Science Nature Books

Ordering on line was a wonderful experience. The quality of the book I purchased was amazing!
Thanks!

This book details what the bones in your body look like and their functions. Colorful pictures are helpful and entertaining. This book also mentions a broken arm. Fun reading if your child is in a cast.

As a teacher of children with a wide variety special needs, this book has been an invaluable resource. Students are offered loads of hands-on activities (which are by far the most effective teaching tool for both special- and regular-education students), covering all the major systems of the human body - the skeletal, digestive, respiratory, circulatory, and urinary-tract systems. Students cut out and assemble each system, all of which can be assembled on the same human body, which also allows pupils to see how all the systems interact. In addition, students can build separate models of the tongue (sense of taste), eye, ear, and musculo-skeletal joints. Further, the authors offer additional hands-on activities, though these require a little preparation. (Teachers may also want to practice assembling the models beforehand to ensure a smooth lesson.) I would recommend this book for upper-elementary and middle school students; third-graders and students with handicaps in fine-motor activies will have difficulty cutting out some of the components. That criticism aside, I heartily recommend this invaluable resource which my students enjoyed and principal greatly appreciated.

Awesome book to learn about the human body. When you are done, you have pieced together a skeleton. We are using this for school this year and all our children ask, "When do we get to do the next part". When you have them asking to learn more meaningful information....it's a great book.

This definitely is geared for the upper end of the age group (3-6th grade). Lots of black & white pictures, not very interesting for the younger child. You must make copies of the cut-out pages or the book is destroyed. I've decided to hold it for a couple of years 'til my grandchild is around 10.

If you have been frustrated using a text book to teach your children anatomy, you've got to try this book! It gets the kids involved instead of just reading big words out of a book. I have 13,12, and 8 year old boys, and they all enjoy the making of the models. I highly recommend this book.

my 5 yr old loved this book! We studied human anatomy for several months, added in books for each system in the body, and she (and I) would create and build all the models for each system in the body. "Susie", my daughter's 'final project' from this book, a 3-4 ft tall skeletal model of the human body with all the organs in their proper place, was a huge hit! I HIGHLY recommend this book! We loved it!

If you are interested in learning and classifying weather phenomenon this book is for you. The focus of the book is on clouds and it does a great job differentiating the ten major cloud types and describing the sub-species and varieties. The full color photographic illustrations are outstanding. The author does not get into too much detail about the science behind the phenomena, but that is not the intention.

Such a statement is music to the ears of anyone who strives to encourage curiosity and promotes learning. We carry The Weather Identification Handbook with us in the car, identifying cloud formations, making our own weather predictions. We can grow with the book, now reading highlights, progressing into greater detail and increasing focus with age and ability. Isn't learning that sneaks up as fun, great?

This is an excellent book. It is generously illustrated, giving the user more types of cloud classification than most people will ever need to know. It then goes into storm development and other atmospheric conditions. The information is concisely organized and well presented. This is just an excellent book. Anyone with a casual interest in weather will find this book useful.

The book is printed on good quality stock and is full color throughout. I wouldn't be suprised if this is used as a meteorology textbook. It is reasonably priced so I encourage everyone who reads this review to strongly consider this book.

I am reluctant to criticize any book for being something other than what I expected it to be. I was looking for a 'basic meteorology' book. I wanted a better understanding of fronts, high- and low-pressure areas, wind patterns, world weather patterns, the influence of ocean currents, etc.

If you're looking for weather principles, this book is not for you. Unfortunately (for me), the book takes a taxonomic approach to weather. Approx. 2/3rds of the pages are dedicated to identifying and classifying various cloud formations and optical phenomena. If you read assiduously, you'll never mistake stratus for stratocumulus, cirrus for cirrocumulus, and, aha, there's some altostratus undulatus! And you'll learn of Corona, Glory, and Heiligenschein. Broad weather patterns and principles get short shrift, if they get any shrift at all. About page 178 (out of 192, incl. bibliography, credits, and index) you'll finally get into a discussion of air masses, fronts, depressions, etc.

Publishers are usually responsible for choosing the title. This book is mis-titled.

