Science Nature Books

This is a great book for a more complex look at human anatomy. It covers the basic anatomy and goes to a deeper level on some systems.

A good start in my anatomy revision but I will now be looking for something better still, if such a thing is available.

Would certainly be of benefit to high school and new nursing students.

This children's easy learning technique applied to adults is a great way of learning the anatomy, even if you are in the middle of med school.
And coloring is so much fun. A must for children and adults.

This is a fine workbook to help learn human anatomy. Just enough text to explain everything and then pictures to color to re-enforce the lesson. My middle schoolers both learned the basics with this book.

Product was great.. shipped in time... Very informative book, would highly recommend it for people who wish to learn anatomy who are not officially in the medical field- perhaps even for those people going into the medical field- it does have a unique way of teaching "where all the parts are".

I was looking for more information on anatomy and thought this would be helpful. For the depth that I needed it was not, however I WOULD recommend this book for a high school anatomy course.

I purchased this for a friend and they were delighted to receive it and as far as i know they are enjoying the book.

Very informative. Going to have to go out this summer and put it to the test.

This is an awesome book, but there was obviously a printing error in the copy I bought. An entire chunk of pages has been repeated and a whole 'nother chunk is missing.

My only other complaint is that it'd be nice if these field guides had color photos all the way through. I know that makes the book more expensive but it also makes it more *useful*. Black-and-white drawings only convey so much.

Item as described and received in a timely manner... an excellent buying experience!

Although this book is well written and organized, I have one minor complaint...

If you are going to depend on a book to decide whether or not you can eat something without poisoning yourself, the pictures next to the plant descriptions ought to be in color rather than black and white sketches.

That's not entirely fair, but...this is a book of essays, not a natural history or gardening book. It is about Pollan's perceptions of nature and landscape, through the gateway of his garden. He does only enough research to flesh out his musings with historical fact and literary reference - and he is very selective. He leans heavily on Thoreau, and neglects wider scholarship. His essays bog down in pedantic and turgid language (he abuses at least one 5-syllable word per essay). The writing is much like Bill Bryson's, about whom, I'm also kinda lukewarm. I didn't love it, although there are good bits - the story of his first rose plantings was interesting, and inspired me to drop a few snobby old roses in the sod.

Michael Pollan's writing is full of metaphors. This book about nature as a human construct was enjoyable to read. I found some parts frustrating because I like the romantic idea of nature even if it is just a human construct. But overall I would recommend this book for a quick read.

I loved this book. It is written in the spirit of earth that author obviously is in love with. The book is divided into four seasons: spring summer,fall and winter. Each of the seasons has it's own unique characteristic that follows ancient tradition of preparing soil, sowing,cultivating, weeding, harvesting and winter nothingness.
However if reader looks for practical advises, he or she will not find it here. It is a wonderfull read for all the nature lovers.

I picked up this book when I didn't have my own dirt to get my hands into, and I was hoping to garden vicariously through Pollan's essays.

There are a lot of lessons to be found. For instance, the chapter on roses explains how human intervention and selective breeding brought about a huge difference between the technicolor tear-dropped buds we see for sale at the grocery store and the rounder and simpler flowers that Shakespeare and his contemporaries wrote about.

Throughout the book Pollan makes the case for uniting culture and nature in the garden rather than pitting them against each other as Thoreau (the naturist) did in his writings or suburban landscaping (very culture-centered) implies today. It is an interesting argument worth considering, but by the fourth part when I found it repeated for the umpteenth time without anything new to add I quit reading the book.

Pollans description of what is a green thumb and the sysiphean art of mowing reminded me how therapeutic gardening can be and why it cures depression. Thank you Michael for making me look at my roses in a totally different way. You will love this book if you tend to think in pictures and love the art and hard work of gardening.

Worldwatch Institute's annual State of the World books are always worth reading. I've read every single one since they first came out in 1984. This 2008 book gives insights into how our world economy needs to change in order to prepare for a viable future. People should be aware, however, that the founder of Worldwatch Institute, Lester Brown, quit the organization a few years ago and set up a new institute, the Earth Policy Institute. His new book Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, Third Edition has just come out. It is one of the most important books in recent years. Worldwatch also publishes Vital Signs 2007-2008: The Trends that Are Shaping Our Future (Vital Signs) Vital Signs is an annual set of statistics books in simple readable charts. I would recommend this too. Together, these three books could give a person some solid information about the environmental state of our planet and what needs to be done to create a viable future. On my profile I have a number of lists of some other very good books on the environment and future watch studies.

