Science Nature Books

I came to this by looking for more McNulty titles after enjoying the more recent 'If you decide to go to the moon' which I also reviewed. This copy is second-hand, but the story is not dated- I'm sure 'Journey to the centre of the Earth' will not date (though I have no way of playing the accompanying audio tape!). This is intended for, I think, 8-ish year olds, but my 3-year old loves it, despite having no concept of time, distance, temperature, pressure, the sheer impossibility of digging a hole that deep (and narrow!), or many of the other concepts (quick visits to Google Video or similar help to explain 'geyser', 'lava', 'volcano' etc). A children's book adults will enjoy re-reading.

I had an eight-year old girl that I tutor in reading comprehension read this book, and she loved it. This book is an interesting guide on how a child would go about digging a hole to the other side of the world.

I remember as a child tryng to dig a hole to the other side of the world. It made me wish that I had read this book as a child. It would have sent my imagination reeling.

This book is highly educational, as well. The child learns about geysers and other things she would encounter while taking on such an endeavor. I was worried that the girl who read this would have a difficult time remembering the elements of the story because it had so many scientific facts in it, but she didn't have a problem at all.

It's a very good book indeed.

Great book on an interesting topic. Children will learn about the earth's layers: topsoil, granite, basalt, steam, magma and mantle. Very readable; recommended for grades 1-5. Children can relate to this book--what child has not imagined "digging their way to China" at some point? Nicely illustrated.

The day this book arrived, my daughter read it on her own cover to cover. It opened up a great dialogue regarding the composition of the Earth. I sometimes have trouble getting her to read regular science books, but this one made it fun to learn about geology and geography.

This book came very quickly from the seller and is in decent condition. The price was absolutely terrific, and I am very happy. This is a good book for people exploring the idea of embarking upon an environmental career, or people looking to change or expand their career to something environmentally related. Thanks!

I suppose this is what you get when you order online. Every once in a while you don't get what you expect and I think it has a lot to do with not having the book right there in your hands before purchase. I just got this book in the mail yesterday and although I haven't got through a lot of it (50 pages or so) I can easily tell it was before Lil' Bush Jr. stepped into office and started rewriting environmental law in favor of big business favor. The book also talks (obviously) about predictions and trends in the field that may or may not still be true. I find myself reading saying "oh thats interesting, i wonder if its still true.

I know much of it has to do with me not noticing the pub. date but when you have a book with 21st century in the title I guess I kind of took it for granted.

This is THE book to buy on careers in the environment. It details almost any profession you can think of, from science to social work. There are clear decsriptions off all the various careers, case studies (ie" a day in the life of John Doe, Botanist")and tons of contact foe everyone from the high school student to a PHD. I bought three books on the subject, and this one coveres all the information that was in the other two, plus it gives hints on how to go about preparing for and engaging in the job search. I am now well on my way to finding a job, and I have a clear sense of direction thanks to this book. BUY THIS BOOK AND READ IT- YOU DON'T NEED ANY OTHERS!

Starting a career the day after you graduate from college is one thing. Selecting a career track before you start college is another. This book, The Complete Guide to Environmental Careers in the 21st Century, is a helpful step in crystalizing your thinking.

With the explosive growth of the worldwide web, there are many, many resources available to help in this major selection process. However, this book focuses on the natural resource careers, and is fairly unique in that regard. I read the chapters dealing with my area of expertise (wildlife), and I thought the coverage was adequate, but a bit too generic. Picky, picky. I still found myself agreeing with what I was reading. I also liked the introductory chapters, and appreciated the focus on getting experience through internships and volunteering. I'd like students to do some exploring in their selection of courses, and "cross-train," or become multidisiplinary. Most students change their major at least once in their college careers, and many change their major several times. Be well grounded, and flexible in the courses you take.

Don't forget, however, that experitse is critical for success. It is not the degree that will propel you along your career track. It is what you know, how well you know it, and how you apply this information that will shape your success.

Most importantly, if you DON'T like the careers discussed in this book, switch majors now!

