Introduction

The Book Now

I have posted 21 of the 23 chapters shown in the Chapter Outline. These 21 chapters are formatted in pdf and include hand-drawn figures merged with the text. Each chapter begins with a Detailed Table of Contents with page numbers. I have compiled all of these Detailed Tables of Contents in a single pdf document - Detailed Tables of Contents .

The Book History

If you found your way to this page using the links on the introductory web page, you already know some of the history of my writing endeavor. I give more details in the following link - History of the Book .

The Acknowledgements

I owe a lot of people great thanks for their encouragement with this writing and more importantly for their positive contributions to both my personal and academic lives. I have listed some of them here - Acknowledgements .

I want to particularly remember Neil Campbell, a botanist and incredibly successful author of biology textbooks, who was my mentor and friend at UCR. Tragically, he suffered a sudden fatal coronary event on October 21, 2004 at the age of 58. You can read about him here - Neil Campbell .

The Author

I was born in Chicago, moved with my parents to Los Angeles at the age of 3, attended Dacotah St. Elementary School, and Gage Junior High School, moved to Whittier, CA, when I was 13, and graduated from Whittier High School in 1955. I did my undergraduate studies at UCLA, earned my Ph.D. at Caltech, was a post-doc at Columbia, and then joined the chemistry faculty at the University of California, Riverside. You can see my professional biography here - Robert Neuman .