California Books

This product is the same book I have been using for the past two years. This book is as good as the last two I received. The problem is with the people who send the books. The last vendor took three weeks to mail the book, then the US Mail took 18 days to carry it from California to east Alabama. It took five days to carry it from Atlanta to me. This is disgraceful.

Recieved item on time, right when we were told it would arrive. Book in very good condition.

Fine transaction. Item arrived quickly and was as described. Would recommend this seller.

I think this is a great algebra 1 textbook. It covers alot of needs and has odd-numbered problem answers in the back of the textbook.
It has examples, etc.

My mother is one of the patients featured in this book, which gave me more understanding, insight (as well as compassion) for what she and others are going through and the sort of enlightened care that Pomerado and its staff are providing. Besides the words, which have the gift of simplicity yet communicate the essence of Alzheimers, the photographs are marvelous and serve to transport you to that person and place that they are in as well as to teach you about the person being photographed with few if any words.

This book is a gift as are all the people featured in it. Thank you.

I read this book this week and was impressed with how well it captured the spirit of the residents and staff at Silverado. My father has lived there for about a year--my mother did too until her death in February--and the place is truly amazing. Just like the book describes, I have had many chances to sit and talk with residents who didn't at first seem able to carry on a conversation. But with patience and love, you can find a way to enther their world. With the recent death of President Reagan,people should use this book as an opportunity to see what the world of Alzheimer's is like. When I come to Silverado, it is not with the dread so many people feel when visiting a nursing home. Instead, I come into a place filled with love and always have occasion to share a laugh, dance with a resident, or sit and enjoy an ice cream with my father. It is a wonderful place, as the book makes so clear in both pictures and text, and I hope it will encourage other facilities to change their way of dealing with residents.

Alive With Alzheimer's is a moving pictorial portrayal of the lives of individuals with Alzheimer's who are living in an innovative residential setting in which the emphasis is on living rather than dying. The pictures do a wonderful job of showing the essential humanity of the victims of the illness, even those in the advanced stages. The text is insightful as well-- I read the book cover to cover twice and found it very uplifting. Definitely worthwhile, especially for those who have loved ones with dementia.

This book was fantastic! It really captured life (real life) with this disease. In fact, it made me feel as though I knew the residents and was appreciating their quality of life along with them. I suppose working in the same setting encourages those thoughts. And, for those who have or are taking care of a loved one now, I imagine they also will be able to relate.

I, as a program director of Hearthstone Alzheimer Care, was encouraged to do better at my work, your book was refreshing. I got some ideas and was reminded the importance music has with this disease.

My sister, who has very little knowledge or interaction with people having this disease, read through the book and was touched.

The pictures really did say it all. I liked that you had a number of sequence pictures. I think the book shows the genuine reality of Silverado. The residents are happy, they are excited about life and engaged.

I enjoyed getting to know more of the culture and practices (both past and present) of area Native American groups: the Kumeyaay, Cahuilla and more briefly other groups in the Baja and SoCal area. The case is made repeatedly for an inclusive view of a desert "wilderness" as more than just a park untouched/left alone, but skillfully stewarded by the desert's first human inhabitants.

A near-perfect blend of anthropology, geology, human and natural history, it is the thorough overview of the Anza-Borrego Desert that I was looking for. There is no preaching or strong advocacy for either conservation or exploitation of the region, but rather a balanced presentation of the various viewpoints of a surprisingly large number of stakeholders. The easy-going tone and pacing make for an enjoyable read. There is a storytelling quality about the writing that drew and held my attention firmly but pleasantly. There was enough technical detail to flesh out the themes but not so much detail that I felt overwhelmed. The only exception was the chapter on the Salton Sea which included, perhaps necessarily, quite a bit of information on past and current politics regarding the handling of this unique area. While there were parts of the book that challenged my previous impression of the desert as "untouched" and "pristine" - and made me wonder if I really wanted that impression challenged - ultimately my attraction to the desert became more informed, not spoiled.

There must be more biomass contained in the paper that makes up all the copies of all the books in print about the American desert than there is left in the same desert.

A decade after his pancreas gave out, Ed Abbey's books fairly fly off the shelves. Terry Tempest Williams seems to come out with a new book every several months. From lyrical evocations of some guy's weekend hikes in the Superstitions to the yearly raft of new books on running the Colorado, a legion of tomes from the masterful to the mediocre seems to have said just about everything there is to say about the hyper-arid west. Nonetheless, new titles seem to hit the shelves every time you turn around. If John the Baptist had come out of the wilderness into a modern writers' workshop, I do believe he would have been contracted, in print and remaindered before the last locust leg stopped twitching in his beard.

