Science Nature Books

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.

We've used the Bob books, Diego phonics, Curious George phonics and by far this is the best "set" of books for my 4 year old boy. Each book focuses on a different phrase, so the repetition of certain words builds confidence.

The stickers have been a great reward system, for us. Generally I am selective about when using rewards - I'd prefer my son learn to read simply for the enjoyment of reading, and not for the sticker - but I have to say that stickers work! I volunteer for 1st & 2nd graders who are "behind" their classmates (something I really don't agree with in our public schools) and stickers motivate them to read, even at that age. It also becomes a quick way for them to see how many books they've read.

I commend the teacher who started this set, and hope more educators are able to put their real-life expertise out for parents like me!

We tried the BOB books in addition to tons of other early reading books and we were always disappointed! They were too hard or easy and not progressive. The stories were boring.

We started this series of Books while my daughter was in Kindergarten. She loved them!!! Earning a sticker every time she correctly read a story was a HUGE incentive because after 3 stickers she moved on to the next story! The repetition was incredibly helpful with word recognition and the comprehension questions are a great tool that we now do with every story we read! We read this series all summer long and now my daughter is in an advanced reading group in first grade! I recommend them to anyone who has a child with a basic sight word list.

My daughter who turned 3 in April loves this book; she received it as a gift last Christmas. It's 10 little books that pull out of clear plastic sleeves. She likes to pretend to read,and the way these stories are written and illustrated, it is very easy for her to do so. I just bought a couple more in the series; I hope they're as good.

I recommend this book to anyone with a child ready to read. It is a step by step phonics based system. Other books I've looked at have black and white pictures or boring stories. The colorful pictures add to the story and I often hear my son laughing while he reads even the simplest books. I have both sets that are in Level One, and both sets for Level two. I'm sure I will be purchasing Level Three.

My daughter LOVED this series!!! One comment though, the description has preschol readers as the reading level.. but actually the INDEPENDENT level is about a second grade level book. Nice pictures, easy text, graduated vocabulary, and high interest topics. I only wish they had MORE on the independent level than they do.

The Changing Nature of Racial and Ethnic Conflict in United States History deals with the question of race in America, from the time of European discovery of the Americas until the present day. It creates a disturbing but evocative picture of injustice and inequality in a nation that espoused principles of justice and equality at its very birth.

The book is brutally honest in its presentation. Facts are lined up to create an uncomfortable picture of prejudice and its victims: the Native Americans, African Americans, immigrants from Europe, Asians, and Latin Americans. My initial response was to deny as much involvement as I could, but even my grandparents, who entered America in the last century, displayed common prejudicial attitudes toward racial issues.

Personal and familial guilt becomes irrelevant, however, in the face of societal guilt. The long attempt by American society to deny racism as a problem cannot be overcome by feigning innocence. Instead, it becomes the responsibility of all people to work for social and economic justice.

The text covers a vast scope in both geography and time, beginning with an examination of relations between early Spanish colonials and native peoples in Mexico and Central America, and continuing with a discussion of the relationship between white settlers in North America and the Native American tribes there. Those native cultures that could not be assimilated were often destroyed outright, or left to suffer and fade away on the outskirts of society.

The fourth chapter deals with the history of slavery, and those assumptions and events that later contribute to attitudes about freed people of color after the Civil War. The next three chapters deal with the struggles of various ethnic groups in America, including the struggles of the Irish, Native Americans, and Germans. Further chapters address the struggles for equality by African-Americans, especially in the middle of the 20th century, and with issues faced by Latin Americans in America.

The most important chapter in the book is the last one, which gives examples of the continued problem of racial conflict in modern society, citing recent history including the Rodney King Riots, the war on drugs, racial profiling, and most disturbingly, the trend towards minorities being executed for offenses that did not earn their white counterparts the same sentence. While current criticism of the Reagan administration tends to be economical, the book attacks Reagan for his opposition to civil rights programs and affirmative action.

I am unconvinced by the book's conclusion; suggesting reparations as a solution to continued racial tensions. Besides being unfair to other victims of our culture, including women, and the mentally ill, reparations are a poor answer to a pattern of social injustice. Putting a dollar value on the suffering of one's ancestors is insulting and insufficient, and will also cause resentment among taxpayers. Perhaps the great debt owed would be better repaid in furthering education as a foil to ignorance and habitual attitudes.