This serves as the text for my meteorology class. It is quite thorough and offers many useful graphics to help seal the various theories into my brain.

I purchased the entire set of these books "Everything You Need..." and find that they are the BEST, absolutely the BEST resources I have found in a compact book. I highly recommend these books, not only for homeschooling families but for anyone who wants to "know more"!!

This book, like the others in the series, is full of bright pictures, diagrams and charts.

The chapters are:

What's Life All About? (with an easy to understand description of the various plant and animal kingdoms)

The Animal Kingdom

The Plant Kingdom

Ecology and the Landscapes of Life

Planet Earth

Outer Space

The Physical World

The basic concepts are simply explained, with helpful graphics, so it is very easy to understand.

From the history of plants on earth to the effects of erosion on the earth and oceans, to the table of elements and the laws of motion, every concept is easy to grasp.

This is a wonderful book, and my kids really enjoy it.

Highly recommended for children from 2nd through 8th grade. (Although the book says 4 - 6 grades.)

I am an educator, and in my opinion, this book is an excellent, entertaining resource chockful of scientific information. It covers topics in biology, earth science, chemistry and even physics. The color, interesting illustrations are well done and informative.

I just purchased this book and I am using it as a supplement to Jerry Bobrow's CSET muliple subject test prep book (Cliffs Test Prep) and it is great! It's written in a simple language, and contains all sorts of review,pictures, charts, etc. It has been MANY years since I have studied science and this so far is helping me remember all the material neccessary for passing the test.

We love the book not only does it have very good information of the solar system is also a work book, my son loves it.

my grandson and myself find this book very interesting and easy to go through. it keeps his interest and anything that will keep him interested so he will learn is a good thing

I homeschool my kids and this is a great workbook. There are enough pictures and color to be interesting without being overbearing. It has good explanations of each topic and then lots of practice pages so the kids can really get a good feel for each topic. Many workbooks just touch on a subject but do not provide enough daily assignments and then you have to supplement. This book is more than sufficient on its own. There is an answer key in the back. This is a nice thick substantial book.

~Note for fellow homeschoolers~
'The Complete Book of...' line offers many great great workbooks. Some of the others we use are: Animals, English and Language Arts, Grammar and Punctuation, US History, Presidents and States, Dinosaurs, Science... just to name a few. They are great!

The book is excellent. This is the book that you have to have if you are studying igneous petrology. Plain and simple.

It is a well written book, but there are no color pictures. If I spend that amount of money on a hardcover textbook, I expect some color photos, especially since mineralogy and petrology deal with birefringence colors and such.

This is a really great book for all students who want to learn sometfing about igneous and metamorphic petrology. Written exeptionally well, with good sence of humor, it covers all the topics related to the formation and evolution of igneous and metamorphic rocks, gives you comprehensive (and comprehensible -- that is also inportant) information about rock types, their classification, textures, structures, rock forming minerals, magmaism, volcanism, metamorphism, their relationships to the tectonic settings and global lithosphere plate motion, etc. It contains so much useful information that can even been used as a handbook for those who work in or study geology, petrology, geochemistry, and geophysics. Reading this book greatly improves your understanding of the subject, so, eventually, you feel you can easily get complicated concepts and ideas, even find beauty in them, and hence enjoy your reading -- the situation which is not usually met for petrology texts.
I used this book as a textbook when I took a course in petrology last year -- and it was great help for me. And I would like to say thanks to John Winter for his really good work.

This book is one of those rare things that isn't painful to read for the sometimes heady subject matter. Winters style is even humorous at times and he keeps it very simple and straightforward. Phase diagrams are explainied in detail and there are just a lot of great visuals that help students understand the evolution of magmas and the significance of isotopes and trace elements present. We use this book at GMU and I was very happy with Winter's PP slides that are available online. Very clear, very concise and fairly easy to read.

As a former student of John Winters, I can honestly say that this book does a terrific job with a subject that can be very complicated! After reading this text (and taking his class!) I came away with a clear understanding of the concepts discussed. And, of course, a little humor here and there helps. The chapters flow well together yet can be read individually, and I plan on keeping this text for future reference. Highly recommended!

