The Grim World of Grant Writing

Reviews the book, Writing the NIH Grant Proposal: A Step-By-Step Guide by William Gerin (see record 2006-05795-000). This book is part of a cohort of help-you-get-a-grant books, and it appears during a grim time for grant seekers. Thin federal budgets have forced researchers to tighten their belts; a few researchers studying basic processes have had to go without pants entirely. It is bad form for a book reviewer to say that a book is a good, well-written book, but Writing the NIH Grant Proposal is a good, well-written book--it is practical and unpretentious. To provide advice, Gerin adopts the roles of cartographer and translator. This book's primary purpose is providing a map for developing, writing, submitting, and managing a National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant. This book's secondary purpose is to translate the NIH guidelines into normal English. The reviewer suspects that many readers will come away from Writing the NIH Grant Proposal feeling ambivalent about grant writing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved)