Use this directory to obtain selected commentaries from The Textbook Letter, Volumes 1 through 5 About 50 pages on this Web site show commentaries that appeared originally in Volumes 1 through 5 of The Textbook Letter. Here are short descriptions of those pages, each preceded by a colored symbol. You can go directly to any page by clicking on the adjacent symbol.

	Doubly vicious -- The writers of Glencoe's high-school textbook Glencoe Health are not content to endorse an immensely destructive form of pseudoscience. They also teach students that if a person is accused of a crime, the person is certainly guilty and should not be allowed to answer the accusation. [from The Textbook Letter, January-February 1995 (Volume 5, Number 6)]
	A physician looks at Holt Health -- In The Textbook Letter for July-August 1994, an article titled "Leading Students into the Clutches of Quacks" described how the high-school textbook Holt Health promotes quackery and superstition. Now a pediatrician takes a broader look at Holt Health and cites many other reasons why this book is unfit for use in schools. [from The Textbook Letter, January-February 1995 (Volume 5, Number 6)]
	Phony "standards" and fake "history" -- The bogus document National Standards for United States History is really a detailed plan for a curriculum dealing in ideological nonsense. One of its more malignant traits is the retailing of a "history" that virtually excludes science, technology and medicine as historical forces, and virtually ignores the achievements of American scientists and technologists. This exclusion seems to be deliberate. [from The Textbook Letter, November-December 1994 (Volume 5, Number 5)]
	More trickery by Charlotte Crabtree and Gary B. Nash -- Soon after a far-left organization in Los Angeles produced two eccentric political screeds and falsely represented them as compilations of federal standards for education in history, the screeds were exposed as fakes, were panned by various individual critics, and were denounced by the United States Senate. The Los Angeles outfit's leaders -- Charlotte Crabtree and Gary B. Nash -- continued to promote their phony "standards" and continued to deal in misrepresentation and deceit. [from The Textbook Letter, January-February 1995 (Volume 5, Number 6)]
	Count 'em, folks! Eighteen! -- The copyright page of Addison-Wesley Biology displays a list of eighteen "content reviewers." Did all those people really fail to notice that Addison-Wesley Biology is full of fakery, flapdoodle and howling errors? [from The Textbook Letter, November-December 1994 (Volume 5, Number 5)]
	Bisonflop -- What did Amerindians do before they began to make big money by running casinos and selling tax-free cigarettes? Well, for starters, they devised unique agricultural techniques -- indeed, they were the folks who invented irrigation. (Fortunately for us, they disclosed their amazing innovation to "modern society," which is why we are able to practice irrigation today.) This is the sort of phony-Injun stuff that Addison-Wesley is peddling in a high-school book. [from The Textbook Letter, November-December 1994 (Volume 5, Number 5)]
	Replicating a fiction -- The writers of many biology books like to tell about Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck, but their Lamarck is an invention. He has acquired his characteristics from hearsay and wrong guesses, and he has been replicated in successive generations of schoolbooks by successive teams of plagiarists. [from The Textbook Letter, September-October 1994 (Volume 5, Number 4)]
	Thirteen dumbbells -- Glencoe's Biology: An Everyday Experience is dated in 1992, but it is a leftover from the 1970s. It is oblivious to contemporary biology, it is loaded with religious myths, old wives' tales and other claptrap, and it even equates "scientific method" with a fake "experiment" that obviously cannot work. Despite all this, Glencoe has managed to dig up thirteen "reviewers" who evidently think that Biology: An Everyday Experience is just fine. The names and affiliations of these thirteen dumbbells appear at the end of our review. [from The Textbook Letter, September-October 1994 (Volume 5, Number 4)]
	Simply nonsensical -- This article, originally published as a sidebar to a review of Glencoe's Biology: An Everyday Experience, describes one way to recognize a phony "biology" book or a phony "life science" book. Does the book divide animals into categories labeled "simple" and "complex"? If so, you can reject the book right away. [from The Textbook Letter, September-October 1994 (Volume 5, Number 4)]
	Holt promotes quackery to high-school students -- If you're not feeling well, maybe you should take a magical tonic, or get someone to fiddle with your "meridians," or hire a witch doctor to put your "elements" into "harmony." That's what the student learns from Holt Health, a high-school book that preaches superstition, peddles mumbo jumbo, and tricks the student. [from The Textbook Letter, July-August 1994 (Volume 5, Number 3)]
	"Culture" crud -- Some state education agencies and many local school districts have vitiated or demolished the teaching of history and geography, and they often have replaced history courses or geography courses with fluffy, inane social-studies courses that allegedly deal with "cultures." (These maneuvers have figured prominently in efforts to create dumbed-down curricula and courses which are so simple-minded and vacuous that even the laziest and dimmest students will seem to be doing well.) Schoolbook companies have rushed to exploit the "cultures" fad by producing fluffy, inane social-studies books that display the word cultures in their titles. Here are reviews of two such books.