The issue that the book presented that I was most unaware of was the treatment of Latin Americans especially during the Reagan era. In an increasingly Spanish-literate culture, I was never really cognizant that a problem existed for this group. Considering recent events, including the apparent lack of feeling by the American government for the plight of Haitian refugees, this seems more like obliviousness on my part than anything else.

The book has not so much changed my feelings on the issue as it has raised my awareness of how deeply-seeded the issue is. As a student in the field of education, it became blatantly obvious that students of all races and colors need to understand this topic. Modern students seem unaware of the actual facts of discrimination, rather than the perspective given by the modern media, families, and peers, which is often inaccurate.

The very existence of the book, however, is confirmation of a positive trend towards learning and change; no scholar would have written so honest an analysis one hundred years ago. While painfully honest about the failings of American culture to deal positively with race, the presentation of the subject in The Changing Nature of Racial and Ethnic Conflict in United States History is a strong step in the process of ending racial discrimination. Students of race issues and history will find it an invaluable outline of the events that have shaped American history for years to come.

This book is about you. From the time you, as a homo sapien, took your first steps until today. You are defined in terms of your evolutionary biology, history, psychology, philosophy, and anthropology. David Livingstone Smith constructs a view of human nature that will give you a framework for understanding why we are the most dangerous animal. The author gives us many facets of human nature, which will leave you in deep thought about the war-like nature of mankind.

Once upon a time we were little australopithecine animals living in mortal fear of the great carnivores as we tried to steal bones from their kills, sleeping at night in trees where great snakes and huge eagles treated us as prey. Then some time later we grew larger and smarter and begin to ward off the carnivores with sticks and stones and group cohesion. And then there came the day when we became the most feared predator of them all.

This little history, according to the lengthy and perceptive analysis in this most engaging book, sheds important light on why we wage wars and kill with such ferocity.

"The Most Dangerous Animal" is us. We have guns and walls and locks to protect us not from lions and tigers but from each other. But to gain the right ferocity and the sheer bloodlust needed to defeat our human enemies, we had to turn them into beast and vermin and other non human creatures because, simultaneously with our ability to kill, we had a mental module that urged us not to kill our kind. Therein lies, according to Professor Smith, who is both a philosopher and a psychologist, the terrible dialectic that is the human mind as warrior. For the tribe to survive it had to be able to stir its young men to a killing rage like chimpanzees tearing a strange chimp to bits with their bare hands. But at the same time, this violent ferocity must not be turned upon family, friends and other members of the tribe. And so these two assortments of mental neurons (mental modules) exist simultaneously in the human brain, and depending on circumstances lead us to brotherhood or to genocide.

The question that confronts us today is will we always have war? When I was an undergraduate I argued against the affirmative with others and in particular with one of my psychology professors. In the final argument it came down to the definition of war. If war is any violence of humans against humans, then, yes, war will never end until our nature changes, possibly through some kind of biological engineering. But if war is tribe against tribe, nation against nation, then it is possible that through the rule of law imposed internationally upon all people, war may end. Possibly. Smith is pessimistic, and I can say--no longer an undergraduate--that unless human nature changes, there will always be disputes that sadly cannot be settled in any other way. War is "politics by other means."

Smith defines war as "premeditated, sanctioned violence carried out by one community (group, tribe, nation, etc.) against members of another." (p. 16) He recalls the work of Jane Goodall and others who observed chimpanzees carrying out "raids" against other chimps in a purposeful way that is very much like humans going to war. Since we are genetically very much like chimpanzees, their behavior suggests a common inherited source of warlike violence. But Smith also points to the bonobos, the smaller chimps who practice what can only be called "love not war"--or at least "sex not war." They too are our close cousins. And how like caricatures of the human left-right political dichotomy they are! I think what we need to understand is that those who believe in the war system and those who do not, come by their beliefs genetically. Their beliefs are ingrained. And in many of us both beliefs are held simultaneously.