In a less crowded field, Lawrence Hogue's All The Wild and Lonely Places; Journeys in a Desert Landscape might have attracted the attention it deserves when it came out in 2000. It's fairly popular in the San Diego area, which makes sense, given that most of the action takes place within sight of Anza-Borrego State Park. But I've not seen it in nature bookstores north of Mount San Jacinto.

That's a shame, for Hogue has offered up an intensely important book, relevant far outside the sun-drenched confines of San Diego and Imperial counties. All the Wild and Lonely Places may appear to be a collection of musings by a veteran desert hiker - and it is, one of the most appealing such in some time - but it's also a stealth polemic. It's not much of a stretch to call Hogue's work one of the most important books of the last decade on California's environment.

That's not to say the book isn't a pleasant, diverting read: it is amply so. Hogue's matter-of-fact voice and intimate familiarity with the land are refreshing, and he doesn't spend a lot of time using the desert as an excuse for introspection. Rather, he spends his time (and ours) trying to find out just how the Anza-Borrego area came to be the way it is. A quick tour of the land's tectonic origins and botanic paleontology sets the stage for the subject in which the book finds its true strength: the history of human interactions with - and attitudes about - the land.

European colonizers brought much more than cattle, cholera and Christianity to California when they arrived here: they also brought with them a distinct collection of attitudes about wilderness. Originally a negative, fearful abstraction whose sole value lay in the resources that could be civilized out of it, wilderness was partly redefined by nineteenth and twentieth century environmentalists into a source of inspiration, communion, meaning. Other than the signs at the boundary fence, there's not much to distinguish the new, benevolent wilderness from the menacing version feared by our great great great grandparents. Both are valuable for what can be taken away from them, whether timber or solitude, gold or grandeur. And both are, by definition, untouched by people; outside the walls of human society.

Problem is, in California - and elsewhere in the west - it weren't necessarily so. The summits of high mountains may well have been avoided as sacred places. It's hard to picture people getting much use out of wide alkaline playas. But most of the rest of California - valley grassland, Sierra forest, coastal oak savanna - was intensively managed by the people living here. This isn't news: Kat Anderson and Thomas Blackburn devoted their book Before the Wilderness to these practices almost a decade ago. Native Californians set fires to clear encroaching brush, they moved plants from one place to another, they built dams to turn small creeks into seasonal wetlands. Very little of the state was unaffected by native land management practices. There wasn't much wilderness in the state until the white folks brought it here.

Hogue writes at some length about the Kumeyaay, whose traditional territory stretched from the coast to the Algodones sand dunes, and across what's now the Mexican border well into Baja California, as well as about the Cahuilla, the Kumeyaay's northern neighbors.

By regularly burning over their land, the Kumeyaay maintained thriving grasslands now in retreat throughout the southland. (A wetter climatic cycle that ended around 1900 probably played a role as well.) They may have introduced the "wild" California fan palms to the oases they now grace, bringing seeds or seedlings from Baja. They hunted and killed the occasional puma - after giving the cat fair warning - thereby helping sustain populations of the now-endangered peninsular bighorn.

They also committed acts of agriculture. This will come as surprising news to those of us brought up on the canonical observation that California Indians never farmed, aside from the irrigated gardens of the Yuman tribes. The Kumeyaay didn't plow the earth, but they did engage in a form of no-till agriculture that might as well have been taught by Masanobu Fukuoka. They planted grasses, harvested and saved seeds, and planted again the next season, slowly breeding large-seeded cultivars about as wild as red winter wheat.

This is the landscape that the colonists found. Calling it a wilderness is a bit of a stark judgment of the prior inhabitants. When you call a forest a wilderness, despite the clear fact that it's been intensively tended, you're saying something about the people that tended it. If it's land untouched by human hands, then clearly the hands managing it have been something less than human. We moved into this house and said the builder never existed.