	No answer -- It's funny when the comedian Garrison Keillor reminds us that, in the imaginary town of Lake Wobegon, "all the children are above average." But it's not funny at all when schoolbook-company charlatans concoct similar absurdities and feed them to young students as matters of fact. Welcome to the mendacious world of fake anthropology -- where all societies are "advanced" or "highly developed," and no society has ever been primitive. While you are here, you can read about a charlatan who, when asked to explain his claims, refused to answer. [from The Textbook Letter, July-August 1994 (Volume 5, Number 3)]
	The Pandas scam -- As a part of their campaign to undermine science education in the public schools, fundamentalists frequently promote a book titled Of Pandas and People. The fundamentalists try to induce state agencies and local school districts to adopt Pandas as a "supplemental text" for use in biology courses, and they insist that Pandas must be placed in school libraries and must be catalogued as a science book. In reality, however, Pandas is a religious tract. It is a slick repackaging of various doctrines that originated in "creation-science" -- the religious pseudoscience by which fundamentalists pretend to show that the Holy Bible is a literal account of history and that there is no evolutionary connection between humans and other organisms. The Textbook Letter has carried three articles about Pandas, beginning with a report that gave some information about the book's origins. Here are all three articles.
	Human anatomy and physiology for high-school students -- The company that publishes Structure & Function of the Body claims that this textbook can be used in a one-semester course for students who already have completed a high-school course in general biology. One of our reviewers finds that Structure & Function of the Body "can provide solid grounding for students who may study human anatomy and physiology during their college work." Our second reviewer says that Structure & Function of the Body "does a creditable job with the what, the where and the when, but it often fails to give proper explanations of the why and (especially) the how." [from The Textbook Letter, July-August 1994 (Volume 5, Number 3)]
	Different opinions about a geography text -- Our first reviewer finds that the 1993 version of Prentice Hall World Geography is well organized but is "inadequate in its treatment of social, political and economic matters." Our second reviewer writes that Prentice Hall's text displays an "impressive" conceptual framework and is "one of the best world-geography books available." [from The Textbook Letter, May-June 1994 (Volume 5, Number 2)]
	The old lies live on and on -- Prentice Hall's account of the origin and early history of Russia consists of some political propaganda that the rulers of the Soviet Union invented in their heyday. [from The Textbook Letter, May-June 1994 (Volume 5, Number 2)]
	A science text that is innovative and useful -- Holt's Biology: Visualizing Life is a TV textbook, built around pictures. It differs from most TV textbooks, however, because it has a lot of respectable content, and it can help students to learn. [from The Textbook Letter, May-June 1994 (Volume 5, Number 2)]
	A New York swindle -- The book Concepts in Modern Biology is sold chiefly in the State of New York, for use by students who are preparing to take the biology examination administered by that state's Board of Regents. Written by charlatans who don't even know what mammals are, Concepts in Modern Biology is riddled with pseudoscientific nonsense and startlingly stupid statements -- including the declaration that "the cause of AIDS is not known"! If this book's content reflects the "biology" endorsed by the New York State Board of Regents, then the Board has been asleep for a long time! [from The Textbook Letter, May-June 1994 (Volume 5, Number 2)]
	A gross disservice to students and to teachers -- In a vicious passage that ostensibly alerts students to some of the dangers of smoking, the writers of the schoolbook Holt Health play on vulgar superstitions and reinforce irrational fears of the word chemical. [from The Textbook Letter, May-June 1994 (Volume 5, Number 2)]
	Prentice Hall's phony "science" -- Some of the phoniest and worst "science" textbooks that we ever have seen belong to the Prentice Hall Science series, which comprises nineteen volumes that are sold for use in middle schools. The original versions of all nineteen were dated in 1993 (though they actually were issued in 1992). Here are reviews of the 1993 versions of six of the Prentice Hall Science books, a review of the 1994 versions of the same six books, and a review of the 1997 version of another book in the series.
