Science Nature Books

Although it's been mentioned as the "best book" for plant identification in the Southeast by reviewers, this is simply not accurate and any true field botanist can attest to this. It's a wonderful manual for an OVERALL coverage of Carolinas, parts of Virginia, Tennessee, and portions of Alabama and northern Florida. In regards to wetland plants, Godrey & Wooten's work remains the gold standard for the entire SE. Andre Clewell's "Guide to the Vascular Plants of the Florida Panhandle" is better even without illustrations and covers many, many more species. As you move away from the Jacksonville, FL area and move westward toward the panhandle (and still well within the heart of the SE) Radford, et al. becomes hit and miss and doesn't cover the much more species rich area of the Florida Panhandle and adjacent southern Alabama and SW Georgia.

Radford, et al. still remains an invaluable book for those within the heart of it's range and then some. As for the outdated names, any competent plant taxonomist can find a list of synonyms and cross reference their identifications, so this is hardly a criticism of a work of this caliber.

As a botany major, I have to say this is the most important book to have in your collection. I use it for classes, I use it for the field, I use it for reference. Some things are outdated and need to be corrected, but for the most part it is essential for anyone dealing with plants. One concern I have is that it may be hard to use for people who are not knowledgeable in plant vocabulary. The keys are sometimes difficult for even advanced botanists to use, and not always because of the plant in question. It is a must-have for anyone dealing with plants, but a good plant dictionary is something I heavily recommend.

Though the Green Bible has been the best in the southeastern US for the past 30 years, and is still the best published manual for the Carolinas, it's in dire need of updating. Taxonomy for many of the species has changed, many more species have been discovered in the Carolinas since it was written (some native, some exotic), and the dot maps reflect what was know about species 30-40 years ago and don't necessarily reflect what is known about current ranges (also, the county dots aren't always backed up by occurrence records deposited in herbaria and thus are difficult to confirm)... overall, a wonderful publication, but one in need of a modern overhaul.

I have gone through 4 of these in the past 26 years and I heartily recommend it for anyone with a more than passable amount of knowledge concerning plants.

I have used this book for almost 30 years, and there is none better for the Southeast. Even if you use other guides, this one is the final authority! I cross reference everything through this book.

This book has a great story line with a sense of humor. Young kids love to hear me read it when I visit their classrooms.
I recommend you buy it as one of the books your primary grade kids will fight over.

This book wasn't what I had imagined it to be. The first several pages contain a lot of words, and the last several pages are just pictures. My 6 year old son really enjoys this book, though, and asks for it at night.

Hot Air: The Mostly True Story of the First Hot-Air Balloon Ride is about . . . well, the title pretty much says it all, doesn't it?

I wanted to love this book because it is about two things that are very important to my life: French History (I am an author of the subject) and aviation (I have been married to a pilot for almost 20 years). However, I just didn't LOVE this book.

The writing was not clever or catchy, no fun repetitive phrases or colorful words that would engage young readers. Frankly, the story is bland, boring. I also found the different sizes of typeset annoying. The most important negative, however, is that the author contends Benjamin Franklin was at the hot air balloon ride over Versailles. This is not true. Benjamin Franklin witnessed early hydrogen balloon experiments.

Now, for the positive. The illustrations in Hot Air are absolutely beautiful, full of bold, lively colors that reminds me of a bright sunny day in a garden in Paris. I love, love the colors this illustrator used. I also like the back leaf information about the history of ballooning.

If you would like a children's book about the first manned hot air balloon flight, I highly recommend Mouton's Impossible Dream by Anik Scannell McGrory, which is a fun book to read...a sure hit with young readers.

Starting with the historical facts of the first hot-air balloon ride, which took place in Versailles, France in 1783, Priceman lets her imagination - and illustrations - run wild. The first hot-air balloon aviators (i.e., the guinea pigs) were a sheep, a duck and a rooster. After a few introductory pages of text, Priceman depicts the flight with a series of wordless illustrations. The complex pictures lend themselves to careful inspection to catch all the elements of the story. In the end, our barnyard aviators land safely, which I hope this is one of the true facts of this story. 2006 Caldecott Honor Book.

I love this book and my children love it more. The story is hilariously told through the beautiful illustrations. The Caldecott committee made an excellent choice. This book would appeal to children of all ages.