Gary Nabhan, who for years has written about the Tohono O'odham and their neighbors in the Sonoran Desert, tells of the oasis at Quitobaquito, once a thriving settlement right on the US-Mexico line, now part of Organ Pipe National Monument. When the Tohono O'odham lived there, the spring-fed pond was a spectacularly diverse assemblage of bird and plant life. Under the protection of the National Park Service, biodiversity has declined to the point that on a visit a few years back, I saw perhaps five bird species there in two hours. A similar oasis across the line in Mexico, still fringed by small O'odham family farm plots, still bears diversity like that Quitobaquito once hosted.

When the Kumeyaay, the facilitators of San Diego's biodiversity, were denied access to most of their land, says Hogue, that biodiversity likewise started to decline. Grazing cattle had something to do with that decline, of course, as did a litany of other environmental events Hogue catalogs. There's tamarisk, the bane of desert wetlands, imported as an ornamental windbreak and now sucking the life out of watercourses from Texas to Torrey Pines Reserve. The US military used part of the Anza-Borrego area for target practice; live ordnance is now a permanent addition to the landscape. Off-road vehicles scar much of what the Pentagon left alone, though an observer less charitable than Hogue might suggest that unexploded bombs pose a potential solution to that vector for damage.

The ferocity with which Anglo-Californians treated the landscape was reflected in their dealings with the Kumeyaay. Hogue gives a brief but compelling description of the Jacumba Massacre, sparked by a few missing cattle, a two-hour gun battle that may have killed a dozen or two natives, and certainly drove any survivors out of the Jacumba area. In an ironic twist, even belated attempts to protect the land compounded the damage to the Kumeyaay, who made up much of the ranching population barred from Anza-Borrego State Park a quarter century ago.

Though the material compels anger, Hogue is no browbeating ideologue. He's sympathetic to the white settlers who populated the land. That's sensible, as he's one of them.

He may not get that sympathy returned from all quarters. In a day when environmental activism is still informed by long-discarded ecological concepts such as the "balance of nature" and ecological "communities," pointing out the capricious, stochastic nature of environmental change in the Far West can earn you green detractors.

Nonetheless, the nature of nature in California has far less to do with stable climax forests and regular predator-prey cycles than would be the case in the Pine Barrens or the Schwartzwald. Out here, it's all landslides and flash floods, lakes drying into toxic chemical flats and rivers changing course. Hogue does a great job conveying the consequences of the last two in his chapter on the Salton Sea, avoiding the tempting easy answers. Do we spend billions to restore the accidental lake to non-toxicity, providing habitat for white pelicans and real estate speculators? Or do we let the sump dry up, sending the water to the critically ill Colorado River Delta? Either way, we may well be trying to make a decision that's best left to the river, which has filled the Salton Sea (Lake Cahuilla) at somewhat random intervals over the millennia, then changed course to let the sea turn to sun-baked mud.

We would do well to consider the native way of looking at this natural unpredictability, and Hogue's portrayal is an enjoyable shattering of common preconceptions on the subject. The most prevalent of those preconceptions is the one that leads people to speak of Indians in the past tense, but those native ways of looking at the land aren't entirely lost. The Kumeyaay Campo Environmental Protection Agency is restoring wetlands on tribal land using traditional techniques, and the plants and animals are responding. Far to the north, a consortium of tribes works to restore the Sinkyone Intertribal Park on the Lost Coast. The California Indian Basketweavers' Association is changing the way land managers use herbicides in wildlands throughout the state, and the Timbisha Shoshone may yet win the right to tend much of the landscape in their traditional territory in Death Valley National Park.

Mainstream environmentalists often ignore these initiatives, if they don't actively oppose them - as has been the case with the Timbisha. This is unfortunate. No one would be served if environmentalists uncritically adopted policies just because Indians said we should. But the least we can do is agree that the homebuilder exists.

We might even ask for a copy of the blueprints.

Vastly expanded my consciousness regarding the desert I love. A beautifully written book based on a tremendous amount of personal experience, research, and soul searching.

Melody Ermachild Chavis' book has proved to me that one person CAN make a difference. This story stayed with me, and I can't wait to read "Finding Freedom" by Jarvis Masters, the Death Row inmate Melody befrinds in "Altars." Chavis tells the story of a crumbling South Berkeley neighborhood with realistic hard-edged truths, taking the reader along with her as she struggles to fight back against the drug wars and violence taking over her community. You'll find yourself sharing her pain, joy and frustration with every page you turn. I recommend this book to anyone with an inkling for the possibility of social change. To those who are skeptics, I say give "Altars in the Street" a chance to change your mind--and your life--forever. Bravo to Melody. I just hope she continues to publish her work.