This 25th Anniversary Edition of State of the World focuses on problems and solutions for progress toward a sustainable society. It is a periodical and almanac worth owning. The writing promotes an easy read for sustained digestion of its resources.

Fourteen Chapters by WorldWatch staffers, independent analysts, academics, and intellectual professionals arranged in 2-column newspaper format fill 281 pages, with dozens of boxes, tables, and figures plus endnotes. Each chapter contributes to other chapters and to the understanding of sustainable development as a path, not a panacea. Instead of competing with other writings, the State of the World series complements the contemplations of other writers on interdisciplinary economic, social, and environmental topics.

Every chapter is true to its title. There are verbs of solution - seeding, rethinking, building, improving, engaging, mobilizing, investing, banking. There are nouns of challenge - sustainable economy, the commons, sustainable world, sustainable lifestyles, and sustainability. There are names of things to consider - water, carbon, meat, seafood, biodiversity, global diet, human energy, trade governance, new approaches, and new bottom line.

Sustainability needs all the institutional ingenuity society can muster and harness to evolve into a broader, better focus for the good of humanity.

"2008 State of the World, Innovations for a Sustainable Economy" will stay fresh well beyond next year's edition by the WorldWatch Institute.

This a superb edited work that melds chapters (with notes at the end) from world-class authors on a broad range of topics.

I kept this at five stars until the end and then I could not stand it anymore. There are at least five reasons to reduce it to four. Here are the first two.

1. As someone who grew up with Banks & Textor and have created four analytic models in my lifetime, I am growing increasing impatient with the continued fragmentation of research and writing. There is a model available: ten threats (from the UN High Level Threat Panel), twelve policies, eight challengers. We need to start fusing, analyzing, visualizing and discussing all ten threats in relation to all ten policies. I am no longer content to read about water in one chapter, meat in another, and so on. Stop putzing around and create the EarthGame with all information, all languages, all the time--geospatially grounded of course--and let's get on with the task of identifying with precision the global range of gifts table down to the household level, from $1 to $100 million.

2. I am increasingly irritated by the little cabals that strive to cite only themselves, and furthermore, have their own language to distinguish them. "Get the price right" instead of "true cost"? Get over it. Enough already. I am also increasingly of the view that the Notes must be indexed. The notes are good, but when the lead chapter talks about "Adjust Economic Scale" and fails to cite Small Is Beautiful, 25th Anniversary Edition: Economics As If People Mattered: 25 Years Later . . . With Commentaries or Human Scale I growl.

Together with Plan 3.0 and Vital Signs, both linked by another reviewer, this book represents a fine stand-alone study set if you want to limit yourself to the WorldWatch oracles and dismiss all others.

Here is what grabbed me about this book:

+ Opens with utterly sensational four pages of "timeline" for 2007 with little blocks that are priceless. I really like this.

+ Chapter 1 does a fine job of listing:

- Four flawed economic assumptions:

- 1. Independence of economic activity from "infinite" nature

- 2. Growth should be the primary economic objective

- 3. Markets are always superior to governments at allocating resources

- 4. Humans are economic maximizers and place no value on community

This may sound simple but I admire it.

- The seven big ideas for economic reform:

- 1. Adjust economic scale

- 2. Shift from growth to development

- 3. Make prices tell the ecological truth [note: for World Index of Social and Environmental Responsibility--WISER--to not be in index irritates me so much I almost take the fifth star again).

- 4. Account for nature's contributions [I am infuriated by a second hand citation. I am not familiar with more than a couple of books, but to not mention Ecological Economics: Principles And Applications or The Future of Life moves this book, as very good as it is--toward Classic Comics book shallowness.

- 5. Apply the precautionary principle. [Cites a San Francisco Chronicle opinion piece, what happened to the real books on this subject, such as Protecting Public Health and the Environment: Implementing The Precautionary Principle

- 6. Revitalize commons management

- 7. Value women [here I am irritated by the isolation of these authors and their citations from a broader understanding of why we should value women: because it is a proven fact that there is no better investment, dollar for development dollar, than a dollar spend educating women. That ripples through society and impacts on the men big time.]

The second chapter has a prices Figure showing that computer diffusion is growing arithmetically while cell phone diffusion is growing logrithmically plus. My comment: Nokia is slowing beginning to grasp what I told their Chairman a year ago: give the cell phones to the poor free, sell the call, not the phone (and my other idea, educate the poor one cell call at a time, starting with call centers in India and China, and then monetize the transactions. Having six farmers call in asking about the same animal disease is PRICELESS! How governments cannot understand this simple logic is beyond my comprehension.

