Science Nature Books

A WORLD IN A DROP OF WATER was an excellent book with great information to help my daughter with her science project. The book arrived in less than 4 days from the day it was ordered.

I spent about half of my childhood staring down the end of a microscope. This book is by far the best introduction to microsopy for children. The instructions are clear and easy to follow and the projects are such that almost anyone with a mud puddle or pond nearby can do them. It's hard to compete with video games but if your child has any interest in sciecne then this book, along with the tools that come with any microscope set, will open up an entire world of fun and learning.

This is an excellent book describing the various life forms in a drop of pond water. It may well serve to make your child interested in using microscopes. In addition, there are a couple of pages about Anthony van Leeuwenhoek, who first made and described a microscope and what he could see with it.

But if your child is the owner of a new microscope, I recommend the Usborne book "The World of the Microscope" which will give you ideas for making your own slides and give tips for using the microscope.

For early-mid elementary aged kids, I also recommend "Greg's Microscope", which is a level 3 early reader that follows a young boy who yearns for a microscope, finally gets one, and learns to use it. THAT was the book that got my daughter to decide she wanted a microscope for Christmas!

Easy to read and fun for kids approximately 4-6. The super-hero main character really draws kids in... the illustrations and fun rhyming keep them interested. Great book to use if you want to start conversation about recycling and other environmental topics. My kids love this book. Other favorites are the Garbage Monster and the Wartville Wizard. I do a lot of recycling presentations for young kids and find these 3 books to be awesome tools.

The author gave readers clear points in chapters with his humorous style. If you are the reader that want to understant stable isotope issue in ecology this is absolutly a great book for begining.

For some time now, we have been pounded with the bad news about Darwin. Life was shaped by a war of all against all. Evolution is survival of the fittest. People are incurably violent "killer apes" because Darwin made us killing machines.

This is all alot of nonsense, and always has been. It is important for a number of reasons, however. Among other things, many of the opponents of Darwin in the academic world are motivated by an understandable distaste for the "killer ape" school of thought. If Darwin says that people are no damm good, and that is built into our genes, then we reject Darwin.

But Darwin never said any of that stuff. Evolution by natural selection favors whatever promotes survival, under the conditions a species finds itself. It promotes being big and heavy, for whales in the ocean; it promotes being light and thin, for hummingbirds. It does not promote any one thing, in all circumstances.

It particularly does not promote unlimited aggressiveness, particularly among social animals. A very more useful strategy for survival is cooperation. De Waal makes the case that cooperation is built into us, by natural selection. He uses eminently Darwinian logic, and he knows the science.

Good Natured is a book focusing on morality in the animal kingdom, specifically primates. Overall, I thought this was definitely a fairy easy and engrossing read. The book deals with the structure of primate societies and how they enforce morality, how deeply it extends through the primate family (de Waal primarily researches chimpanzees), and instances of love, guilt, aggression, deception from his own research and those of other primatologists. He also describes other philosophies and research into moral systems.

I like de Waals style: the studies he talked about were fascinating and he really keeps your interest. I guess the only negative is that the book is a little disjointed in places. For example, in the chapter on sympathy there is a section on deception. In the end he makes his own speculation on morality stretching across human boundaries and what he makes of the implications for treatment of primates and other animals. It's definitely a great read for anyone interested in the evolution of morality and primatology.

I must say that this book has really helped me understand how monkeys, bonobos, and chimps live in both captivity and in the wild. In the same token it has also help understand how they all interact with each other, and sometimes I must admit that they seem to treat each other like humans treat one another.

Chapter Two in the book to me seemed to be the most interesting. De Waal with great detail writes about relationships within the species. How they accept handicap within the species and how they deal with an offspring's death.

Overall this book is outstanding and clearly understood. All chapters of this book even though this book is about primates, monkeys, etc., have a tie to human beings. I recommend this book to those individuals interested in learning the behavior and the nature of primates, monkeys, etc., but most of all those interested in learning the behavior and nature of humans, after all we did evolve from old world primates.