Melody Ermachild Chavis writes a thoughtful and compelling account of her commitment to an inner-city neighborhood. Weaving family, community, and personal stories, Melody recounts the joys, triumphs, and struggles she encountered in this Berkely neighborhood. Interspersed are the beginnings of her Buddhist faith which provide the graceful style of her writing. This is one of those books that will remain floating around in my brain for quite some time. It was required reading for a senior Social Work class, but I found that it speaks to all of us who find ourselves in neighborhoods or communities. We all face challenges of living closely together and this is a testament that these difficulties can be overcome in a harmonious fashion.

Alters in the Street slices through the jaded, bunker-mentality of urban life by seeping us in the war zone, giving a poignant face to the brutalized and brutalizing who are our neighbors, and delivering renewed committment and a path to making peace and quality of life right where we are. I experienced the whole range of emotions, cried while reading every chapter but ended up wanting to extend myself further into my community. I almost wanted to become a Buddhist! A moving example of travelling through discord, through the elements that separate us from ourselves and our community to reach a more integrated, whole and hopeful self.

As owner of GAIA Bookstore in Berkeley, I read many books and I'm often being asked to read many more, as you can imagine. So when ALTARS IN THE STREET arrived at GAIA, I packed it along with many books to take on a weekend trip. Thinking I might read a few pages, I was immediately engrossed by this beautifully written book, rich in detail yet capturing the essence of human struggles and resourcefulness. Melody portrays the horrors of life where drugs and violence are daily visitors. Yet rather than feeling depressed or overwhelmed by the problems, I was filled with hope, learning how much there is that we can do when we engage our hearts and face the suffering courageously and creatively. The actions she and her neighbors took were heroic, but things any of us can do to solve community problems, to improve the quality of life where we live, to restore kindness to our streets, to provide our children with a future to look forward to. PATRICE WYNNE, Owner of GAIA Bookstor

I love Kate Delafield! It s not too often when a dectective series starring a woman can hold it's own book after book. Kate's character is fully formed and not at all one dimensional. You see how she struggles to remain tough in what was definetly a ma's job in the 1980's. You also see her struggle with her sexuality and how it affects those around her. Thank you Katherine V. Forrest for a great series.

Where have I been all these years? I missed Katherine Forrest, I missed Kate Delafield -and now that I've found them both, this is it - I want them all!! What a marvelous read! Thank goodness its summer and I can read all I want, so here goes. I'm buying all I see, reading all I can. Forrest is an excellent author, I'd read other things, just not the Delafield series. I'm the biggest fan these days.
VERY contemporary, don't let the date throw you. Its very NOW and hot.
Read read read!

If I'd read the Delafield series in order, I'd have given this a higher ranking, but Nightwood and Malibu are better. Great start for the series though. Good mystery story, and nice portrayal of the "love story."

If you haven't read the Kate Delafield books, now is the time to start! Ms. Forrest puts more effort into character development than any other author I've read, bar none. Each book in the series is chock full of intriguing, plausible suspects, and the returning characters change and grow throughout the series. Great work! As for the who-dun-it aspect, I've solved only a couple before the final secret's revealed. I figure most mysteries out around the half-way mark.

This is the first book in a remarkable series. Women, lesbians and mystery-holics are bound to enjoy it... as is any intelligent mind.

This book provides an excellent overview of the history of the dust bowl Okies and the culture they (we) have created in central California. Gregory explores the religion, music, and politics well in clear language. The book is short enough to be enjoyable and while goes into some depth on a few issues, it is not so filled with unimportant details as to be muddled. Gregory sprinkles the text with brief excerpts of the many interviews he conducted with the Okies.

James Gregory has put together a outstanding history of the migration and culture of the dust bowl migrants who settled in California. I have probably read Grapes of Wrath four or five times since first reading it in high school, but after reading Gregory's description of the way these poor south-westerners struggled with poverty and at the same time maintained family unity and cultural pride, Steinbeck's book takes on a whole new meaning. Gregory goes step by step to show what motivated many to move, and then what motivated them to stay even though they suffered great privations and predjudice. I especially enjoyed learning about the influences of country music not just upon the migrants, but on the entire nation. A must read to make Grapes more clear!

Overall a good study of the last great westward folk migration in American history. I would add that many of their predecessors in the "classic" frontier period were just as broke and hungry as these migrants, but there was little mass media around to record them. An interesting, well-done slice of folk Americana.