What we do, as Smith so painstakingly demonstrates, is we lie to ourselves. We practice self-deception to an amazing degree. Smith even argues that self-deception is adaptive in the Darwinian sense. He cites biologist Robert L. Trivers as arguing that self-deception is adaptive because it is easier to fool others when we have first fooled ourselves. (p. 126) Furthermore, how do we avoid guilt and self-loathing after killing another human being in cold blood on the battlefield? Or better yet, how do we get our young men to do this killing? We convince ourselves first, and then them, that our adversaries are monstrous vermin, that they are subhuman, that, although they have a human form, they lack the "essence" of being human. Smith gives many examples of people from ancient times to the present day as doing exactly this. The prelude to genocide is the dehumanization of others.

But this book is about more than the war system. Professor Smith demonstrates a profound understanding of human psychology in other areas as well. His take on consciousness is one of the best I have ever read. He writes: "...it is a mistake to imagine that there is something in the brain corresponding to our notion of consciousness. Consciousness is not a thing inside the brain rubbing shoulders with the anterior cingulated gyrus or tucked away discretely behind the amygdala. Consciousness--if one wants to use this slippery term at all--is something that the brain does. The fact that the word "consciousness" is a noun half-seduces us into thinking of it as a thing. The word `consciousness' should have a verbal equivalent: we should be able to say that the brain is `consciousnessing'." (p. 104)

Actually we do have such a verbal equivalent. It is "perceiving." Consciousness is perception, but perception writ large, including partial perception of our inner states and our mental activities, and the feelings that come from our emotions, as well as what has happened, is happening, and is likely to happen, around us. This is in addition to the perception that comes from the "third eye"--the mind. This perception, at which we are the planet's clear leaders, combines knowledge from perceptions about things past and present, about things seen and heard and told about, and puts all that information together in a grand mental perception about what has happened, is happening or is to come.

Perhaps due to so-called consciousness, our species seems to be the only one affected by vanity. We like to imagine not only that we are in control of our fate, that we "dominate" nature, but also that we are superior to all other animals due to our "morality". No other organism seems particularly concerned with distinguishing between "good" and "bad" (whereas we can fill whole libraries with boring treatises debating this most pressing issue). Ironically, humans are also the ONLY species on this planet that practices war: planning, meticulously preparing, and finally killing hundreds to millions of members of our own kind. If everything goes well, the "victorious" side then gets to compose poems, make blockbuster movies and erect monuments in honour of the "heroic" soldiers who so bravely slaughtered away the "enemy" in the name of God, freedom or democracy. The obvious fact that humans are the greatest killers (and are quite innovative at it, too!) seems nevertheless to cause some discomfort. Invariably we are told that wars are "senseless", "evil", or even "inhuman". Yes, and we would all like to end all wars forever, and live in global brotherhood (at least once we get rid of the "enemies of freedom").
Unfortunately such idyllic fantasies do not impress Mother Nature. And for better or for worse, it's Nature's (or more specifically Evolution's) game we are playing here.