Across the book the tables and figures are powerful but they are not integrated into a total model (e.g. you should not grow grain with water you cannot afford to create fuel instead of feeding a family when you could run 35 million cars a year on Cuban sugar cane sap).

I was pleasantly surprised to see meat and seafood in its own chapter, but as an avid admirer of everything by Francis Moore Lappe
, see for example Diet for a Small Planet and her most recentDemocracy's Edge: Choosing to Save Our Country by Bringing Democracy to Life.

Toward the end are two very important chapters, one on the financial implications of sustainability (i.e. what alternative vehicles can be used to push back on predatory lending, absentee ownership, and wasteful food practices) and on harnessing human energy (e.g. to plant trees).

I put the book down with irritation--Open Money, Collective Intelligence, even the word Citizen are not in this book--and I again harken to the need for an EarthGame in which all knowledge, all budgets, all citizens, can come together to game, understand, dialog, and decide.

I've come to the conclusion that the fragmentation of the "academy" is now just as dangerous as the desperate failure of our political system in America (see Running On Empty: How The Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It for the simple reason that if the academy would get its act together and "make sense" to the public, the public will take care of the political fix.

We knew most of this stuff in the 1970's, 1980's, and 1990's--at the academic level--but the politicians were able to ignore us because a) the people were unwitting and b) low gas prices and high Exxon bribes were great for the smokey room crowd. That's over. It's time for the academy to start producing explicit recommendations and budgets, at the zip code level, that we can use to beat politicians into submission or out of office.

Please have it online by 4 July 2008, and thank you for all the wonderful work up to this point. Time to bring this program home.

Two more links that are action oriented:
How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, Updated Edition
Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace

have as yet not read the book but will within the next few weeks as I travel abroad and have some quality time while traveling. Thank you for asking, Jan

This book is an exellent read that provides insightful commentary on the work of several leading scientists and communities. Our understanding of current industralized communities is explored, and the effects on nature are considered. Alternative solutions in various fields are investigated that allow people from all walks of life to connect with the messages in the book. The topics are structured in a easy to read and logical fashion that leads you through the discussion of redesigning our solutions for food, energy, materials, computing, bio-diversity, recycling, industry and co-habitation with nature in educative and highly engaging tone.

I love Janine's prose as it engenders a rich connection with nature, and the hope that we can change our systems towards a sustainable future. This book is an essential read for each one of us, and we can all learn to appreciate the true value of bio-diversity, and of conserving as much of it as we can, in its truest, unmaligned form.

I've been able to consider how I lead my life and the materials I am dependent upon. I hope to change my habits to better conserve the precious gifts that Nature has provided. I've come to appreciate the roots of our immense knowledge and lessons continually being learnt from Nature, and hope that we can continue to utilise this to create a happier future for generations to come.

I'm still reading through, but I was expecting less theory and more practical features/examples. I already had the general background and needed a methodology to put into practice. So far I haven't found it.

I am an engineer by training and an amateur naturalist by vocation so this book proved to be a reflection on many of my thoughts and then some. I am convinced that engineers can learn a lot from biology and how design problems have been solved elegantly by evolution and natural selection. Watching nature can return a sense of wonder to the arrogant worldview of the technologist and I think Biomimicry addresses this beautifully.
However, at times I find the author a bit too enthusiastic about technology. This is understandable as she is a self-confessed technophyle.

I had no need for it in my class so I did not use it.

I expected a book that would move me emotionally as well as intellectually, like Abby's Desert Solitude. That's not what this book is all about. It is well written, yes, but it only shoots for the intellect, not the heart, or at least it did for me. It is still an important read.

A classic. As we rush into brave new environmental worlds where angels fear to tread, and as our kids grow up plugged in rather than playing in the dirt, this should be required reading in all schools (and required for the parents, too). Besides presenting a compelling and important argument, it's also a very good book.

The book was in great condition, at a great price! I got it within just a few days. I would def. buy from this person again.

The earlier reviewer is wrong.The Ballantine edition is not censored.I have a Ballantine edition and there are at least three uses of the word "evolution" and the name Darwin is used at least twice.So don't let the paranoid pronouncements of an evolution worshiper stop you from enjoying this great book.All who love the outdoors and the natural world should read this classic work.