	Let them eat fake -- Schoolbooks are important instruments for transferring ignorance and gullibility from one generation to the next, because schoolbook-writers often affirm and promote vulgar superstitions. Here is an article which accompanied a review of Prentice Hall's high-school textbook World Cultures: A Global Mosaic (1993). It describes how Prentice Hall's writers endorsed the story of the Virgin of Guadalupe, a religious folktale that is popular in Mexico and in the southwestern United States. The writers presented this legend as if it were an account of history, and they refused to tell that an artifact linked with the legend had been shown to be bogus. [from The Textbook Letter, March-April 1994 (Volume 5, Number 1)]
	"Keep Them Dumb, Keep Them Pregnant" -- Here is a four-part examination of Teen-Aid, a religious outfit that promotes phony "sex education" materials to public schools. These materials include the books Sexuality, Commitment & Family (which Teen-Aid offers as a high-school text) and Me, My World, My Future (which Teen-Aid sells for use in junior high schools). Both books are actually propaganda tracts: Combining fundamentalist preaching with pseudoscientific claptrap, they seek to deceive students and to promote various superstitions and sociopolitical doctrines espoused by the Religious Right. In advertising its fake "educational" items, Teen-Aid uses misleading claims and plain lies.
	A new edition of a good general-biology book -- Here's a review of the second edition of Biology: Concepts and Applications, a compact, competent textbook issued by Wadsworth Publishing. [from The Textbook Letter, January-February 1994 (Volume 4, Number 6)]
	Different assessments of a high-school physics textbook -- Our first reviewer declares that Addison-Wesley's Conceptual Physics is "by far the best" of all the high-school physics texts that he has seen. Our second reviewer says that Conceptual Physics contains too many errors and misleading presentations. [from The Textbook Letter, November-December 1993 (Volume 4, Number 5)]
	All in all, a good book about chemical science and technology -- The high-school book ChemCom: Chemistry in the Community doesn't pretend to be, and can't be substituted for, a conventional chemistry text. Aimed at bright students who plan to attend college but don't plan to become scientists, this cogently conceived, well written book presents some basic chemical concepts and relates them to everyday occurrences, to contemporary technology, and to major societal issues. The book's major fault is its pro-industry stance: When the writers deal with the chemical-process industries, they offer cheer-leading and boosterism while they avoid topics that point to malfeasance and controversy. [from The Textbook Letter, September-October 1993 (Volume 4, Number 4)]
	Feeding a superstition -- In one of their few lapses of good judgment, the writers of the high-school book ChemCom: Chemistry in the Community have decided to promote the common superstition that there is enough food for all the humans on Earth. [from The Textbook Letter, September-October 1993 (Volume 4, Number 4)]
	Obvious questions, interesting answers -- Sleepy textbook-writers recite the same tired story again and again, in one history text after another: Columbus discovers the New World; Europeans surge across the sea and bring their diseases with them; the Europeans' diseases then cause massive mortality in Amerindian populations, and the Europeans take over. Sleepy textbook-writers never notice the obvious questions that occur to anyone who is awake: Didn't the Indians pass any diseases to the Europeans? If Europeans carried Old World pathogens that could devastate populations of Indians, didn't the Indians carry New World pathogens that could devastate populations of Europeans? If not, why not? The answers will be interesting to all teachers who take history seriously and who respect their students' intelligence. [from The Textbook Letter, September-October 1993 (Volume 4, Number 4)]
	Nonsense by the numbers -- When they pretend to describe how slavery flourished in the New World, the writers of Prentice Hall's World Cultures use all of the major distortions, misrepresentations and fictions that are commonly printed in schoolbooks. But these Prentice Hall writers also try something new: They further mislead the student by dispensing some numerical flapdoodle. [from The Textbook Letter, September-October 1993 (Volume 4, Number 4)]