Smith's `The Most Dangerous Animal' proposes a rather cheerless approach to the issue of war: instead of endlessly moralizing about it, he leads the reader on a tour through our evolutionary past, to show how our capacity and necessity to fight wars developed via natural selection, and is therefore deeply ingrained in our minds. What has in the meantime become common sense for at least some people, namely that "evil" is first and foremost to be found within us, can now be confirmed by evolutionary biology. As if it wasn't bad enough that the "paragon of creation", in Hamlet's noble words, has been reduced to a bundle of selfish genes - now we are told that even culture and civilization, our pride and joy, are basically rooted in the wars we have fought, are fighting and will be fighting for years to come!
The first half of the book presents a baffling amount of historical, anthropological and of course biological evidence to show just how advantageous war has been for the spreading of human genes on the planet. It is particularly interesting to observe the transition from more disorganized and limited raids (also practiced by chimpanzees) to "true wars" - involving far more premeditation, ideological preparation, resources and manpower (as well as victims). The latter date back only ten thousand years, when the development of agriculture and sedentary populations made battles for territory and resources all the more appealing... and unavoidable. Ever since, humans have been busy developing the most exquisite forms of torture and slaughter, including manhunts, concentration camps and of course the atomic bomb (in a nutshell). Smith provides countless quotations of astonishingly violent acts across the cultures and eras, basically proving that "the history of humanity is, to a very great extent, a history of violence."
The second part of the book concentrates on the "cognitive" aspect of war, i.e., how come that such sensitive organisms as ourselves (who can even write heartfelt love songs and organize mega-charity spectacles) can so ruthlessly slay other humans without a flicker of doubt. As it turns out, wars are not only messy, filthy and smelly, but also quite traumatizing for the killers. Tricky as usual, evolution has endowed us with extreme empathy as well as indifference towards the suffering of others. The question is how to make the switch from friendly neighbour to greatest enemy. Recovering some of the arguments he had already convincingly used in his previous book `Why We Lie', Smith shows that our ability to be (unimaginably) "cruel" when appropriate is fundamentally connected with our great knack to deceive ourselves. In fact, most of human consciousness consists of self-deception. It should be no surprise then that when it comes to killing, our brains are able to conjure up all kinds of arguments that justify and embellish the act. In a typical example of (self-defensive) vanity, we tend to convince ourselves that "the enemy" is not human at all. Again Smith uses various examples from testimonies, historical accounts, current political propaganda, to show to what extent our minds produce mild (and socially sanctioned) hallucinations that make the process of killing not only endurable but even pleasant.

By the end of this spooky tour through the realities of war there is very little space left for optimism. Smith does try to wrap it up in a faintly hopeful humanistic message - now that we understand where we come from, maybe we can work hard against our evolutionary legacy, etc - but it doesn't sound very convincing. After all, wars are still tremendously useful and necessary (which is why all "civilized" and "peaceful" countries are engaged in proxy wars abroad). Hundreds of battles are being fought as we speak. New deadly weapons are busily being developed by impartial scientists in the best laboratories. If anything, given the state of the world (depletion of resources, lack of space), we can expect even greater wars in a not too far future. Understanding where we come from hardly means that we can influence where we're going to. We are left with little more than the consolation of recognition.

In what is a well researched and ambitious argument concerning the origins of war, the author paints an uncensored depiction of this uniquely human endeavor.

"War is mangled bodies and shattered minds. It is a stomach turning reek of decaying corpses, of burning flesh and feces. It is rape, disease, and displacement. It is terrible beyond comprehension," Smith says early on.
This image however, is rarely the one that most Americans, not to mention most nations who are usually aggressors seldom see. Indeed, most Americans DO NOT WANT TO SEE this picture.

Pictures like the one that Iraq veteran and Marine Nathaniel Fick writes in One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer,

"We pass a bus, smashed and burned, with charred human remains sitting upright in some windows. There's a man in the road with no head and a dead little girl, too, about three or four, lying on her back. She's wearing a dress and has no legs."

Michael Massing of the New York review of books continues with another stark depiction of wars ugly reality,

"Marine named Graves goes to help a little girl cowering in the back seat, her eyes wide open. As he goes to pick her up, "thinking about what medical supplies he might need to treat her...the top of her head slides off and her brains fall out," Wright writes. As Graves steps back in horror, his boot slips in the girl's brains. "This is the event that is going to get to me when I go home," he says."
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20906

When is the last time you heard something like that on the evening news?
And this fact constitutes a large portion of his argument: That self deception, which entails dehumanization and sanitized language (they are animals and we are going to "take them out.") among the other mechanisms, helps soldiers overcome the natural aversion to taking human life. As long as that self deception is allowed to continue in the soldiers mind, he (as most soldiers responsible killing are male) will remain relatively safe from the awesome psychological burden of killing. When the truth occurs to him however, it is devastating, reaping a horrible psychological wound that many times has no cure. Just look at the stories of World War II hero Audie Murphy or the men who fought in Normandy, of which 98% of the survivors suffered psychiatric damage.

In the end, the author concludes that while he is not at all optimistic that war will be eradicated, or even that we can stop men from enjoying war, a notion that he considers a fool's errand, he says, "... our best hope of stopping war is stopping this kind of self deception, or least becoming intolerant of it."