This is such an enjoyable book. It's not 'scientific'; rather it's 'aesthetic'. And that's not unreasonable because clouds are infinitely variable - one form merging into another, one species evolving into another ..... If you judge a type correctly at one moment, a minute or two later and your assessment may no longer be accurate. I loved the stories used to illustrate the information in the book. Perhaps I might have liked more stories about clouds from the point of view of the cloud - as pilots would experience when flying close to, or through them. There is one story of a pilot who fell through a cumulonimbus - what an experience! And then there is the expectation and the exciting realisation of the morning glory in the final chapter.

Enthusiastically recommended for the way it enhances life in the way it draws interest and attention to what we might otherwise just fail to see.

Gavin Pretor-Pinner deserves praise for taking something so obvious as clouds, and writing a whole book. We tend to take the fluffy white (or bleak grey ......) objects for granted, and many know a little about what they are composed of, and where they come from. Mr P-P is obviously something of an expert in his field, and a real enthusiast, and has caused my thoughts to be "amongst the clouds", and in that the book has achieved some success. However, can I still name the 10 cloud types, and identify them? That is a different matter.

After a general introduction, there are chapters on each of the 10 (main) cloud types. In previous eras, clouds were seen to portend the weather. In the days of the 24-hour availability of detailed meteorological forecasts, that is now hard to believe. Knowledge of cloud formations is becoming something that we do not need to know. There are detailed explanations of weather fronts, (cold front, warm front and what used to be known as occluded fronts). However, there are no weather maps as a pictorial guide, with isobars. That would have been helpful.

Generally, I liked the book more as I progressed, but the subject matter is not `a story'. Gavin writes better when the detail is linked to little anecdotes, and he has a wry sense of humour, more to make the reader weakly smile that laugh. There are informative matters of detail, so that any reader will come away with items they never knew. The style brings life to the sometimes dry subject matter of condensed water vapour, which at times left me reeling with formation details and Latin names of the sub-species of clouds.

I found that some detail of the basic cloud types merged into each other, much as a blanket of Cirrostratus. But then again, I am not a paid-up member of the Cloud Appreciation Society - yes there really is such a society, and this book resulted from that organisation, with the author as its founder. Of more interest to me was the detail about halos, and other visual effects that can be seen. Before opening this book, I had never heard of a `sundog', and am now eager to see one.

Is the weather the same now as it has always been? Mr P-P talks about climate change from a different angle, bringing this in to ways in which we have changed our clouds. This has been done both consciously (Russian attempts to ensure that the weather is fine for May day parades), and unconsciously. In the latter category come the new types of clouds that are seen high in the sky on some otherwise cloud-free days - the contrails ("condensation trails") from jet aircraft. It is interesting to note the effect that 9/11 had climate on the USA, with no aircraft flying and causing contrails for 48 hours. This resulted in an increased average difference of day-time and night-time temperatures of 1.1 degrees centigrade in tem mediate aftermath.

The last chapter details a particular cloud formation, not one of the 10 cloud types, but a spectacular, localised cloud, known as "The Morning Glory". Impressive as this is, I found it has too much coverage, and there were many more illustrations than of more widely-occurring phenomena. Awe-inspiring - yes. Worth that amount of coverage - no.

One thing is certain, I walk more with my head in the clouds, looking at the water vapour above, below and around me with a little more knowledge and detail.

Peter Morgan, Bath, UK[...]

Great content, both scientific and soulful. Very accessible to every level of reader. I only wish the photos were in color.

Since reading this book my friends and family have renamed me clerd (cloud nerd). I love this book. It is written to be informative and amusing. That's the best way to learn. I remember the lectures I had where the professors made me laugh, but remember less when they stared at their shoes and mumbled.

The book describes a cloud genera per chapter, starting with the nomenclature and progressing through the science and is interspersed with all sorts of tales and anecdotes of history and art. It also goes into weird cloud phenomena such as sprites, blue jets, sun dogs and rainbows. There are beautiful pictures of clouds, science figures and art reproductions.