I re-read Leopold's Sand County Almanac every couple of years or so. It's not just a beautifully poetic celebration of the land. Its defense of a new sense of moral responsibility to the environment, spelled out in the book's "The Land Ethic," is a bracing tonic against the modern temptation to take the biosphere for granted. In these days of global warming, fossil fuel depletion, and escalating degradation of the land, water, and atmosphere, Leopold's 60-year-old plea for a new environmental ethic is both prophetic and urgently immediate.

In "The Land Ethic," Leopold argues for a new understanding of the moral community. Earlier ethical models focused on interpersonal and social relationships between humans. But given the interconnectedness of all members of the biosphere, we need to extend the moral community to include earth, sky, water, and all species--the biota. At least since the dawn of the modern age, human have tended to prize the biota only in terms of what we could get out of it. It had a purely economic, utilitarian value. But this way of thinking has resulted in environmental (not to mention economic and political) crisis.

What we must do now, argues Leopold, is to recognize our "vital" relationship to the biota, acknowledging that the well-being of our species is intimately connected to the well-being of the whole. This calls for a new standard of valuation that runs counter to the older, economic model. "Quit thinking about decent land-use as solely an economic problem," writes Leopold. "Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient." And if we do that, he concludes, we'll adopt the following ethical principle: "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise" (p. 262). And part of what this means is that humans should strive to leave relatively light footprints on the earth, because the lighter our impact, the more likely the biota can successfully readjust to maintain integrity, stability, and beauty.

Good, important advice.

There is nothing I can say that would do any justice as to how great this book is. It was everything you could possibly hope for in an ethnographic text. You learn a lot about a culture very different from ours and it is truly just fascinating!

What do people make of places? Basso's opening sentence is a good example of what the Apache call `letting one's mind have room'. As we read through the chapters of the book Basso continues to add layers to the meaning of this opening question. It allows us to reflect on various uses of the word `make'. We make sense of places by interpreting them. We make places intelligible by foregrounding them. We make use of places; as sign posts or land-marks through the use of descriptive naming. We make places or constitute them as sites or repositories of learning; we invest them as placeholders for morality tales or homilies. We make places vital; we invest them with agency, we enchant them, animate them, in the spirit of golems; we take a piece of earth and through magic or metaphysics we bring it alive, giving it a mission and a life of its own.

Wisdom sits in places. The Apache are a good example of virtue ethics. This is a theory of ethics, usually based on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, which argues against an ethical universalism and in favor of a particularism. It foregoes the quest for nomothetic foundations and looks instead to the development of certain skills or character traits. Aristotle created a catalogue of areas of behavior or traits with a continuum of possible dispositions. The virtuous behavior was the means between the two extremes of each continuum. Thus the virtue of bravery was somewhere in the range between cowardice and foolhardiness or irrational voluntarism in the face of impossible odds or a meaningless risk.
Aristotle's concept of phronesis finds an interesting parallel in the Apache moral imagination. Phronesis is a meta-virtue; it is the ability to choose the right action for each particular event; the ability to find the virtuous means between vicious poles. It is the essential skill for particularism which is the theory that the right action, the correct moral choice is particular to each unique event. It is opposed to the universalist proposition that there are sets of moral propositions or codes that we can apply in a covering law model. Universalism holds that when two of our moral codes clash we resolve the dilemma by applying a meta-rule, most commonly a deontological (Kantian) or utilitarian proposition.
The Apache's sense of wisdom is a good example of a pragmatic ethics informed by a set of virtues that are learned and continually developed throughout their life's journey. In the first chapter we note how each speaker brings the homily (the moral lesson associated with a place name) forward, making it their own, fleshing it out. One imagines that each speaker and hearer of place names is expected to silently immerse themselves in each homily; making it real by seeing it happen. The act of giving vision to the oral narrative is a process of developing layers upon layers of particular exemplars of the lesson. It is thus internalized and carried forward for the next use. As one gains wisdom one becomes more proficient at seeing when and where to apply these lessons.
This is similar to the thought of the American pragmatist and logician, C. S. Peirce, who proposed a fallibilism about knowledge, truth, and scientific results. He felt that we were always discovering more and that a full statement of any putative universal law was always deferred. Peirce's original pragmatism differed from what James and Dewey later made of it. For Peirce we expanded our sense of a truth through a process of discovering layers upon layers of particular applications and gradually gaining more of an understanding of the wider truth. But his sense of fallibilism posited rich moral concepts such as justice or duty as essentially contested concepts.