Professor David Barash, an evolutionary biologist who contributed the blurb above, recommended the book to me and so I will recommended to you, with the hope that you will do the same to your friends. This book should be read by both supporters and opponents of the current Iraqi occupation, as well as anyone who wishes to better understand human nature and origins of war.

For a brief interview of the author, go to this site [...]

In the last century alone over 200 million people, mainly civilians, have been slaughtered in war by their fellow creatures. It's mind boggling to imagine what that number would be if we could calculate the figure beginning with antiquity. In this book written for a broad readership, philosopher David Livingstone speculates about the "big question" of war. Why do humans kill each other on such a mass scale and with such ferocious cruelty? How and why do we ignore or overcome our deepest inhibitions about taking another's life? Livingstone frames the question as a choice between two broad alternatives. He rejects the idea that war is a matter of nurture, a learned behavior, or mere "cultural artifact." Rather, he argues that war is deeply embedded in human nature, that it's innate and, if you will, our natural impulse. As such, war is not so much a pathology or aberrant choice, it's "a normal feature of human life."

To make this point Livingstone appeals to science. Much of his book is not about war at all but about neurobiology, Freudian psychology, evolutionary biology, anthropology, history and archaeology. He's a strict materialist who rejects the notion that there is any "credible alternative to a materialistic conception of mind" (96). As for ethics, "the idea that moral values are objective simply does not hold water" (132). He's convinced that "our taste for killing was bred into us over millions of years by natural and sexual selection" (161) and a "hideously cruel" evolutionary process. That being the case, war might be tragic and regrettable, but in my mind Livingstone has a hard time transcending the conclusion of Arthur Schopenhauer who described nature as a "scene of tormented and agonized beings, who only continue to exist by devouring each other, in which, therefore, every ravenous beast is the living grave of thousands of others, and its self-maintenance is a chain of painful deaths" (67). Life without transcendence is difficult.

This book has some neat ideas and generally uses things you have in your home (especially if you have kids and all the stuff they accumulate).
Really good for fun on a rainy day.

My 9-year old picked out this book, because she loves science and because of the brightly colored cover. The experiments inside did not disappoint. The set-up time was short enough to hold her interest, the supplies were things I had around the house, and the explanations of why things worked the way they did was very clear and concise. Most importantly, the experiments weren't the same old ones we've done before. We especially enjoyed making (and eating!) our own ice cream (experiment 29), as a reward for all our hard work!

Great book filled with doable projects for children with and without adult supervision. Super learning tool.

This is a big, colorful, fun science book. It is full of fun practical science demonstrations, many of which can be done with common household items. This book is at a level that young gradeschoolers can understand, and covers science topics as high as middle school levels. It covers eleven different areas from air and gases to motion and machines. I have done many of these projects with my children. I even used the "Make a Rainbow" demo from the Color section in my Sunday school class while teaching about Noah. This book is a great addition to a homeschool library.

The pictures in this book are wonderful, however, our success rate is 0.5 out of 4 for the experiments. I am sure many of the experiments will work, but not the ones we selected. Many of the experiments are quite elaborate, so unless your child is very ambititous, you will be doing quite alot of work.

Polkinhorne aims to see the world through theology than through physical science. It is a great literary piece when a person is always in conflict with self vs. religion because of science. Here is a physicist/theologian who shifts his scientific view of things to a more spiritually open way of perceiving the world.