I thought that this was a good book. I read it for a history course on the Great Depression and it was definately worth reading. It can get a little bogged down in detail or a little dull ocassionally, but overall it is a good view of "okie culture". It really helped be to understand the diversity and impact of the migration. And it contains a few interesting personal stories as well!

If you want to have a complete picture of Baja California's interesting herpetological communicty; this is a splendid book. Written by someone who has spend years in this area studying these animals and therefor knows what he is writing about with a lot of personal information. No one else could have written this standard piece of work for this area. Excellent photographs make this book a must have and makes me want to go bakc there every time I take it off the shelf.

If you're in to herp's at all, you will love this book. I personally have a passion for Rosy Boas (Lichanura trivirgata), so having data and photo's of obscure locality specimens is very exciting for me. I also contacted Lee via email, and he was very diligent with replies and candid details about rosys. This book took 25 years of his life to put together, and it shows. The level of detail and representation of every specie and subspecies indigenous to the peninsula is awesome. The quality of the photographs and the portrait that each paint is outstanding. There are even photos of the variable habitats that occur on the peninsula too. I have never seen the natural habitat that my captive born Baja rosys come from, but this book has inspired me to do so. I highly recommend this book. It will make you want to discover Baja in person.

Jerry Hartley
Northern Nevada

First, let me say that I have known Lee Grismer for many years and I know the passion he has for the Baja Peninsula and its natural wonders. I have been waiting a long, long time for this book. When I received it, I scanned the book and planned to read it cover to cover when I had the time. In the last weeks, I made the time and have nearly finished this tome.
Dr. Grismer has put his heart and soul into making this book the best herpetological reference on Baja California, bar none. Baja is a mysterious place with many influences flowing into it from the Pacific, the Colorado Desert and mainland México. In this book, Dr. Grismer takes great pains to delineate the geological influences which have helped to shape this strange land and the effects on the herpetology of this 1,000 km long peninsula.
I marvel at the time he has put in studying the many organisms extant on the peninsula and his obviously meticulous note taking. I am in awe of the relationships he has built up with local ranchers and fishermen over the last quarter century. Local people are a great source of information and Lee has used their knowledge and consciousness to build a reference source the likes of which has never before been devoted to a similar chunk of land.
I would love to write more but I feel that the book will speak for itself. It is a great read and not nearly as tedious as other scientific works I have read. Just for its reference value, this book deserves to be on the shelf of any serious student of herpetology.
Now, all we need is Field Guide!

Excellent! Grismer not only has a lengthy description of each animal, he includes and section on the animal's status in the wild and local beliefs, which in all cases are very interesting. The style of of photograpy for title pages is very creative, with the animal in a bottom corner, and the Baja scenery in the background. (He does have macro photographs where the animal is centered for species documentaion.) I highly recommend it for it's wonderful photography and interesting text.

Having read a number of books in recent months on Egpyt, Canaan, and Israel, I decided that I needed to go to the source to see for myself what the many partially quoted Egyptian texts actually say. Miriam Lichtheim's "Ancient Egyptian Literature - Volume I: The Old and Middle Kingdoms" was my starting point.

The customer reviews recommended it - and what other customers have to say about a book is usually an important factor as to whether I will buy it. In this case, I was cautious and only bought the first volume. I enjoyed it immensely.

Professor Lichtheim's aim was to provide an up-to-date translation of a representative selection of Egyptian Literature, and in preparing these she states that she has made full use of existing translations and studies. I found her introductory survey on the development of Egyptian literature and her detailed explanation and notes of each text to be most useful in helping me understand what I was reading.

This first volume includes translations of about 50 texts dating from the 5th dynasty of the Old Kingdom to the 14th Dynasty of the Middle kingdom - which covers the period c 2450BCE to c 1650BCE. The texts include tomb inscriptions, selected "Utterances" from the Pyramid texts, Didactic Instructions, Songs and Hymns, as well as three amusing and interesting prose tales - The Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor, ThreeTales of Wonder, and The Story of Sinuhe.

The Didactic literature is also very interesting, generally being instructions from kings to sons on how to properly rule the kingdom after his death. But they also include such texts as "The Dispute between a Man and his Ba", "The Eloquent Peasant", "The Satire of the Trades", and the much (partially) quoted and often misquoted "Admonitions of Ipuwer".