This book is a superb guide to what is often a confusing jumble of environmental career paths. From forestry to hazardous waste management to environmental education, the authors at the Environmental Careers Organization give detailed information about 11 major fields of work. In each field, they discuss major trends, career niches, salary ranges, appropriate educational background, and mini case studies. Introductory chapters have excellent advice on the job search. The annotated listings of professional assocations and other resources at the end of each chapter are by themselves worth the price of the book. Anyone considering a career in environment should have this book.

If I hear that again, I now have something to pull out and place in the hands of my six year old. We have read it together, and she has read it alone. The pictures are fun and the point is well made. Great book!

...Savor that smile as it slips onto your face and let the merriment begin with this refreshing and insightful narrative about the feelings of a child. This book is both adorable and wise, and it teaches children to look at everything and every situation in a different way. Fun Is A Feeling tells us that fun is where we find it and shows us how to look for it; however, it also reminds us that sometimes we have to put that fun there.

Inside this book, children will discover things that will delight their imagination and wisdom that can only come from within. Fantasy and whimsy permeate, fill, and overflow these pages. That isn't simply a sprinkle of rain pitter-pattering on the upturned faces of children! Who would settle for rain when it can be turned into tiny little kisses - from raindrops that were looking just for them? And what about that bug that lands on their nose? Isn't it there just to give them a hug?

Stardust sparkles and swirls from page to page, sweeping us along with pure joy. Trees stretch their arms wide to let the smiles of children sail through their branches and tickle their leaves. The clear blue waters of a stream giggle their way through a forest glade, while colorful little fish leap as high as they can to peek out at the glorious scenery. What child could resist such beautiful illustrations, or fail to understand the most important message carried within this story...children are very special and their joy can light up the universe.

This is a wonderful book. Sweep up some of its stardust, put it in your pocket, and let its magical message change the way you look at your world - and when that happens, it will change your life...

Reviewed by Ruth Wilson

We just love this book!! The soft, melodic prose is very soothing, as well as the fun, airy illustration. The story provokes imagination and creativity, even in us as parents reading to our child. As with all books by Chara M. Curtis, I couldn't recommend this book more.

At 2 1/2 years old my daughter just hangs on every word and image. She loves this book as well as Curits' All I See is Part of Me. The message is outstanding, the writing divinely inspired, and the images evoking. When's the next one coming out?

...Fun isn't something or somewhere or who... it's a feeling a joy that lives inside of you!...

An absolutely wonderful book, full of joy and of course... FUN! Awesome illustrations and great for kids even below the suggested age group (suggested age group: 4-8). Our son is 2 1/2 and adores this as well as our 1 yr. old daughter!

This book teaches about feelings (sad, happy, angry) and how each and every one of them are healthy and ok, including the feeling, fun. Nice suggestions for older kids are included like having fun by imagining .. "vacuuming the hall with an elephants snout" and so forth.

Our kids enjoy this book every time we read it, which is almost every day incidentally. Not to mention, how much my husband and I enjoy reading it with them.

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)

I would not recommend buying this book. I purchased it to use for home schooling because it was recommended in The Well Trained Mind book. While visually appealing and fairly informative, the experiments and demonstrations are nothing but frustrating and usually do not work. I invested a lot of time and some money into the experiments and they simply did not work. I am educated and have no problem following directions, so I have to admit I do not think that was the problem. I can't get rid of my book fast enough. Good luck to you if you decide to use this book!

This book is the single most helpful book I have ever run across in trying to explain to my very visual son what happens when different earth phenomens occur. The experiments in this book brought to life the workings of our planet to my son in the 2nd grade. That was 5 years ago and he still remembers the experiments we did out of this book. The experiments can be recreated out of ordinary household/garage items. You will be amazed. I submit you will learn more about "How The Earth Works" than you thought possible. This will generate conversations with your children that will last a lifetime. Stop being afraid of science. Go through this book with your children.

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.

We are living in South Korea and homeschooling our daughter. This series of books is simply fantastic. The information is clear and interesting. The experiments are practical (we can do most of them in our kitchen) and fun. I highly recommend this entire series for the homeschooled late grammar/middle school student who loves science.