insert examples. For example, a battery technology that is discussed in a step by step fashion in terms of equilibria, balancing redox equations, and problem solving. Also, a modernization of laboratory experiments to include topics in biochemistry, food and environmental science would be helpful in any future editon.

Harold Cruse was one of the most intellectual and insightful men of his time. The Essential Harold Cruse:A Reader is a collection of essays that provides into how he was thinking and what he thought as a black man during times, past and present, of racial strife and struggle.

Mr.Cruse critiques some of the most well known people of his time. Chapter four of the book sticks out in mind, for example. James Baldwin, one of the most well known and respected author's ever, wrote a play called Blues for Mr. Charlie. Mr. Baldwin was emphatic when discussing Mr. Charlie that it was not a Negro play, but just a a play that had some resonant social themes. Cruse criticizes Baldwin for not being true to himself or to the cause. Mr. Cruse was very outspoken and always wrote or said what he thought.

The Essential Harold Cruse:A Reader edited by William Jelani Webb was a very difficult book to read at times because some of the essays were very indepth and I felt as though the author was talking over my head and overanalyzing. On the other hand the collection of essays was insightful and informative and I feel that in reading this book that I learned a lot.

Reviewed by Simone A. Hawks

Mr. Sammler is a Polish Jew who escaped death at the hands of the Nazis at the cost of sight in one eye.

He is a survivor. He now lives in New York City in the 1960's, supported by his nephew who is but a few years younger.

Sammler, a intellectual with that gentlemanly old world manner, is now trying to come to terms with the culture he sees in NYC at the time, including how most of relatives have taken to it, the Holocaust and WWII in general. And, what the meaning of being a survivor is, both for himself and for the world he now finds himself in.

But just as his physical vision, thanks to the Nazis, is but half and distorted, so is his sight and vision into his soul. (Anyway, that's my metaphorical take on the bad eye.) He is emotionally removed.

As for Bellow's writing, it was great! This was my first Bellow book and I read it only because friends I highly respect so recommended him. I was flabbergasted that the writing was so good. Not at all heavy but yet trenchant in content and to the point. The scene where Sammler gives his talk is classic. His inability to understand the 60's culture and those in it, including his relations, yet having to deal with them, is often simultaneously riotous and deadly serious.

It's easy to see why this book won the National Book Award.

Note: Kosinski's _The Painted Bird_ has a complementary and sometimes similar subject matter. Imo, each books adds greater depth and meaning to the other.

This review is to refute some of the negative customer reviews. Anyone who is reading only for plot is reading on a very superficial level. I had never read Bellow and didnt know what to expect. After a few pages, I wasnt sure I wanted to continue, but I'm glad I did. I felt this book was, among other things, like opening a time capsule from the late 1960s. I did not at all feel the author was preaching his own views or that the characters were not developed. The author delves deep into the mind of a well-educated man who is a Holocaust survivor, living in New York when the city was decidedly at a low point and confronted with hippie-era social and political attitudes. I don't know if this story is autobiographical, but it is not plotless, dull or stupid. I urge potential readers to ignore those comments.

This was my introduction to Saul Bellow and I probably shouldn't have started with this one, because all the others probably pale in comparsion to this. They have to. Anyone this good would have to be some inhuman writing machine. Wow.

Sammler is a human being like the rest of us tackling questions that we all have given passing thought to at least once in our lives. He may come to a firm conclusion about them, but he gives it his best shot, even as he deals with his family, including his dying nephew.

The best part about this novel are the stream of consciousness narratives that show us the ebb and flow of Sammler's thoughts, where most of his thinking takes place. Here are the best scenes in the novel, and Bellow does it with ease, showing that he is influenced by Joyce but not mastered by him, taking his techinques and refining them to the next level.

Anyone interested in reading about the sixties should try this book, or just anyone who has ever stood and watched something happen and wonder why they didn't do anything, and wonder why. So does Artur Sammler.

After reviewing some of Stanley Crouch's essays in Always in Pursuit, my feelings is that this Brother is either confused, ill informed, or probably the superlative individual suffering from Narcissistic Personality Disorder. I find his grandiose style in certain areas of African-American History highly annoying and distorted. It is apparent this Brother requires excessive admiration from those that would cross the street or call the police if he was changing a tire in their neighborhood.

Stanley's piece regarding Blues for Three Widows is the epitome of a one-sided narrow-minded view of the struggles and tribulations of Sisters King, Evers-Williams and Shabazz. Their sacrifices are un-questionable. Their husband's views, beliefs, and practices are the essence of the true American Constitution.

In this and other essays Stanley places America and its citizens in this, "one for all and all for one" melting pot. However, American has never been a melting pot. America is a bottle of oil, water, and vinegar, one sitting on top of another, every now a then being shaken by a King, Evers, or Shabazz.

Stanley Crouch i Respect his Mind.but i don't agree with alot of the things he says.he is a trip.i guess i will always have issue at some of the things he once said about Miles Davis after the 60's.Mr.Crouch likes to group things.he is a very Intelligent Man but he can go all over the place&leave you hanging.these essays are interesting.I don't agree with his thoughts on Michael Jackson nor Malcolm X.deep down he probably would love to trade places with them.folks he seems to always have an issue with are Free Spirits.hint,hint.