I bought this book for my son's science reading to prepare for his year 8 next year. The other physical science text book which I had bought before this book was harder to read and my son was wasting time to read the same sentence repeatedly. I let him stop reading the other book and consequently wasted about $100 (book price + overseas delivery).
Then I found some sample pages of this book in the publisher's website and read them with my son and decided to order this book. This book was the same level with the other book but we have discovered that this book was much easier to understand and reading have become obviously efficient. My son likes reading this book and the writing style has made such a difference.

I am fascinated with the writer of this book. Having lived my life as a Wiccan practitioner for over 40 years has allowed me to see what he sees. I am happy that someone is finally putting out into main stream culture the information that we have, for so long, lived with.

Kurlian photography has photographed the electrical maps of living systems for decades. And removing the physical aspect of the living organism does not diminish the electrical blueprint that remains behind as a whole, despite part of the living organism having been removed. Call it whatever you like: the aura is with us. Ready or not, enlightenment will come to unite all of mankind.

He speaks of dampening the process by thinking negative thoughts about the systems he explains. It is a natural thing for us to think the worst. Magic is no different. All texts ask that you simply accept magic as truth and then go about your life. We have always had the power to create our own realities. Now we see why.

THANK YOU, GOD!!! THANK YOU!!!

Legendary managment guru W. Edwards Deming spoke frequently of "profound knowledge." Basically, this is knowledge that profoundly changes the way you think and releases new creative energies. See his book The New Economics.

Rupert Sheldrake's ideas about "morphogenetic fields" and "morphic resonance" must surely be that kind of knowledge. He begins with a fairly simple scientific concept and brings it into another creative universe. Many of us are familiar with "fields". For example, there are electomagnetic fields, gravitational fields, and quantum matter fields.

We know from Science that we are immersed in a sea of electromagnetic fields of numerous frequencies. Waves of energy pass through each other without interfering with each other. Matter is condensed energy. We can see that form of energy, however there is a lot of energy we cannot see.

Based on mathematical calculations, we also know that an infinite spectrum of energy waves is theoretically possible. Waves in infinite variety might be passing through each other continuously without noticeably interacting. Perhaps, the world we know is just one spectrum connected to many other spectrums we haven't seen yet.

We'd have worlds have within worlds, in other words: "baby universes", ten dimensions in "space time", "superstrings", "universe splits", and so forth and so on.

Author and physcist David Bohn famously explained it this way. "Everything material is also mental, and everything mental is also material. But, there may be more infinitely subtle levels of matter than we are aware of." This is where Sheldrake's morphogentic fields come into the picture, or big picture, it seems to me. The forms and physical properties that we see resonating throughout existence are developed by some kind of know-how or knowledge. Could it be that there are fields in Biology and Chemistry like the fields we recognize in Physics?

If I've got it right, Sheldrake's morphogenetic fields are mental or maybe spiritual fields that spread know-how and knowledge throughout creation. Maybe I've skipped a rung of the inner and outer worlds of existence, but I feel like I'm getting pretty warm here.

Sheldrake doesn't want us to just take his word for this, however. Theories in Science need to be tested. And, Sheldrake's already working on that. He proposes several experiments in the last few chapters of the book. Browsing Amazon, I see there's another book or two in publication about these experiments.

You might want to read this book with Out of Control by Kevin Kelly and/or Living Systems by James Grier Miller, which is what I did. Several reviewers of this book have mentioned "metaphysics". If you'd like to go in that direction as well, you might enjoy What is Process Theology by Robert B. Mellert or Process Theology: A Basic Introduction by Robert Mesle.

I read this book some years ago and find the ideas in it have stayed with me, as they go a long way toward filling some holes in our understanding of reality. Sheldrake's Morphic Fields mean living things communicate even when they are not in physical proximity. This explains some of his other research, such as psychic connections between human and animal. Read Sheldrake's book, Dogs That Know When Their Owners are Coming Home, a fascinating look at the human-animal bond.

But the idea that once a new technique is learned by part of the population, it is more easily learned by the rest is startling. Can it explain the rapid spread of computer literacy? Like the old joke in school, can we actually learn "by osmosis?" Sheldrake's examples of group behavior and generational learning in the animal world points exactly in that direction. What one generation learns can be passed to the next. What I learn can make it easier for you to learn. This is a radical idea!

I've recently read astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell's book, The Way of the Explorer, in which he presents his view of reality, based on years of research into psychic and spiritual pehonomenon. His view incorporates Sheldrake's ideas in that he accounts for knowledge that does not come from standard learning methods. Knowledge received from spiritual insight or received psychically is part of the natural but unseen web underlying our universe, according to Mitchell. All knowledge of past and present is available, but is not sought by most people, since they do not know or practice the techniques for tapping into that source and there are no currently accepted scientific theories to explain how it works. Sheldrake's Morphic Fields are one such explanation.