The book was worth buying for the this last item alone, since this text has often been described as providing textual evidence of events leading up to the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt. According to Professor Lichtheim, the only surviving text is on a 19th Dynasty Payprus comprising 17 pages of about 14 lines with lacunae in various places, and she provides the complete translation of all that is still legible. In her explanation of the text, she discusses at some length whether the text is "a direct response to a calamity" or an "historical romance". Her conclusion is that "The Admonitions of Ipuwer has not only no bearing whatever on the long past First Intermediate Period, it also does not derive from any other historical situation" She believes it to be "the last, fullest, most exaggerated, and hence least successful composition of the theme 'order versus chaos'" Even if you have already decided that Ipuwer IS describing events leading to the Exodus, it is worth buying this book to read the translation of the full text by a scholar who has provided a most cogent explanation of its provenance

I know this is going to be one of those books which I shall read time and time again. I thoroughly recommend it to other readers, and I certainly intend to obtain Volumes II and III.

This is an excellent corpus of translations from an authoritative hand, including from simple "funeral" and "biographical" inscriptions from the Old Kingdom upto nice and good renderings of all the major "tales" and "stories" from the MIddle Kingdom: The Tale of Sinuhe, The Dialogue between a Man and His Soul, the Tale of Kheops and the magicians, and many other paramount titles of the ancient Egyptian literature dated to the aforesaid periods. Each piece contains an introductory notes with the "history" of the documents and end-notes full of interesting comments as for the translation's details and plenty of bilbiography. Most recommended, both for the beginners and the trained readers.

Miriam Lichtheim's "Ancient Egyptian Literature, Vol. 1" is a very good translation of a wide range of texts from Old and Middle Kingdom Egypt. It contains a representative sampling of Pyramid and Coffin texts, monumental inscriptions, didactic and wisdom literature,including the famous "Dispute Between a Man and His Ba", a few hymns, and prose selections, including "The Story of Sinuhe", "Three Wonder Tales", and "The Shipwrecked Sailor". For me the clincher in deciding to purchase this particular volume over its competitors was Ms. Lichtheim's decision to leave the words "ka", "ba", and selected other terms untranslated rather than giving anachronistic, supposed modern equivalents, to these complex words, as other recent translators have done. There are, additionally, excellent introductions and notes.

When I was learning to read Middle Egyptian, it was Lichtheim who kept me on track. She has a wonderful gift for translation. Her translations, while very close to literal, somehow manage to carry the atmosphere of the original without sounding as bizarre as a literal translation would.

I would recommend this gem of a book to American Anglophiles.

I found this wonderful volume when I was shuffling through a used bookstore in Raleigh, NC, while my soon to be ex was pouring over the gardening section. I came upon "The Annals of London: A Year-by-Year Record of a Thousand Years of History" just by chance. I sat down and opened it up. I was transfixed for the next two hours. It is very compelling.

This book reads like a slow-motion history of English civilization: Every page (it's organized like a newspaper) has a tidbit.

It is a gripping tale. The inevitability of the English political system is striking. The people of London ignore their leaders with a very satisfying frequency.

Interesting tidbits: Henry VIII's coffin exploded while laying in Westminster, and his remains were eaten by dogs; an article on the demolition of the Globe and a less than popular playwright; lots of flatulent monarchs and mayors; and a glimpse at the origins of the English socialist movement that is still very influential today. This book is an incredible archive, and I would recommend it to any fellow American who has a fascination for mother England.

A bit wordy and condescending in that British sort of way, but like any good newspaper, you can skip the parts that don't interest you.

This is the perfect bathroom book. Short, concise vignettes. Pick it up. Put it down. Never lose your place. I'm mere pages from finishing, and I've been reading it for 2 1/2 years.

If you're interested in London history, this book is a great way to strengthen your understanding of that great city without burying yourself in a huge tome.

So why only 4 stars? (I'd have done 3.5 if it was an option.) The author slants very heavily toward two subjects. London theatrical history and architectural history. The former is mind-numbingly ubiquitous. The latter is much more integral to understanding London as it stands today. Both subjects are important and relevant, but in some parts of the book they seem to be the only topics covered at all.

Have this book on hand anytime you are reading history of London or books set in London. I have just read London: the Biography by Peter Ackroyd and London: the Novel by Edward Rutherford and am tempted to re-read both 1000 page books so that I can follow along in The Annals. Fascinating material!

