Please make sure you adhere to the policies on academic honesty.
Also, please note that this problem does NOT involve Big-Oh notation, rather it involves the raw growth rates, similar to those given in Table 3.2. The authors explain on page 103 that when they write the expression log n, they mean by default log2 n, the binary logarithm. This is the standard assumption throughout computer science for several reasons, most notably that all numbers are represented internally in binary (as opposed to decimal).
(Note: the ``penultimate'' node is defined as the second-to-last node of the list).