We have maps in our heads. There are other interesting parallels with the ancient Greeks besides virtue ethics. There is a significant body of study regarding Plato's thought on the spoken and written word. Plato argued that reality resides in absolute and eternal forms. Thus the impressions available to our senses are imitations that is but a shadow of these eternal truths; they confuse us and should not be trusted. Worse still are the imitations of imitations; thus his polemics against poetry, art, and the written word. It would be interesting to combine this with the study of texts in the 20th century to look at the Apache's preference for maps in the head. Barthes, Derrida and others all expanded our notion of what can serve as texts and it might be interesting to look at Apache use of places through some of those lenses.
In addition there are interesting parallels with the sophists. Although Plato and Socrates succeeded in creating our contemporary disdain for sophism, recent work in the study of Isocrates and others brings a new appreciation of certain tenets of sophism. The sophists exhibited some similarities to the Apache notions of epistemology. They both saw the elders and ancestors as the source of wisdom and warrants for knowledge to be used for current problems. They both argued that the knowledge of the past resided less in universal laws than in practices of the ancestors; actual responses to past dilemmas that are best accessed through interpretation rather than a rote use of the covering law model or a slavish rehearsal of rigid and dogmatic rituals.
They both thought that knowledge (as justified true belief) was discovered and ultimately ratified and warranted by the voice of the majority; the interpretation that found the most general favor. The sophists proposed that vigorous debate in an open forum of citizens is the most epistemologically sound form of inquiry. Their best speakers would take both sides on various propositions of what the ancestors would have done in the current crisis. The goal was to make the best possible argument for all options and let the citizenry decide.
Both the ancient Greeks and the Apache continued to observe religious rituals but it would also be interesting to compare characteristics of their religious cosmology, the role of the gods, and their associations with natural entities and nature in general.

This book was mediocre at best. Although Keith Basso did provide some insight into why the Apache people cherish their land, I felt that Basso kept on saying the exact same thing in every sentence. I had the point of the entire book by the time I was ten pages into it, and it kept on going, therefore making me lose my concentration on what I was reading.

Anthropologists, language students, and Native American culture afficionados will find this book, and any by Keith Basso, written links into a cultural past which struggles to exist today. As the Western Apache tribes become more modern, the information found in this and other Keith Basso writings, become necessities in the preservation of traditional Apache culture; with the exception of the knowledge of a few hundred very traditional Apaches still living in Arizona.