This book is dense in ideas. Fr. Polkinghorne does not talk down to you, he expects you to keep up. I must admit, that even with an MSEE, I had to read some passages three or four times before I felt that I had grasped the nuances. However, it is well worth the effort (assuming you have your OED on hand as well as your old physics and philosophy texts!). I would say that fred101 did a better job than any other reviewer to date in summarizing the key elements of this book, but I will attempt to condense it further and make it more readable -- even if it may only be for my own edification!
Fr. Polkinghorne makes clear that he knows that he cannot claim to make a "proof" of God's existence nor can he likewise claim that science (that is to say the human endeavor to "explain" and thereby predict/retrodict commonly observed phenomena -- my apologies to Huston Smith, but there is my attempt) can completely approach an all encompassing explanation of reality. Modern philosophy as well as modern physics itself (through QM's indeterminancy) and the Incompleteness Theorem of Godel have seen to that. Those who seriously study these subjects will appreciate this. What he can say, however, is this, that science has approached a certain practical level of explanation that cannot be ignored any longer by those of more mystic beliefs or philosophies. Likewise, he argues that at least the belief in a God of the new natural philosophy as he outlines here (and in his other books) would be as (if not more) "intellectually satisfying" in placing a context to the cosmos as we understand it currently than a universe born out of nothing! He adds to this that it is to his thinking nothing short of spectacular to heap upon this a belief, as non-intelligent design'ers must, in the coincidences of the apparently narrow path which not only brought us into existence, but which also makes the universe appear to fight our general understandings of entropy (chaos) by "becoming" something more "complex" and even "self aware" (through our minds) rather than just remaining within its equally likely state of the original primordial chaos of the big bang. Perhaps, only David Bohm or Fritjof Capra have offered something plausible here, but they are not in the mainstream of interpretations of QM. Fr. Polkinghorne relies on the former to explain this God's possible method of interaction with our reality through its complex (edge of order and chaos) systems. This could be considered a weak link by many, but there it is. I admit that I am slightly inclined to it myself, as far as it may be taken.
If there are any other weak points to Fr. Polkinghorne's thinking, they would start with the connection he attempts to make between this neo-natural theology and the orthodoxy of Christianity. I honestly didn't understand it. At best I would describe it as a liberal application of "Cartesian Doubt" -- If you don't know/have any better facts, it's best to stick with what's most commonly believed. But by that logic then we should all perhaps be Buddists or Muslims. Anyway, from other reviews, I am apparently not alone. In his defense, he rightly points out that "critical realism" as applied to theological study is a new field and better theological minds than he have only begun to grope its boundaries -- we therefore must be respectfully patient on this perhaps. Equally unfortunate is the fact that he evades (squarely!) facing the question of the rather spectacular notion that such a Creator, as he just envisioned, should bestow any particularly special character to one (incredibly small!) cultural group and to add perhaps more insult to this, only visit them with an incarnation of Himself -- leaving no first-hand written word. For a design as spectacular and intricate as this universe appears to me, on a planet as small as ours, it would seem to be a blundering oversight to miss all the other diverse cultures -- though, to the mind of a chaotician, nothing could be a sweeter picture, perhaps, than one illiterate man, coming from seeming nowheresville, and exhibiting such a major influence upon the world.

In all, this may be one of the most important books you'll ever read, if you understand it! I very highly recommend it.

John Polkinghorne is truly an intellectual. I picked up all of his books at the library thinking they would be a fun but brief read. I was dead wrong. His books may be short (this one is 130 pages) but the material is dense. Anyone who is interested in Science and Theology (regardless whether they are a Naturalist or not), Polkinghorne is required reading.

He is a Theoretical Physicist, former President (now fellow) of Queens College and Canon Theologian of Liverpool. He is also an ordained Anglican priest. He was part of the group of physicists that discovered quarks and gluons and is unquestionably qualified to write on the intersection of Religion and Science.

As someone who took little interest in science in high school, and continued to be apathetic towards science my first year of university, I know nothing about physics. Now I have taken interest in science, particularly evolutionary biology. But physics always seemed too esoteric and dense to be of any interest to me. Until I started reading more about it and realized how fantastic a subject it is.

But I am still an amateur and getting through this book was quite difficult but I think the determined reader armed with a dictionary, can plow through and learn much about what theology has to say about Reality in light of science. When discussing the concepts of physics and theology Polkinghorne often takes the readers knowledge for granted assuming everyone knows the mathematics of Chaos Theory or of "epistemological input and ontological belief" in Critical Realism. It can get a little frustrating to be reading and have no clue what he is talking about, but with persitance, it is overall an enjoyable read.