The Presence of the Past is an influential book that will continue to be consulted and discussed. Since reading it, I've had more reason to think Sheldrake is right and I've read nothing elsewhere that disproves his fascinating conclusions.

Sheldrake's opus shakes the axioms of causality underlying experimental science. Not many books have done that. Not many books can address metaphysical topics, suggest alternatives to the standard Aristotelian underpinnings of science or "naturalism," and do so plausibly without recourse to superstition.

Sheldrake, a biologist, examines the many anomalous phenomena that seem to cut against some very basic beliefs about "how things work." The book integrates observations from many different fields of endeavor from physics to biology to psychology. The scope of this work as as wide as it is deep.

If you have ever read Thomas Kuhn's "Structure of Scientific Revolutions," this book will resonate along the same lines for you. Well worth your time and money.

I felt compulsed to write a 5-star review after seeing only 3 reviews, all of them giving 3 or 4 stars to this classic masterpiece. Hey, don't get it wrong! this is a superb book you can't put down once you've started. I have read it twice and intend to translate it into Estonian.
Although, yes, only maybe a quarter of orthodox biologists can stand Sheldrake's name, the implications of his theory - if correct - are enormous. It would thoroughly change our present understanding of the concept of memory, which means that we need new fields of science - physical semiotics, for example. It would push the "borders" of semiotics to include the very first particles after the BB. Followers of C.S.Peirce would drink lots of champagne and would celebrate the victory. It would also require a radical revision of the ideas of evolution.
So - yes, yes, this IS a popular half-science-fiction book, easily dismissed by orthodox scientists. However, several of Sheldrake's examples are convincing and his theoretizing makes sense. So, I prefer to keep Sheldrake's ideas in "Interesting unsolved cases" drawer. Sheldrake is very much like Ken Wilber. "Serious" philosophers don't call Wilber a philosopher, but an "interesting individual". I would take it as a compliment.

I am a middle school teacher in an inner city. This book has provided the extra practice that my students need! It breaks down the topics step by step and the review exercises are helpful!!!! Definitely worth the money!

I am a self-proclaimed math illiterate and a fractions idiot. My poor teachers way-back-when used take alka-seltzer after a session and a B on a test was a chance for great praise. Now that my daughter is getting into math more complicated than adding and subtracting, I needed something to help me help her. I read this book and suddenly a lighbulb went on. I could actually understand the concept of fractions and adding and multiplying and common denominators. It had all been a murky mess before. This book is clear and concise with examples and a chance to practice. I highly recommend it!

I use this workbook in my classroom for our daily math practice. The format provides a great way to maintain daily facts review and it ensures that you incorporate word problems regularly. Each page provides ten problems of work in one particular area, with a small reminder of the process involved. The pages are not too 'busy' or overwhelming in visual presentation. Each page also begins with a review of concepts taught previously, so that ongoing practice is incorporated. Of course, separate instruction, hands-on learning and other formats of work are essentail for rounding out the curriculum, but this is an easy format to follow for a year's focus of basic math curricula. This will be my second year using the book, and I have yet to try to 'new' edition. The older edition did have a few mistakes with problems given more than once on a page every now and then and the answer key sometimes provided wrong answers, but the students loved finding these errors! We have found as a class that the pages often take more than 20 minutes to complete. 30 minutes may be more accurate.

My 11 year old child has been working through this book for homeschool math and it is very good. Every page is an independent unit, with review, explanation of new material, and new problems to solve. The explanations are concise and always understandable. This book could be used as a reference if you've forgotten how to do certain kinds of problems (for schoolkids).

My only criticism is that is does not have an answer key, although the back cover claims that it does. I guess they mean you can buy a SEPARATE answer key? So to check the work you have to work through each problem yourself.

Also it's only black and white and has no pictures, but I'm sure that helps keep the costs (& size) down.

I strongly recommend this book.

I bought this book to use in our homeschool and love it! It is a great book to use for review as well as an easy way to teach new concepts that we haven't covered. No more pages and pages of boring problems. My kids don't complain about doing math anymore and they're getting it! The drills are great for speeding up their computation skills. I highly recommend this book!