At first glance, this book with its lists of events might appear a little dry, but as you begin reading the events' descriptions, you'll soon discover pages filled with interesting historical anecdotes.

Among the events covered are institutional foundings (such as churches, hospitals, schools, theatres and newspapers), technical and medical achievements, the various floodings and freezings of the Thames, bridge and tunnel collapses, executions, assassinations, hangings, murders, fires, and more.

Even the smallest events have interesting details... such as the blowing down of Fairlop Oak in Hainault Forest in 1820. The tree is described as having branches that spread 116 ft and it is noted: "Around it took place the annual Fairlop Fair -- an event which helped to shorten the tree's life, because visitors would use the inside of the trunk to light fires for cooking."

Another entry that appears earlier in 1741 mentions the opening of St. George's Chapel in Curzon Street by a Reverend Alexander Keith who "scandalized the clergy by his readiness to perform marriages without too many questions."

Many event descriptions run for a few paragraphs and some have illustrations. My only gripe with this book is that the font size for the print is very small. (The print would be much easier to read if it was just another 2 points larger.) Aside from that, I'm sure this book will appeal to anyone with an interest in London history.

This book provides a wonderful doorway into the art of ant identification. The keys are well tested and current. The photographs of a representative ant from each genus are stunning. The lists of North American genera and species are very useful as is the list of literature for identifying species. I wish I had had this book 30 years ago when I first started learning to identify ants! This is a must have book for everyone who studies North American ants. It should also be in the libraries of all field stations and any institution of higher learning that teaches classes in the natural sciences.

I am a myrmecologist, and this is definitely the most helpful (and portable) ant key I have come across.

It is full of excellent illustrations and intuitive couplets, but aving said that, this book deals only with genera found in the USA, not whole North America.

The first part of the book is the dichotomous key, whereas the second part describes each genus in detail (ecology, morphological characteristics, the most recent literature dealing with that genus, etc.)

The authors have even managed to squeeze in a couple of (ant) jokes and funny anecdotes into this part of the text.
The last part of the book contains the list of all known species in North America.

The authors have made one mistake that I am aware of, and that is on page 111, where they state that genus Monomorium has 11 antennal segmnents while they actually have 12.

Ants are one of the groups of organisms that I found fascinating from an early age. I finally settled on spiders, but ants were always in the back of my mind on the numerous field trips on which I went to pursue my eight-legged quarry. However, guides to ants were few and far between and when I was given a copy of Creighton's "The Ants of North America" I was almost as confused as I was before. While the illustrations were good, the descriptions and keys were a bit difficult and of course even by the time I was given the book, it was quite dated.

We have long needed a book such as Brian Fisher and Stefan Cover have produced in "Ants of North America: A Guide to the Genera". Among other things the photos of actual specimens are a great help in determining the genera (and in some cases sub-genera) that anyone might encounter in a backyard or in the wild. The keys are both very good and well illustrated. A good hand lens will be sufficient with many, but the size of some requires a good binocular dissecting microscope (one reason that ants are less popular than butterflies, dragonflies or even moths). Still both professional entomologists and serious amateurs will find this book very useful as a first step in the identification of the ant fauna.

Because I am a professional biologist and an entomologist I found that, although I do not know the authors, I do know at least six of the people listed in the acknowledgements - such is the small size of the entomological community.

I recommend this book highly and only wish that something like it was available when I was becoming interested in the tiny life around us.

"Ants of North America: A Guide to the Genera" by Brian Fisher and Stefan Cover is quite simply the best identification guide (down to the genus level) available for these fascinating insects.

Combining straightforward identification keys that contain excellent line drawings of pertinent ant features with April Nobile's detailed automontage pictures, this publication functions both as a "working book" and a page-by-page display of the true beauty and diversity of these ants.

The alphabetical method of ordering the genera descriptions is also to be saluted. As the subfamily level gets re-shuffled over the years, the alphabet stays the same, and so provides a user-friendly way to thumb through the genera.

All of the genus listings contain both a head-on and lateral picture of the ant, along with diagnostic remarks and brief distribution and ecological information.

This book belongs on the bookshelf and lab workbench of every myrmecologist, and certainly any ecologist that works within the conservation field performing biodiversity surveys. It has been said that you cannot begin to understand the species you are trying to preserve if you cannot identify them, and so this book will allow any ecologist with basic entomology skills the ability to identify, as E.O. Wilson describes ants, the "little things that run the world."