In this collection of essays the brilliant Stanley Crouch comes off a lot like your grouchy old uncle who hates everything. This may put you off but keep reading because a lot of what he's saying is true. Miles Davis did turn out scholk ablums in his later years, much of what passes for black comedy is half a step from the old mintrel show and the O.J.Simpson case was lost becuase the prosecution did a lousy job.
Crouch takes know prisoners and spares no one's feelings. If he loves something he says so and if he thinks someone is a fool he says that too. You'll smile, you'll be offended and you might hurl the book down in anger but read it. Mr. Crouch has an interesting mind, something that is sorely lacking in much of our media figures today.

Stanley Crouch has written a novel that embodies the strength, granduer and magic of Twain, Faulkner and Ellison. One could--and should--add Thomas Mann to that list, because of the vast intellectual depths brought to these endlessly probing and illuminating pages. Indeed, it is a seminal achievement in American fiction. On the dust jacket of this great novel, Saul Bellow writes: "In matters of race, few Americans feel that they can say exactly what they think. What one feels in reading "Don't the Moon Look Lonesome" is an immediate relief from the burden of ideology, from 'more of the same.' For Stanley Crouch, the facts are color free." Bellow has it right. In Carla, the protagonist of a novel as rich and many-layered as a serving of Baklava, Crouch has created a woman who belongs in the Pantheon with Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina but, unlike those tragic, doomed women, Carla survives and grows as she passionately embraces the cards life has dealt her. But a secondary wonder of Crouch's mastery as a novelist is the care, understanding and compassion he bestows on his supporting cast. Ah, how these satellites orbit around Carla's glowing moon! How brilliantly they shine in the refracted light! How he cocoons them within the penumbra of Blues and Swing! In scene after textured scene, Crouch runs the scale. What a stunning achievement he has wrought...!

I loved Stanley Crouch's book. It presents black characters in ways that are rarely presented in fiction, as people who talk about life with wit and humor on a very civilized level. They talk about justice and the purpose of existence. They talk about literature (Shakespeare), about classical music (Wagner), about painting (Leonardo and Picasso). And when they discuss jazz - as is to be expected in a book about a black jazz saxophone soloist and a white woman from Idaho who becomes a serious jazz singer - they talk not only about the feeling of jazz but about its content and the ideas that underlie it. Another strikingly original aspect of this book is that Crouch represents religion in our society as a powerful and stabilizing force (his description of a black church service in Houston is compelling and masterly).Is Crouch discursive?  Of course he is, but so was Shaw, and how about Homer?

I don't think that I have ever read a more astonishing inward realization of a woman's life and memory and desire and feeling. As a Shakespeare scholar and a teacher of that great, great master for 30 years, I can confidently say that this novel is truly Shakespearean in its uncanny sense of capturing, without ego or intrusion, the soul and the idiom of a character. Each character is pure and unique and possessed of a distinct language. As a woman born and raised in the Midwest, I was equally startled by how accurately Stanley Crouch captured the style, the feeling, the speech, and the thinking of those particular Americans, among the many, many others he so powerfully and sensitively presents to us. This is a courageous book and it request that we be courageous readers willing to experience the great beauties and the enormous hurts the main character has to live through and witness as she is taught the many, many ways that race and sex and class touch and turn us in the world we inhabit right now. The insights into how men and women relate across the lines of color and class are unexceeded by any writing of which I am aware. These are the human things that people talk about privately when the subject of race comes around but that no one has written of until now, especially, on one level, the psychological and emotional intricacies that come into play when black and white women must truly face each other, setting aside all of the assigned roles and opening up to each other. Who would have thought a man would ever get something like that right? But this is an epic in the classical sense. It is a novel brimming over with ideas that are equaled by the panorama of emotion delivered by all of these three-dimensional characters who arrive from so many parts of our society. We move back and forth from the high to the low and through just about everything in between but we, even when what we experience is terrifying or shocking, are never debased. To read this book we have to live more fully in our humanity in the very same way that we must when Shakespeare sets his world of people before us in all their pain and wit and splendor. That is why we are enlarged by the broad substance of this novel, which has to be one of the great ones. There are definitely more than enough instances in this text for one to call it, without hyperbole, a work of absolute genius.

The Souls of Black Folk is an American classic. Written before he turned 30, Dubois deals deftly with the central issues of not only the beginning of the twentieth century (black leadership, the color line, southern politics, reconstruction, the talented tenth, etc.) but the end as well. When I heard that Benjamin and Crouch were going to put something together in honor of it I awaited my copy with anticipation.

After having read it, at least I can say the cover is really nice.

This book was not a chore to read...the way Benjamin skewers a number of "public intellectuals" is funny at times. And though I seldom agree with Crouch on anything, I find that he has serious skills as a wordsmith. But the central problem is that the work is poorly edited (particularly Benjamin's contribution), and there is no way that this does the original justice. It's better than THE FUTURE OF THE RACE (a similar attempt by Gates and West), but that's not really saying much. Skip it and reread the original.