	Glencoe's thieves -- Many schoolbook-writers are crooks who steal material and try to pass it off as their own work. They steal text or illustrations from schoolbooks written by other people, or from respectable books or journals, or even from documents issued by state education agencies. Here is an account of some clumsy thievery performed by crooks who were working for the Glencoe Division of the Macmillan/McGraw-Hill School Publishing Company. [from The Textbook Letter, July-August 1993 (Volume 4, Number 3)]
	A good textbook of general biology -- No textbook is perfect, but some textbooks are certainly good. Consider, for example, Wadsworth Publishing's Biology: Concepts and Applications. Though it has its defects (including the mishandling of some scientific terms), this book is so good, overall, that one of our reviewers recommends it for use in high-school biology courses at all levels -- honors biology, advanced-placement biology, and even 10th-grade introductory biology. [from The Textbook Letter, July-August 1993 (Volume 4, Number 3)]
	No reply -- A middle-school "science" textbook dispenses pseudoscientific drivel, and the book's alleged "author" refuses to answer written inquiries about it. [from The Textbook Letter, May-June 1993 (Volume 4, Number 2)]
	Do teachers fall for such stuff? -- Some schoolbook-writers evidently assume that teachers are stupid enough to believe almost anything. Just look at how some Prentice Hall writers have purported to "explain" a famous scene in a film. [from The Textbook Letter, May-June 1993 (Volume 4, Number 2)]
	Exxon peddles corporate propaganda to science teachers -- In March of 1989, the Exxon Corporation's tanker Exxon Valdez broke open and spilled some 11 million gallons of petroleum into Prince William Sound, creating one of North America's worst environmental catastrophes. Now Exxon has made a video about the Exxon Valdez spill and has offered the video to teachers, for use in science classrooms. The video employs distortion, evasion and misdirection to misrepresent the spill's impacts. [from The Textbook Letter, January-February 1993 (Volume 3, Number 6)]
	Prentice Hall's weak links -- In the realm of public education, fads constitute the staff of life. "Integration," or "linking," is an ed-fad which calls for making connections between different subjects (e.g., between economics and music, or between physics and literature), even if the connections are tenuous or phony. Prentice Hall's hacks have attempted to exploit the integration fad by inventing links between physics and some famous stories written by Jack London and by Mark Twain. The results are ridiculous. [from The Textbook Letter, January-February 1993 (Volume 3, Number 6)]
	IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH -- Among the many fads that feckless educators have embraced in recent years, none is more pernicious than the one that calls for promoting anti-intellectualism, for endorsing ignorance, and for teaching students to scorn the very idea of learning. Sleazy publishers exploit this fad by producing schoolbooks in which students are urged to form opinions without knowing anything, to bray about complicated issues that lie far beyond their grasp, and to substitute sham for knowledge and reason. Here are two reviews of such a book -- Merrill Life Science, published by Glencoe. It is hard to read Merrill Life Science without recalling 1984 and the Party's slogan IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. [from The Textbook Letter, January-February 1993 (Volume 3, Number 6)]
	Prentice Hall disseminates racial rubbish -- Racism and racial pandering are rampant in today's schoolbooks. This article, which ran as a sidebar to a review of Prentice Hall's Motion, Forces, and Energy, analyzes some nonsense that Prentice Hall's race-hustlers have inserted into the teacher's edition of that book. [from The Textbook Letter, November-December 1992 (Volume 3, Number 5)]
	Race-myths from the extreme left -- Many of today's schoolbooks promote the extreme left's brand of racism. Textbook-writers disseminate race-myths and racial stereotypes that leftists favor, and the writers conceal any information that contravenes the leftists' racial ideology. Here is an article that shows how these practices have influenced the treatment of slavery -- and especially the treatment of the Atlantic slave trade -- in some world-history books. [from The Textbook Letter, November-December 1992 (Volume 3, Number 5)]