I would recommend this book to anyone who is even only vaguely interested in learning about what is going on above them. Gavin will draw you in and make a clerd out of you too.

Knowing the name of something is not the same as really knowing it, and this book goes much further than merely identifying the ten major types of clouds, with descriptions and pictures. And the numerous species and sub-varieties within each species. And variants and adjuncts. Accessory clouds and supplementary features. Man-made and man-altered clouds.

Pretor-Pinney explains how and why and where each cloud forms, gives a little history lesson, some poetry, and some literary or painting references for almost every type, as well as a number of typically-British humourous stories. In fact the author's umbrella-dry humour takes what is a potentially twee subject matter and makes it quite charming, really.

Except for the boring Stratus nebulosus, the plain old rain cloud about which Pretor-Pinney is hard-pressed to find any poetry, or art, or positive things to say. The best he can muster is, "it's never known to make you feel elated." Classic!

In the end, the author has accomplished much more than a Field Guide to Clouds, having really brought cloudspotting up to respectibility, and giving the reader the impression that he (or she) really does "know clouds" well beyond the mere recitation of their given names.

Rihard Primack's Essentials of Conservation Biology was the the first textbook to present the fledgling field of conservation biology in a comprehennsive fashion. His Primer of Conservation Biology presents complex topics in a manner that makes this information accessible to a wider readership. The book covers a broad range of topics that includes an accounting of the origins and history of the field of conservation biology. The basic operating principles are offered with numerous examples of their application to real world problems. The author has chosen these examples from many different parts of the world so that all readers can relate to the practical approaches cited. This book serves as an excellent introductory text for readers that want a thorough introduction to conservation biology and access to the jargon of the field. I have recommended this book to students considering entering the field as well as to non-scientists that wish to become familiar with the basics of this new branch of science.

My 8 yr old son checked this out of the library two days ago and has barely let it out of his grasp since! Including when his 6 yr old brother tried to yank it from him because it's "soo cool!" So far, the page he keeps turning to is how to make a marshmallow shooter out of PVC pipe. Guess we're heading to the hardware store this weekend! This is a perfect gift for a boy, any age really. I am going to buy a copy for him.

The content has been reviewed thoroughly (it's great, and well organized and fun to read). The book itself is on high quality, glossy colored thick paperstock. So not only is this a fun book for kids (and grown-up kids) to go back to time and time again, it should last for a long time.

I gave Howtoons to my 11 year old daughter for Christmas. She loves it, and it's a fantastic way to come up with active and interesting activities that don't involve a pile of imagination-crushing store-bought toys.

Her cousins have seen it, and they want their own copy too!

This book was recommended to me by a friend for my 9 year old son as a gift. Since he enjoys comic book, and enjoys making things (especially of it involves shooting objects), this was a real hit (no pun intended?). The stories are fun and the drawings well done. Very engaging and friendly, and has a universal rating. Highly recommended!

Reviewed by Ben Weldon (age 10) for Reader Views (3/08)

"HowToons" by Saul Griffith, Nick Draggota, and Joost Bonsen is a graphic novel that teaches you to build many neat contraptions with household items. The book has an entertaining storyline about a brother and sister who undertake various projects in their basement workshop. There is information about tools, safety and creating a workspace. There are also a few historical facts.

This book includes directions for a marshmallow gun, motor, terrarium and rocket launcher, but these are just a few of the things you can make! I tried to build the motor from the instructions but I couldn't get it to work. I even worked on it with my dad who is an engineer. Some of the projects sound really neat but you shouldn't expect to get them done quickly or without additional experimentation.

The graphics are exciting. There are some subtle illustrations and humor. For example, the first page of the safety section "An Eye for Safety" has a drawing of a cut-out paper mask with a pair of scissors poking through the eye. The siblings exchange nightmare stories of unsafe events, and Tucker says, "The list reads like an emergency room clipboard."

I would recommend "HowToons" to people who really like to invent things, but they must have a lot of patience and interest because the projects take a lot of effort. I liked this book but I don't think I will try all of the projects.