Since I liked her first book "The Nurture Assumption," I thought this one would also be enlightening, and it was somewhat, but it wasn't nearly as good. It seeks to answer the question of why identical twins are different even when they're raised in the same household--and why other siblings and step-siblings differ as they do. About 50% of our behavior is genetic and the rest, she posits, derives from three "mental systems": the relationship system, the socialization system, and the status system. These involve interaction between the individual and his (although she usually uses "her") peer group, building on her theories from "The Nurture Assumption." She points out that even identical twins are born with slight differences, and can change further with things like illness, accidents, or just noise, the random "zigs and zags" that happen to people; and that these lead to different experiences with others and different developments in the three systems.
The book is intermittently interesting and Harris writes well and entertainingly. But much too much time is spent knocking down other people's theories such as the importance of birth order, parenting fads, and so on. Harris spends an inordinate amount of energy lambasting certain other researchers, or the academy of which she isn't a part, since she was kicked out of Harvard. On the other hand, she invokes Steven Pinker's name quite often, presumably to claim respectability via her acquaintance with a famous person in the scientific community. (*He* thinks I know what I'm talking about.) I could have done without the axe-grinding, and I was annoyed by her frequent and gratuitous mention of her own poor health and inability to get around outside. Why does she need to remind the reader over and over that she isn't well and that she needs other, more mobile people to help her do her research? Is it to make us overlook any literary or scientific shortcomings, or does she just need sympathy?
In summary, I think the book does a pretty good job of advancing an interesting premise, but would have been much better--and shorter-- without the personal distractions.

No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality

Easy to read and understand! Answers some of the questions left open in Stephen Pinker's chapter in "The Blank Slate" on the same subject. Brings together a lot of aspects of cognitive science into a coherent whole!

Harris has produced a very satisfying three-legged stool of a theory, giving a stability not achieved by any of the usual two-factor approaches. I will immediately start requiring my students to read it! On the negative side, she spends too much time rehearsing old feuds and wounds in the first half of the book.

Judith Rich Harris is one of a kind: a brilliant, iconoclastic thinker who has made a huge contribution to social science from her book-filled study, armed only with her own formidable intelligence and encyclopedic knowledge of the literature. Just as we now know that Knopf rejected classic books by Nabokov and Kerouac as unreadable, the Harvard psychology department foolishly encouraged Ms. Harris to leave its Ph.D. program in the 1960s. But as THE NURTURE ASSUMPTION and NO TWO ALIKE show, Harvard's loss is our gain: working outside the academy has freed Ms. Harris to view the intellectual landscape from 35,000 feet, and to see things that no one on the ground was able to recognize.

I believe that people looking back on our era will see THE NURTURE ASSUMPTION as one of the most important works of social science of this era. NO TWO ALIKE is a worthy successor, taking us into the mystery of human personality and offering a testable hypothesis about what makes us the way we are.

Other reviewers have ably summarized the book, and I will not do that here. Instead, I simply urge anyone interested in human beings to read both of Ms. Harris' wonderful books.

This is an outstanding book on social and developmental psychology based primarily on evolutionary psychology, cognitive psychology and neuroscience--the new paradigm that's revolutionizing academic psychology. It's engagingly written, authoritative, witty, ingeniously argued, and filled with information and wisdom. Judith Rich Harris is that rare, very rare, individual who is a top academic without a position at a major university, a professor without portfolio, so to speak.

When I first picked this up I almost put it down again. The title "No Two Alike" sounds suspiciously like another feel good, shallow celebration of human diversity. Right. We're all wonderful. Thanks, I needed that. Furthermore, I kind of creeped out at the joined-at-the-heads twins that were the subject near the beginning of the book. In fact I stopped reading from the beginning and put the book aside. When I returned to it, I noticed that chapters six through nine were entitled, The Modular Mind, The Relationship System, The Socialization System, and The Status System. That rekindled my interest.

The idea of the modular mind comes from fairly recent advances in neuroscience and cognitive psychology as understood from an evolutionary perspective. I started reading on page 143 where the chapter on the modular mind begins. What I discovered is that Harris' understanding of who we are and how we got that way begins with evidence from genetics and ends with insights from social psychology. She sees the relationship system as the way we learn to form and maintain relationships with others. The infant begins with a relationship with its mother. Harris states that the child's first job is to get the mother to love her. I have seen this in children and they do it mostly by appealing to the mother's instincts. They are small and helpless with relatively big eyes and soft skin, etc., and so appear to the mother as irresistibly cute. Next they try to win the love of the father. Girls instinctively know that if they win the love of their father they are likely to be safe. They work hard at it. Then come the relationships with others.