	Mocking truth and tricking students -- The writers of a middle-school book in life science have devoted a whole page to a bizarre exercise in sustained falsity. The writers present a bogus "Hippocratic Oath," and they strive to make the student believe that this "Oath" was composed in ancient times. In doing so, they falsely ascribe modern values and formulas to people who lived thousands of years ago, and they hide the values, beliefs and customs that those ancient people actually embraced. [from The Textbook Letter, November-December 1992 (Volume 3, Number 5)]
	What's in a name? -- The Merrill Publishing Company's middle-school book Focus on Earth Science was so bad that a reviewer wondered how it had got into print. Here is what the reviewer learned when he talked with one of the "authors" and two of the "content consultants" whose names were shown on the book's title page. [from The Textbook Letter, September-October 1992 (Volume 3, Number 4)]
	Where have all the fishes gone? -- "The tragedy of the commons" explains why people knowingly and systematically destroy fisheries and other renewable resources, instead of allowing them to persist, to regenerate themselves, and to provide economic benefits in future times. This powerful explanatory principle elucidates important historical trends, and it is crucial to any understanding of what we humans are doing to our planet right now, but it is routinely excluded from schoolbooks. [from The Textbook Letter, September-October 1992 (Volume 3, Number 4)]
	Caterpillar, Inc., peddles corporate propaganda to science teachers -- Caterpillar produces heavy equipment for use in earth-moving, road-building and logging. Caterpillar's propaganda video, which has been distributed widely to schools, uses distortion and obscurity to misrepresent scientific, economic and civic issues pertaining to the logging of our national forests. [from The Textbook Letter, September-October 1992 (Volume 3, Number 4)]
	Leave it to Bambi -- Kendall/Hunt's eccentric book Middle School Life Science, issued in 1991, is built around anthropocentricity and anthropomorphism. Those pretensions do not have any scientific basis, and they do not have any place in a science classroom. Neither does Middle School Life Science. [from The Textbook Letter, September-October 1992 (Volume 3, Number 4)]
	A double dose of fantasy -- The writers of junky science books like to rhapsodize about nature's "balance," but they never disclose what it is or how it can be recognized. In truth, their notion of a "balance" is a mystical fiction. (It is derived not from science but from 19th-century religion, and it collapses as soon as we ask a few questions.) Here is an article -- originally published as a sidebar to a review of Kendall/Hunt's Middle School Life Science -- which tells of some schoolbook-writers who dispensed mystical claims about nature's "balance" and augmented them with a quaint exhibition of anthropomorphism. Anthropomorphism, epitomized in Bambi, is the practice of ascribing human properties, faculties and emotions to non-human organisms. [from The Textbook Letter, September-October 1992 (Volume 3, Number 4)]
	How cute! How nice! (How dumb!) -- The introduction of the house sparrow into North America spawned an ecological disaster of classic dimensions, but students won't learn anything about this when they read the soft, cute, dumbed-down account given in Kendall/Hunt's Middle School Life Science (1991). Here is a short article -- originally published as a sidebar to a review of Middle School Life Science -- which tells how the writers of that book have turned the notorious history of the house sparrow into inane happy-talk. [from The Textbook Letter, September-October 1992 (Volume 3, Number 4)]
	A good textbook of marine biology -- All in all, An Introduction to the Biology of Marine Life is a commendable text. The taxonomic-overview chapter is poor, but the bulk of the book -- especially the material dealing with marine ecology and the effects of human activities on marine ecosystems -- is admirable. In a high-school setting, An Introduction to the Biology of Marine Life can serve as the textbook for an honors course or an advanced-placement course. [from The Textbook Letter, September-October 1992 (Volume 3, Number 4)]