What do people make of places? This is the central question examined by Keith Basso in his ethno-linguistic study of the relationship between language and landscape among the Apaches of Cibecue, on the Fort Apache Reservation in central Arizona. Basso, a professor of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico, has spent over 30 years conducting field work among the Western Apaches. His publications concerning this group include articles on language, patterns of silence in social interaction, witchcraft beliefs, and ceremonial symbolism, among others. The idea for Wisdom Sits in Places stemmed from a study conducted between 1979 and 1984, in which Basso, with the help of a grant from the National Science Foundation and the guidance of the Apaches, conducted a study of Apache places and place-names; how the Apache refer to their land, the stories behind the place-names, and how these place-names are used in daily conversation by Apache men and women. The result is a stunningly informative account of the use of landscape and language in the social interactions of the Western Apaches.
Basso divides his book into four sections: Quoting the Ancestors, Stalking with Stories, Speaking with Names, and Wisdom Sits in Places. Each chapter's focus is to examine how landscape and language serve distinct purposes in Western Apache society. Basso incorporates the oral history of, and discussions with, local Apaches, as well as his formal training as an ethnographer-linguist, to explain the underlying themes of this book.
First, Basso introduces the reader to the idea of place-names and in the Western Apache construction of history. As conceived by the Apaches, the past is a "well-worn `path' or `trail' which was traveled first by the people's founding ancestors and which subsequent generations of Apaches have traveled ever since" (31). The ancestors gave names to places, based on events that occurred there. Regardless of the physical changes in the landscape that occurred over time, the story of what took place, as well as the place-name, was passed down through generations and serves as a connection between the people and their ancestors.
Second, Basso examines how the language and the land are "manipulated by Apaches to promote compliance with standards for acceptable social behavior and the moral values which support them" (41). The historical tales of place-names are without exception morality tales, intended to influence patterns of social action. Their purpose is to serve as warnings, criticisms, and enlightenment for those who are behaving improperly; not in accordance with the Apache way of life. The telling of a historical tale is "intended as a critical and remedial response" to an individual's having committed one or more social offenses. Apaches contend that if the message is taken to heart, a lasting bond will have been created between that individual and the site at which the events in the tale took place. In short, the land, accompanied with its historical tale, "makes the people live right" (61).
Third, through the act of "speaking with names", place-names can be condensed "into compact form their essential moral truths" (101). "Speaking with names" is considered appropriate only under certain circumstances, generally to enable those who engage in it "to acknowledge a regrettable circumstance without explicitly judging it, to exhibit solicitude without openly proclaiming it, and to offer advice without appearing to do so" (91). Evoking images of a particular place and narrative thus replaces a more direct form of advice or criticism, with "a minimum of linguistic means" (103).
Finally, with the guidance of his Apache friend, Dudley Patterson, Basso examines the path of wisdom in Western Apache society. Patterson explains there are two mental conditions, "steadiness of mind", and "resilience of mind", which lead to a third and most desirable condition, smoothness of mind. These three conditions are not innate; therefore, one must work on one's mind in order to gain wisdom. To work on one's mind, "one must observe different places, learn their Apache place-names, and reflect on traditional narratives that underscore the virtues of wisdom" (134). A resilient mind, according to Patterson, does not "give in to panic or fall prey to spasms of anxiety or succumb to spells of crippling worry" (132). A steady mind is "unhampered by feelings of arrogance or pride, anger or vindictiveness, jealously or lust" (133). Steadiness and resilience give way to a sense of "cleared space" or "area free of obstruction", conditions necessary for smoothness of mind. Only those who continue on the trail of wisdom their whole lives come closest to having a smooth mind, and are "able to foresee disaster, fend off misfortune, and avoid explosive conflicts with other persons" (131). Thus, wisdom is intertwined with the idea of survival through the consistent and thoughtful evocation of landscape and language.
Keith Basso and the Western Apaches of Cibecue have provided readers with an insightful and provocative account of the connection between language, land, and a people's cultural history. Wisdom Sits in Places opens the door for future research on place-names by shedding light on a previously overshadowed topic in anthropological studies. Basso's dissection of certain stories and social interactions can be overwhelming and a bit dry, but his purpose is made clear when his examinations are added together with the Apache narratives. What results is a clear picture of what language and landscape mean to the Western Apaches, the functional versatility of place-names, and the importance of being aware of one's sense of place.

This was an outstanding book. Filled with a lot of information I had only partially known, and seldom understood. The story of thousands of dams built for no reason other then to keep two Federal agencies in business. Some success and some death causing failures. A must read for anyone west of the Mississippi with a interest in the historical infrastructure of the western states despite the massive mishandling of Federal funds to aid in ecological disaster. A true study in government math at alludes us all.

This was a return engagement to "Cadillac Desert", as I had read the original in the 1980s, amazed at the time, considering it a premier example of thorough history and analysis in a subject about which few people knew much at all. What could have been a "dry" subject was actually quite gripping and informative, and fortunate to have many participants in key moments still available.

In that sense the author was ahead of his time, documenting essential history that looks all the more important twenty years later. No doubt the book would still be fresh history to many, especially if supplemented by some other source on more current topics. I can only imagine what Mr. Reisner would think of the explosive growth of Las Vegas in the barren Nevada desert in recent years.

I finally got to the revised edition and certainly feel the loss of Marc Reisner, who would have had plenty of material for another revision or two. The additional material is a plus, although it, too, has been around long enough for either edition to be a worthwhile reference.

The growth of Los Angeles and the whole situation with the Owens Valley, San Fernando Valley, William Mulholland, the Chandlers, and so on, is exceptional, and can be read almost on its own. Perhaps there is a more definitive history, with more emphasis on some individuals or some other angle. Reisner packs a punch, laying it all out bluntly, including the fraud and corruption along with social and technical aspects.

Another favorite was the early history of the unexplored West, such as John Wesley Powell's prescience and his journey down the virgin Colorado. How much the region has changed in such a short time, and how extensive were our errors.

This is a first-rate history.

Essential reading for anyone living in the American West or living in the East and subsidizing water rates in the West.

This book was an alarming, eye-opening account of how the United States is running out of it's own water resources that provide for many of desert urban areas. Why is it that we are settling in areas that are not natural for us as human beings to live in, and depleting our water resources and damaging natural beauty in order to live in seemingly uninhabital areas, such as Las Vegas, and Phoenix? This book looks to address this and much much more. A great read for anyone interested in enviromental politics and issues in the U.S..