I found the book to be highly readable and subject matter to be fascinating. This subject is no where near my field (which is history) but found that De Waal presents the material in way that is very accessible to anyone. De Waal has an entertaining writing style that keeps you absorbed in the reading without the effort I have found in other books on the subject.

It's very important for us to really look at where we come from and why we are what we are, and taking a look at our closest relatives is a good window into our minds. I found the analysis and the conclusions to be well formed and fairly presented. The evidence he gives for his conclusions is well documented and explained.

While I did have a few problems here and there, these did not detract from the overall readability and the pure enjoyment of the book. This was just a very enjoyable book that I would recommend to anyone, whether you have a deep interest in the topic or you're just looking for an interesting book to use up a few hours in the day.

De Waal is brilliant, objective, careful in reaching conclusions, ethical, a good writer, and has a lot to say. He is very much aware of research in related fields, such as developmental psychology. He and others place great store on observation of animals in natural settings, but also use controlled experimentation, analogous to the type of studies psychologists are always performing on college students. While I think this was an outstanding book, I would acknowledge that the beginning is slower reading than the end: more focused on the necessary vocabulary, some of the controversies, more argumentative, a little redundant.

De Waal contrasts "lower" primates and chimpanzees so that we can better understand the evolution of morality, and such distinctions as that between learned adjustment and true empathy. Chimps will mourn, console, deceive; the alpha male will intervene in disputes where the only objective can be restoration of harmony. As all animals, their adaptive potential exceeds the range of behavior observed in natural settings. For example, in the wild, females do not usually spend much time with other adult females, whereas in captivity they do. In captivity, they may use their friendships/alliances to control overly aggressive males, and even influence who becomes the alpha male. While morality has a genetic basis, even in monkeys there is a cultural component. In one experiment, aggressive rhesus adolescents learned to be more tolerant after living with more peaceful stump tailed macaques for 6 months.

The adaptive potential of morality is that it fosters group cohesion, which for many species is essential for defense against predators, or to find or protect resources. This is not to deny that one basis of morality is the selfish gene: by helping kin, you are helping some of your own genes to survive, so "altruistic genes" tend to perpetuate themselves.

Another great picture book for younger children to understand the soil beneath the grass line, that they cannot see. The activity that takes place there is amazing to them.

As a mother, teacher, and naturalist, I have been very impressed with this book (as well as the other Let's-Read-and-Find-Out series). It is incredible how so much information is packed into a book for kids and is also full of colorful artwork engaging to the eye. This book about worms covers how worms help the earth, how they eat, make waste, reproduce (tastefully written of course), where they go in the winter, why you find them out when it's raining, how they sense things around them, how their bodies are designed to help them move, all the while explaining things with proper terms, yet simple to understand. This book, as well as the others in the series, has an activity or two in the back of the book for hands-on learning. Excellent resource for any nature/science library.

Children will learn that worms have value beyond fishing and food for birds with Wiggling Worms at Work. The illustration is beautiful but not quite as engaging for younger children as other books in the Let's Read and Find Out Science series.

It begins by piquing a child's interest in what is going on underground all the time. The images do open a child's imagination as to what goes on beneath the surface of the ground.

Vocabulary children will learn include:

1. gizzard
2. crop
3. castings
4. segment
5. fungi
6. midden
7. burrow

While done tastefully, the page that focuses on the reproduction cycle of a worm may be a bit too much for the 3 to 6 year old range (and I realize that this book is geared more for ages 5 to 9) so there is some overlap and a challenge in providing enough details for an older child's understanding.

Page 22 states:

"In spring, before the weather warms, worms wiggle to the surface to mate. Worms are different from most other animals. Each worm is both male and female. but each one still needs a mate. After mating each worm crawls back into its burrow."

The following pages continue with a detailed and very informative description of the cocoon process and the development of the wormlets.

For budding scientists there are a few "experiment" ideas in the rear of the book.