	A failed attempt to tell about organic evolution -- Hawkhill's shoddy video Evolution presents an outdated, jumbled view of organic evolution, repeatedly conflating science with supernaturalism and half-baked sociology. Hawkhill offers "evolution" as conceived by journalists, not by scientists. [from The Textbook Letter, July-August 1992 (Volume 3, Number 3)]
	Trouble in Texas -- Once in a great while, the corruption that pervades the schoolbook business is displayed so vividly that it draws the attention of the national media. That is what happened in 1991, when the Texas State Board of Education staged an adoption of American-history books. [from The Textbook Letter, May-June 1992 (Volume 3, Number 2)]
	The best high-school physics book -- Here is a review of the 1991 version of PSSC Physics, the best high-school physics textbook that we have seen. [from The Textbook Letter, May-June 1992 (Volume 3, Number 2)]
	Prentice Hall promotes a silly story as fact -- In Prentice Hall Earth Science (a middle-school text), students learn that nobody was sure about the shape of our planet until Christopher Columbus's voyage in 1492 gave "final proof" that Earth "was indeed round." The students are learning rubbish. [from The Textbook Letter, January-February 1992 (Volume 2, Number 6)]
	It doesn't work -- Though Kendall/Hunt's Global Science displays a number of good features, it fails as a schoolbook. One reason for its failure is its lack of an identifiable audience. Some parts of Global Science are suitable only for high-school seniors who have a real command of mathematics, but other parts seem to have been written for elementary-school students. [from The Textbook Letter, January-February 1992 (Volume 2, Number 6)]
	A "science" book produced by buffoons -- Here are two reviews of Silver Burdett & Ginn Life Science. Our first reviewer finds that "This book is trash." The second reviewer says that Silver Burdett & Ginn Life Science is "a book of credulity and buffoonery," and he explains why the buffoons have had to conceal the fact that fishes can reproduce. [from The Textbook Letter, November-December 1991 (Volume 2, Number 5)]
	Wow! Look at all those colors! -- Merrill's high-school book Biology: The Dynamics of Life reminds us of some depressing facts: Because so many of the people who pretend to teach biology in our high schools are ignorant dolts, a publisher can produce a "biology" textbook without bothering to hire any writers or editors who know about biology. If the book is loaded with glitz, with colorful pictures, and with stupid activities that ignoramuses will mistake for science, the publisher can realistically hope that the book will be a commercial success. [from The Textbook Letter, November-December 1991 (Volume 2, Number 5)]
	That old-time religion -- The writers of a Merrill "biology" book display their devotion to natural theology, a religious fancy that was popular in Britain during the 19th century. [from The Textbook Letter, November-December 1991 (Volume 2, Number 5)]
	There's no Injuns like fake Injuns -- It's faddish nowadays for textbook-company hacks to lard their books with phony stories that glorify primitive peoples, especially Amerindians. Here is one of the dumbest Injun stories that we have seen. [from The Textbook Letter, July-August 1991 (Volume 2, Number 3)]
	Ignorance, ignorance, burning bright -- In a middle-school textbook published by D.C. Heath and Company, imaginary "science" is combined with guesswork "history" to produce an incandescent demonstration of ignorance and incompetence. [from The Textbook Letter, May-June 1991 (Volume 2, Number 2)]
	He ain't talkin' -- The high-school text Addison-Wesley Health and Safety was the subject of two reviews in The Textbook Letter. Both reviewers reported that the book was oblivious to the lives and needs of teenagers in the real world, and both reviewers described passages in which the book's biomedical "information" was obsolete, distorted or entirely wrong -- yet the book's "authors," listed on the title page, included a man who allegedly was both a physician and a professor of medicine. We wrote to him and inquired whether he ever had seen the book in question. [from The Textbook Letter, March-April 1991 (Volume 2, Number 1)]
