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Rating: 
Summary: If I wanted to be preached at, I'd read a religious text
Review: Being a mathematician taking an anthropology course is strange in its own right, but every time I was forced to read Haviland's text I felt more and more like I was in church and not reading a college textbook. In my field, we can either prove or disprove things, and people's opinions are rarely an issue. However, in the so-called social "sciences" this is not the case, and Haviland's book only compounds this problem. This book is absolutely painful to read, since everything is about what Haviland believes to be the "right" theory. Little evidence supporting other theories, no matter how widely-accepted, is presented. Instead, he fills page after page tearing apart other peoples' theories (and particularly enjoys to point out how older theories were flawed, even when it doesn't fit within the flow of the chapter). He often repeats himself to the point of being repetitively redundant. For example, in the early chapters on human origins, he beats to death the idea that differences between humans and other primates are "differences of degree, not kind". One would hope that a typical college freshman could understand this concept after the first ten times they're hit with it, but apparently Haviland disagrees. The book, like all introductory college texts, is full of meaningless photographs and figures. Of particular interest are the bell curve-like figures supposedly showing distributions of characteristics in human ancestors. As a mathematician, I still can't make any sense out of these figures, which don't have any meaningful scale attached and have completely unenlightening captions. Haviland's examples are also quite weak and do little to shore up his arguments. He has a few pet examples (e.g., intersexuals and transexuals in Native American culture) that come up chapter after chapter after chapter without doing one thing to strengthen his arguments. In fact, it seems that most of his examples only exist to further his own political agenda, which I hope he is not trying to hide, for if he is, he has failed miserably. In fact, a reviewer of an earlier edition of this text claimed that reading Haviland's book made her want to go out and change the world. Last time I checked, the point of an introductory anthropology course is to teach students about human culture at all times and in all places (to steal another favorite phrase of these so-called "scientists") and not to point out injustices throughout the history of the world. Another serious problem with this text is that, despite being a tenth edition, it exhibits the total lack of editing that I would expect in a first edition. There are far too many sentences that I read, reread, and then puzzled over how it was supposed to be grammatically correct. Additionally, he "defined" at least one adjective (polytypic) by giving a definition for a noun.If you're an instructor, please, please, please stay away from this text. If you're a student, you might want to consider changing sections to one with a different textbook unless your instructor is known for giving good notes, as this text will not hlep you learn and will only make you frustrated.
Rating: 
Summary: Insightful and not at all preaching.
Review: I couldn't disagree more with the previous reviewer and felt the need to add my review to explain the absurdity of theirs. This book is very insighful, interesting, and makes perfect sense. Quite a bit of the writers opinions are included, but that is the case with most books on the social sciences. It is almost an unavoidable reality that the author will flavor the text with their own personal experience. The previous reviewer (a mathematician) seems more intent on discrediting Anthropology as a science than presenting the real facts. If one is truly interested in gleaning a generalized view of all the anthropological disciplines from one text, this book comes highly recommended.
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