This IS NOT an apologetic work and anyone who approaches this as such will not find any conclusive evidence that God exists. Polkinghorne does briefly discuss some basic defenses on the existence of God, but by no means goes into a detailed discussion. Those looking for definitive proof will have to look elsewhere. As a matter of fact, those who think they have found conclusive proof that God exists (or doesn't exist) is quite delusional. I think both stances can be rationally defended. I think this book is focused on "If there is a God what would his character be in light of the processes of the Natural World?" And in my opinion, although Polkinghorne himself does not say this, the Christian God seems to fit this role much easier than the ideas of God in Islam and Judaism, as well as the eternally cyclical and impersonal "essences" of Buddhism and Hinduism. In Eastern Orthodoxy (and Hans Kung also discusses this in "On Being a Christian" and in more detail in "Does God Exist?"), unlike the West, God is not something we can prove by mere methods of reasoning. He is something we cannot even described with words (in the East this is called apophatic theology), but He is a personal living being in which we enter into a mystical relationship, sharing in his divine nature. Polkinghorne did not mean to prove God's existence through physics or math, just open the minds of those that might never have thought that it is possible to believe in God in an age of science.

But I think traditional Theism wins out because, as Polkinghorne states, it is concerned "with making total sense of reality...the force of its claims depends upon the degree to which belief in God affords the best explanation of the varieties, not just of religious experience, but of all human experience"(24). But whether you believe this is true or not he discusses how new findings in science can help us develop our theology better when it comes to questions about Divine Providence, Predestination/Freewill, the Christian doctrine of the Fall, the nature of God (especially his omnipotence) and God's relationship to the material world.

In the conclusion of this review let me pick out a few ideas that I found especially interesting to me an Orthodox Christian, and then investigate how these relate to the theology of Eastern Orthodoxy (where I believe there is the best synthesis of science and metaphysics).

For instance his idea on the Fall found on pages 87-89 are astounding. He explains how can understand the myth found in Genesis and how to understand it. Here is a rather large quote of this discussion:

"The scale of theological thinking, in both space and time, still remains domesticated and anthropocentric. When theologians speak of the "world", they usually do not mean the universe but our local planet. When they talk of history, it is mostly the few thousand years of human cultural development that they have in mind. When they talk of the future, it seems to stretch only a few centuries onward. This means that some questions referring to cosmic beginnings and endings require further discussion.

Concern with beginnings scarcely needs to focus yet again on the tired issue of big bang cosmology. Popular science writers, who like to garnish their wares with references to God, still seem to find it difficult to grasp that the doctrine of creation is concerned with why the world exists, and continues to exist, rather than how it all began. Yet the rest of us know that theology is concerned with these ontological questions and that it gains little from science's fascinating, but largely theologically irrelevant, talk of temporal origins. Much more important is that event which is that event which surely the most significant in cosmic history to date--the dawn of consciousness. From the theological point of view this raises the acute question of how we are to understand the Christian doctrine of the Fall.

In sense of contemporary experience it seems to straightforward. One recalls Reinhold Niebuhr's remark that original sin is the only empirically verifiable Christian doctrine! You only have to look around--or within--to see the slantedness of human nature, which frustrates human hopes and perverts human desires. Yet we can no more believe that this is the entail of a single disastrous ancestral act than we can believe that there was neither death nor thistles in the world before our forebears took that fateful step. It has long been understood that the powerful tale of Genesis 3 is to be understood mythically rather than literally. In part it portrays life as we now experience it, but that recognition does not remove the question of how these things came to be in God's supposedly good creation.

Clearly consciousness is possessed by some of the higher animals but it seems likely that the further power of self-consciousness, with its concomitant ability to form expectations and plans for the future, only dawned with the evolution of hominid lines leading eventually to Homo sapiens. As that self-awareness developed, I suppose that a corresponding spiritual awareness of the presence of God also became apart of the experience of these living beings. One can conceive of a struggle in the hominid psyche between the pole of the divine, resolved by a turning from God and a concentration on the creature as all-sufficient, a succumbing to the temptation whispered in Eve's ear by the serpent in that powerful ancient story, to assert human autonomy over creaturely dependence, to believe "you will be like God, knowing good and evil" (Gen 3:5). In Luther's phrase, humanity became incurvatus in se. At what stage in hominid development, an over what period of time, this inversion upon the self took place, I do not know. That it has taken place seems confirmed by the contemporary human condition. It is in these terms that one can try to construct a contemporary doctrine of the Fall.