	"Candid Statements and Unpleasant Truths" -- Where do textbooks come from? More specifically, where do biology textbooks come from? And why are they the way they are? Some candid answers to those questions appear in Fulfilling the Promise: Biology Education in the Nation's Schools, a report prepared by the National Research Council and published by the National Academy Press (Washington, DC). [from The Textbook Letter, January-February 1991 (Volume 1, Number 6)]
	A plan to overhaul science education and science texts in California -- California is one of 22 states in which state agencies control the evaluation, selection and adoption of the textbooks that will be used in public schools. California adoptions revolve around documents called frameworks, which are issued by the California State Board of Education. There is a framework for mathematics, a framework for health education, a framework for history and social studies, a framework for science, and so on, each prescribing the topics that young people should study as they progress from kindergarten through grade 12. The framework for a given subject is intended to guide school-district officials as they formulate curricula, to guide publishers as they create the textbooks that they will submit for adoption, and to guide state functionaries as they evaluate the textbooks that the publishers produce. In November 1989 the State Board approved a new science framework that sought to reshape science instruction in California schools and to ensure that the sciences would be presented to California students as intellectual disciplines -- not as mere catalogues of facts and terms. The development of the new framework had gained national attention, and had engendered articles in publications such as The New York Times and the Washington Post, because fundamentalists had opposed the framework-writers' insistence on a valid treatment of biology and of biology's central, unifying principle, the theory of organic evolution. Those articles had missed much, however, because the framework's notable features went far beyond its references to evolution. Here is a two-part report on the framework's history, content and implications. [from The Textbook Letter, November-December 1990 (Volume 1, Number 5) and January-February 1991 (Volume 1, Number 6)]
	Addison-Wesley's fraudulent life-science book -- During the 1970s and the 1980s, most of the high-school biology texts and middle-school life-science texts produced in this country peddled a brainless, fraudulent kind of "biology" based on fundamentalist religious doctrines. Corrupt publishers such as Addison-Wesley or D.C. Heath or the Macmillan Publishing Company issued books which strictly hid the fact that modern biology is a coherent science unified by the central concept of organic evolution -- and if the history of life on Earth was mentioned at all, it was cloaked in double-talk and equivocation and falsehood. This deliberate deceiving of students, for the purpose of promoting primitive religion, was richly demonstrated in a life-science text that Addison-Wesley published in 1989. [from The Textbook Letter, November-December 1990 (Volume 1, Number 5)]
	Bonnie and Mike -- The Addison-Wesley Publishing Company produced a fraudulent life-science textbook that sought to promote sectarian religious claims, and the two "authors" shown on the book's title page were Bonnie B. Barr (of the State University of New York at Cortland) and Michael B. Leyden (of Eastern Illinois University). Were Bonnie and Mike really the writers who had created Addison-Wesley's religious tract? [from The Textbook Letter, November-December 1990 (Volume 1, Number 5)]
	Myths, malarkey and misinformation -- The high-school book Prentice-Hall Biology is a compendium of myths, malarkey and traditional misinformation, and it has little to do with real biology. The publisher's catalogue says that this book's content is "organized around a phylogenetic approach," but the writers are virtually oblivious to phylogenetic relationships, and they evidently don't know that biologists use phylogenetic relationships in classifying organisms. [from The Textbook Letter, September-October 1990 (Volume 1, Number 4)]

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