Cadillac Desert is a plodding book that spends more time making sideways remarks about its characters than establishing it's own narrative. Plagued by numerous typographical errors, it reads in fits and starts. While its message of government excess and because-we-can justification for modifying the natural landscape is surely worthwhile, if repetitive, the fact of the matter is that two generations of farmers, ranchers and urbanites in the American West looked to the Bureau of Reclamation as the only organization suited to develop their water resources. The dated material is noticeable at times--who but a civil engineer now knows of the Teton Dam failure? why the concern over the Central Arizona Project that has operated for nearly two decades?--and the treatment of the material is done with an eye toward stirring the reader's emotions more than informing them. Donald Worster's Rivers of Empire deals with much the same material in a more thorough and even-handed, though academic, manner.

This is the most fascinating book I have ever read. The amazing Temple Grandin takes two subjects: autism and animal behavior,and draws comparisons with remarkable insight. She brings the world of animal behavior into sharp focus with examples and explanations and makes it easy for the lay reader to understand. She and coauthor, Catherine Johnson, write with a conversational prose that makes even the most difficult concepts easy to grasp. Every chapter elicits a "Wow".

Although the dry title may put some people off because it sounds clinical and cerebral, this absolutely exciting book holds a plethora of facts and wonders about the animals we come into contact with on a daily basis. A real eye-opener!

- C.A. Wulff, author of Born Without a Tail

This is a terrific book. I learned about animal behavior and autism. I am a science teacher and I gained understanding of my autistic students and my pets and insight to share with students regarding animal behavior.

she has several positive points to make about her own autism which is a change form other books i have read,

Please do not use this book as a guide to understanding your dog. Dr. Grandin does not appear to know anything about dogs or even like them very much.

With all the force of revelation, an autistic scientist offers the rest of us revolutionary insights into the animal mind. It is written in clear, deceptively simple prose. There's so much here that it is hard to keep it in the bounds of a short review:

The first section is about Temple Grandin and her autism, how she has coped with it and used her unique perception to help animals and the people who work with them. This is an inspiring story.

The second section talks about how animals perceive the immediate environment and how people do not. This was literally an eye-opener! Since then, I have become a better observer of my own animals. My horse trusts me more because I can respond to his alerts. My dog has an ability to detect the approach of dangerous weather.

The third section discusses animal feelings in a scientific manner and challenges some modern methods of animal breeding, care or confinement that produce abnormal behaviors. This is a fascinating chapter that covers many aspects of animal behavior and altered my own. After reading this chapter, I started buying only eggs that were labeled "cage-free".

The chapter on animal aggression had a lot of information about dogs and cats, animals of prey that have become our closest companions. A fundamental difference exists between a dog happily killing a squirrel and a dog angrily biting a human.

She makes an equally fundamental point in the following chapter about animals masking pain that suddenly explained why a horse I once had who had just broken a bone suddenly put his head down and started to eat grass as if everything was fine. In following chapters there was food for thought in how animals think and about animal genius.

In short, if you like animals, this is an invaluable book made more useful and effective by its wide-ranging focus on a variety of species.

As close to everyone knows, this is Al Gore's book which allegedly proves that, because of mankind's increased carbon emissions, therefore the global climate is warming and therefore we will suffer from a wide variety of catastrophic problems unless we act to reverse the situation. Gore actually argues in this book that, unless we radically decrease CO2 emissions, the oceans will rise 20 feet, most of Florida and New York City will be drowned -- he provides very real looking computer-generated maps of these predictions -- there will be many more hurricanes and, in general, the world as we know it will come to an end.

It is possible that Gore's basic thesis is correct. Our climate might be warming from CO2 emissions. There is no way to assess the value of his thesis from this book, however. This is a beautifully illustrated picture book. It is filled with gorgeous photographs. It has very little text. On the few occasions when Gore actually puts more than 50 words in a row it is generally to tell some heart-wrenching anecdote such as why the near-death of his son made him passionate about global warming. The book has no footnotes, and no connected argument. It is, to be blunt about, a coffee-table book, not a scientific book.

I appreciate that Gore's defenders will disagree. After all, the pictures show facts don't they? We can see, from the pictures, that there is less ice on Mt. Kilamanjero. We can see that many glaciers have retreated in the last century. We can even see the photos showing how much of Florida would be submerged, if the sea rose 20 feet, which it would, if all of the ice in Greenland melted.