There was death in the world long before there were our human precursors. After all, it was the extermination of the dinosaurs that gave us mammals our evolutionary chance. But the Fall, as I have described it, turned death into mortality. Self-consciousness made us aware of our transience--we could foresee our deaths--and alienation from the God who is the eternal ground of hope, turned that recognition into sadness and bitterness. In a similar way, the problems of living, symbolized by thorns and thistles, became causes of frustration and the expense of spirit" (87-89)

In Eastern Orthodoxy the Garden and the Fall is not some "perfect" place where Adam and Eve were fully realized in their perfection, and that we "fell" from this status and now we are forever damned by the transmission of "Original Sin" by our progenitors. This is a Western Idea of the Fall. In the light of physics the universe seems to have an inclination towards openness and creaturely self-making and this seems to square much better with Eastern cosmology than with the West. As Vladimir Lossky states in "Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church" we see in "the initial state of the created cosmos an unstable perfection in which the fullness of union is not yet achieved and in which created beings still have to grown in love in order to accomplish the thought-will of God" (97). And these thought-wills "determine the different modes that creatures participate in the creative energies" (95). So instead of the myth in Genesis being understood as something that once was, it was something that could have been. Rather than being partners with God, partaking in His nature, growing in perfection, we instead chose ourselves to be self-sufficient. Christ restored that broken bond out of love, not as a satisfaction of God's wrath. He "became human so that humans may become divine" as St Athanasius said.

So in Eastern thought the universe is more dynamic and relational in character, not the static universe of Augustine. So we, as creature reveled to be created in the Image and Likeness of God have the supreme role in the cosmic drama as microcosm and mediator bringing together the physical and spiritual universe, which we truly become "gods" as God himself became man, that the material world becomes full of God's divine Energies through our responsibility as "priests".

If one would like to go further I would recommend "Light from the East" by Alexei V. Nesteruk.

Simply put, unless you have a PhD. in Physics and Theology, which John C. Polkinghorne does, don't even try. The book is so dense that it took me several times reading each chapter to pull much out of it (and I still feel like there is more in there I haven't touched.)

On the other hand, if you do have these PhD's or would like some good light (light being emphasized very sarcastically here) reading, this is the book for you. Polkinghorne did not mean to prove God's existence through physics or math, just open the minds of those that might never have thought that it is possible to believe in God in an Age of Science.

I love a good book that bridges (because yes there is a bridge) between science and theology. I bought this book after seeing all the praise it received here on Amazon, along with other places. And indeed the book did start out strong. It explored the nuances of how science and theology are woven together to show the purpose of the universe, from the smallest of particles to the largest of galaxies. The enjoyment rose, many considerations were given by the author, then something happened. It was as if a rousing discussion turned into a tedious lecture. My reading slowed down. I understand what Mr. John Polkinghorne is talking about, but the way he talks about all the considerations between science and theology, just seems like a heavy load with dwindling payoff. The sentence and paragraphs just seemed to start boggling down after half the book has been read. This doesn't mean that I don't like what is being said, it is just that what is being said is being said in a very laborious way. I highly suggest readers to read this book, it does have some very important considerations to be made toward the balance and the binding of theology (the exploration toward the mind of God and the will of God and the love of God) and science (how the will of God works on quantum natural, the Newtonian natural, and super-natural levels). At least in my opinion. However, I must warn you that there will be times that you will find yourself laboring through a few pages here and there just wishing the author to get to the point, at least in a more flowing way than he does.

This book should be on every Alaskan's shelf. It is invaluable for identifying all the fungi in our gardens in August. Simple, easy to read and good pictures.

A guide specific for the Alaskan Wilderness. A must have for any Alaskan mushroom hunters collection.

A guide specific for the Alaskan Wilderness. A must have for any Alaskan mushroom hunters collection.

While this book is fairly informative and useful, it lacks enough information and/or illustration to positively identify mushrooms for forager's consumption.

Extremely dissapointed. Product very incomplete, so as to render it nearly useless. Author tried, but not very hard. Would not reccomend this guide to anyone.

This book is quick and good for children in order to teach them to save water.