I have used every edition of the Analytical Reading Inventory, but this one is the best yet. Since I am a teacher educator, I find the accompanying audiotapes quite helpful--both to me and to my students. The content of the graded passages has always been real children's literature, and thus, more like real reading. There are both narrative and expository passages with different forms for pre-and post-assessments, or for comparing silent reading comprehension to oral reading comprehension. The directions for use are very reader-friendly. And, for this latest edition, the reader passages come in a separate booklet for easy use in the testing situation. I think anyone using this inventory would be well satisfied.

This grab-bag of writings from around the world includes Kate Wilhelm's short story "The Village," which dramatizes the Vietnam War in an unusual way; Octavio Paz's analysis of "The Day of the Dead" in Mexico; and Samir Al-Khalil's account of how Saddam Hussein uses fear to control the people of Iraq. Truly multicultural, this collection has a wide variety of fiction and non-fiction from around the world. Themes include The Family in Different Cultures, Turning Points, How Culture Shapes Gender Roles, How Work Creates Identity, Class Conflicts, The State and the Individual, Strangers in a Strange Land, The Role Customs Play in Different Cultures, and The Impact of War. Authors include George Orwell, Joan Didion, Amy Tan, Danny Santiago, and Jamaica Kincaid. Great for a high school or college reading or writing class.

It is astonishing to see that Hans Ruesch is included in this august list of writers and thinkers - which covers the thoughts of people such as Stendhal, Keats, Shaw, Malthus, Baldwin, Orwell, de Beauvoir, Toynbee, Herodotus, Carlyle, Whitman, Kennedy, Darwin, Kolata, Heyerdahl, Hoyle, Plato, Scriptures in Hinduism, the Prophet Mohammad, St Matthew Parables, Darrow, Sartre, Aristotle, Ruskin, Flaubert, Rothstein, de Mille, Berger - because so much has been done, for decades, in all sections of the anglophone media in Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the US, to stifle/suppress/ignore what Hans Ruesch has to say; whereas the company in which he has been placed is so widely known and read that one only needs to mention their surnames, as it were.[...]BR>
This isn't just any old book. It is targeted at the possibly great thinkers of the future, mainly those in universities, from freshman to postgraduate. That is not to say that great thinkers are only to be found in universities, as you will note from the list of names in this book: In rightly adding Hans Ruesch's name to 'Ideas That Changed The World', the authors have 'un-suppressed' him. They have, indeed, quoted some 10 pages from "Slaughter of the Innocent", his meticulously researched most famous oeuvre for genuine antivivisectionists. The faux anti-vivisectionists also did/still do a hatchet job on him, yet the 'innocent' in the title are humans and animals, both.
<[...]P>Kudos to the authors for this inclusion.