And then comes the socialization system. Harris makes a distinction between learning to form relationships and socialization. In the former it's one on one. In the latter we don't so much relate to individuals as to the average of all others. We seek to become like the typical person in our group. We support the group and identify with its values and preoccupations.

Finally comes the status system. This is in some sense at loggerheads with the socialization system. Instead of seeking to be like others, what we want is to be like them only a little better or at least a little better at something. Instead of imitating the styles of others we look at them to read how they rate us.

Harris sees these three systems with our genes interacting over time as forming our personalities. She makes it clear that it is our peer groups that we look to for both our identity and our status. She believes that the primary information we receive does not come from our parents. We adjust to and comform to the values, beliefs and mores of the larger society at the peer group level, not to the values, beliefs and mores of our parents, except insofar as their values are similar to those of the larger group. Furthermore, we tend to discount the opinions of our relatives when assessing our status. (They can be biased!) Instead we look to our peers to tell us how we stand. Harris calls this "mindreading," but what we do is not so much read the minds of our peers as read their behavior, especially their behavior toward us, and deduce our status accordingly. If everybody in the group suddenly turns to look at you when the tough question comes up--guess what? They probably think you are the best person to answer it. When it comes to deciding how to choose up teams for basketball, if their eyes turn to Basketball Jones, you can be fairly sure that they think Basketball Jones knows basketball, or at least she knows how to set up teams.

The complex interactions of these systems in addition to the genetic endowment ensures us that everybody is unique, even identical twins. Harris makes a point of showing how identical twins become differentiated over time through feedback from especially the status system. People need to form mental dossiers on everybody they know, and they do so even with twins; and in doing so they see fine distinctions, and then the distinctions grow. Not only that but one twin will, through happenstance or "environmental noise," as Harris terms it, be ever so slightly more assertive or more confident, and that difference, like a leak in a dike, will grow.

In short this is a terrific book, skillfully and even eloquently written, full of information and deep insights into human nature, well documented and argued in a most convincing manner. It is simply one of the best books on psychology that I have read in quite a while.

Here's a quote from Harris that demonstrates her skill and intelligence: "The desire for status begins early and lasts a lifetime. Old people in nursing homes, well past the point when Viagra can do them any good, still care about their status. In my view, status is an end in itself for humans. The fact that it buys access to desirable sexual partners in adulthood is no doubt one of the evolutionary reasons we are endowed with this motive, but evolution's reasons shouldn't be confused with people's motivations. Status also buys access to desirable things to eat and drink, but the drive to gain status isn't a side effect of hunger or thirst. If anything, hunger and thirst are likely to interfere with the quest for status. Sex can too. Ask Bill Clinton." (p. 256)

What a gem! I was surprised when I discovered this book. The gist of the book is for the child (or adult) to mark off a square space in the woods and begin exploring and learning. This book is a real integration of activities, suggested observations, and fact. The learner is to explore, dig, look, observe and investigate every inch of this square area. While suggesting the learner look for this or that, the author provides factual information about various findings. The book goes into a lot of detail and there are many things that the author thinks may be found. I bet that the learner won't find everything that is mentioned but that is OK, at least the reader can experience it in reading about it in the book if it is missed "in real life".

The book starts off in autumn, assuming the learner begins in the fall and in an area of deciduous trees. A small sampling of what is addressed in this book is why trees lose their leaves, how trees store energy and make energy, examples of camouflage with animals, migration of birds and butterflies, insects, spiders and their webs, lizards and mammals big and small. As the book progresses winter then spring then summer is discussed.

The illustrations are drawn and in color (just like the cover), these are not photographs. There are loads of details in the drawings. At the back is an illustrated guide to creatures grouped by their classification (leaves, mammals, fungi) and an index.

The learner is encouraged to do creative projects such as leaf and trunk rubbings. Also keeping a nature journal or notebook to record the findings is recommended.

I am surprised that so much information and creative ideas packed into this small and very inexpensive book. This is one in a series of "one small square" books and I plan to buy more to use in our homeschooling adventure. Now this is science!

This book provides a small instant field trip to those students who might not have access to woods. It gives incredible details of what goes on in one small square of woods. For those who have access to wooded areas for exploration...safety tips are included as well as supplies needed for collecting data while exploring. I teach second grade and use all of the Small Square books in my teaching.