About: New Scientist writer O'Hare provides instructions explains a multitude of science experiments that can easily be done at home.

Pros: Very interesting, varied topics and experiments. Written in easy-to-understand language. My favorite topics included the best ways to get ketchup out of a bottle, how to test if talking on a cell phone affects your reaction time (it does), why hot water freezes faster than cold water, why your vision is blurry underwater, how to extract iron from cereal and DNA from yourself. Apparently, Alka-Seltzer can be used for several cool experiments.

Cons: No sources cited. A further reading section would've been nice

Traditional psychology posits a strict distinction between me, in here, and everything else, out there. While such a paradigm has a long history, it was Freud who established such duality as dogma and insisted that a theory of human behavior must be based on scientific observation. Good idea, Sig. But science marches on. Now that physicists believe that experimental results depend as much on the observer as the observed, the old "in here/out there" dichotomy is falling on hard times. Further, evolutionary theory has embraced the idea that ecosystems evolve as much as individual species, and psychology continues to reveal the constant interplay between who we are and where we exist. Enter "Ecopsychology," a framework for rethinking the causes of environmental despoliation and its impact on personal growth. The growing field includes ecofeminists and deep ecologists, Buddhist and Native American psychologists, Harvard Psychiatry professors and architects. Why are we, as a specie, so willing to foul our own nests? How does that effect us? We evolved as widely dispersed hunter-gatherers intimately connected to the natural world and now often live in close proximity to thousands of other humans largely insulated from the living system that supports us. Who can reasonably claim that this would NOT have profound impacts on the psyche? Along the way, ecopsychologists surmise that there still exists a deep connection to nature that environmentalism would do well to tap. They suggest that joyful celebration of our interdependence will touch hearts turned off by scare tactics that constantly iterate impending doom. This book is an excellent overview of a new direction for psychology and the exciting convergence of post-Darwinian, post-Einsteinian, post-Heisenbergian, post-Toastian (isn't this fun?) thought.

Assembled here are some of the leading lights of ecopsychology, with papers and excerpts from the books they've written: Roszak himself, Aizenstat, Hillman, Gomes, Glendinning, and on and on. A rare collection of important voices.

The idea of ecopsychology is to open up awareness to the unheard voice of the Earth. "Animism" is a 19th century assumption that assumes the world lives only to the degree we project into it. The authors here realize that animism is a reductionistic and outdated concept that only serves to justify the ongoing rape and dematerialization of the natural world--a world that in fact projects her presence into those of us who can learn to hear her.

This is not a back-to-nature project but a necessity if we are to preserve what's left of the Earth from our greed, haste, and the global warming of the psyche endemic to a society of rapacious and immature consumers too bent on private advantage to do what our ancestors did for a million years of history and prehistory: recognize and respect her personhood. And today, we can do so with all our critical faculties intact and a bit of help from green technics.

This book contains essays from a variety of sources. It does not tell you what ecopsychology is but tells you why it makes sence.
It quotes many psychologists, even Freud, and analises the real issues of today. Excellent material for a college thesus, but no real info on the techniques used/

This is a highly informative book. It tells about people's different points of view on the highly volatile and up-and-coming field of ecopsychology. This book is a great source of information and knowledge of the field as well as it's a pretty easy read. I used this book as a jumping off point for research for my undergraduate thesis. If you are interested in environmental issues and psychology, read this book.

To those who are environmental activists, this explains much of what the lay person thinks. This book I don't feel was meant to be a textbook of sorts, but it helps people who are trying to open up the minds and hearts of the human race to realize that we each as an individual can control how much and in what way we impact mother earth. Fact upon fact have been given out to try to convince people of the terrible acts we commit against Mother Earth and yet some people still don't feel they are responsible. I enjoyed reading the book. Honestly, I didn't rad the book to critique what the authors believe or rate their knowledge or intelligence, I read it for information on how to help! I feel it will help me to present my views to people in ways that they may understand and I will understand more of how people perceive them.