Yes, the pictures give isolated facts. But science is not done with pictures, because one can always take a few facts out of context to prove anything. You do not do science with a few photos. You do science with hard data, taken from as many sources as possible. You do science by looking at the whole picture, or as much as you can. You also do science by seriously addressing critics and alternative theories. I am sorry, Al, but this book is much closer to a rock video than it is to a scientific argument. It relies on pictures, emotions and wild claims. That does not prove that it is wrong. You can not , however, rationally assess the truth or falsity of the statements with Gore's presentation.

Al thinks we are stupid. He does not think we will read through serious science. He thinks we need lots of pictures or we just won't get it.

Although i was well aware of global warming, the scientific evidence and the real statistics of the global warming from this book definitely raised my awareness even more. I mainly bought this book because i am very interested from saving the earth from the global warming. This book is informative and contains many pictures that reveal impact of the global warming in the world. This book is worth of every penny and worth of time to read it.

I purchased this book despite my skepticism on human caused global warming. I figure i need to know both sides of the argument before I formulate an opinion.

There were some great points made in the book and despite my belief that global warming is not entirely human caused, there are a lot of things where I said "ya, why not? Wouldn't hurt to reduce this or that."

I did have a problem with Al's failure to show both sides of the coin when he pointed out statistics and used charts. One chart he used pointed out recent increases of this or that, but didn't comment on the historical increases that were shown on the same chart.

I also felt like the charts and graphs were misleading in many ways. Often they used visual tips and tricks to draw the eye to the points they wanted to make while 'hiding' the counter arguments. Although I was probably especially sensitive to this as I just read a book on the visual presentation of data.

If you are interested in global warming, even if you are a conservative that is against it, I believe you need to read this book. It would be naive to argue against it if you haven't read it.

After forcing myself to read Al's tirade, the conclusion is obvious: An Inconvenient Truth is nothing more than a loose morph of Paul Erhlich's The Population Bomb, but with one caveat. Paul Erhlich was (and continues to be) the simple village idiot, happily distracted by butterflies, thinking that what might be true for winged objects of his research is true for homo sapiens, after the application of a strong Malthusian filter. Every one of his predictions were wrong. Enough said.

Al, however, is different in one important respect: he is the consummate capitalist and entirely distinterested in peer reviewed scientific literature. When he departed the office of Vice President, his net worth was about $2M. In 2008, that number is approaching $100M. He doubled his money almost six times in eight years. Not many are able to lay claim to that return on investment. And how did he do it? By peddling enough junk science and apocalyptic rhetoric that would choke a blue whale. And raking in more $$$ from his carbon credit front companies.

Nowhere in the book will you read how Al has worked out the causal mechanism) of global warming that caused rapid continental deglaciation about 10-14 thousand years ago, long before modern humans walked the Earth. In fairness to Al, I wouldn't expect that of him: the causative agents remains to this day poorly understood. But not a single word about Quaternary climate appears in this book. Al is betting most people will not bother read the Geological Society of America Special Paper #270: The Last Interglacial-Glacial Transition in North America. Good odds, I'd say.

Even so, I hear Al replaced the incandescent bulbs in his multi-thousand square foot mansion with the energy-saving florescent variety. Good for you Al: thanks for leading the way and saving the planet!

31,000 U.S. scientests have signed a petition refuting the claims that mankind is causing global warming and many scientests are now saying we are about to enter a period of global cooling due to changes in our sun. A British court found over 30 of Gore's claims in his movie to be false. Al Gore's home uses more energy in one month than the average home owner uses in one year and the zinc mine that was on his property was once listed by an environmental group as the most toxic mine site in America and Gore wants to reopen it. Are these the actions of a man truely concerned about the environment? Do a little searching to find out about Gore's financial interests in promoting global warming, other than his film and books, and you will find what I believe to be his true motivation.

While we do need to be better stewards of our planet the rush to stop climate change is harming millions around the world and will harm hundreds of millions more if we continue on this course. Gore and his followers say warmer temperatures will produce crop failures that will lead to starvation for millions but in our rush to develop cleaner burning bio fuels we are currently leaving millions of people around the world without enough food to eat. The move to develop bio fuels is also causing a huge price increase in foods which will harm the poorest among us. The amount of corn required to produce 25 gallons of ethanol is enough food to feed an adult for one year and that is one years worth of food someone will have to go without. When you rush into something based on emotion instead of facts you often take the wrong course and that is what I see happening with the issue of global warming.

True science has shown us the earth has been warming for thousands of years, the earth has been much warmer in the past then it is currently, and the only thing normal about climate change is it's always changing. As once scientest has said, a never changing climate would be abnormal.