Life on Intertidal Rocks: A Guide to Marine Life of the North Atlantic Coast (Nature Study Guides)

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Life on Intertidal Rocks: A Guide to Marine Life of the North Atlantic Coast (Nature Study Guides)
Cherie H. Day
Manufacturer: Nature Study Guild Publishers
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0912550155

Book Description

This pocket-sized field guide identifies plants and animals that live in the intertidal zone of the rocky coast, from Cape Cod north to the Bay of Fundy, in tide pools, caves, and crevices, and on rocks, wharves and pilings. Explains intertidal ecology and how these fascinating and varied creatures--sea slugs, crabs, rockweeds, star fish, and many others--survive in the harsh and ever-changing environment between the limits of high and low tide.

Book Description

The third edition of this popular guidebook takes the walker 73 miles (117 km) along Scotland's historic Great Glen. It runs between Fort William and Inverness, along the Caledonian Canal and past several lochs, including Loch Ness with its famous monster legend, and Urquhart Castle. The book contains all you need to plan and enjoy a holiday in full color, with over 60 photographs, drop-down map and background on local geology, history and wildlife, on waterproof paper throughout.

Customer Reviews:

Mature and authentic trail guide.......2007-04-04

Facts first: this book, like every other Rucksack Reader, has a yellow panel at the start of each section of the Way that shows the distance, terrain and walking grade, with food and drink stops listed. For three days of the walk, food is exactly where it says, and for the other two days it says "Food and drink: none between X and Y" so you take a packed lunch. Anyone who says "there is really no food en route" either hasn't walked the Great Glen Way or had their eyes closed.

Images next: most of the photographs are of or from the trail, as the captions confirm, with a few aerial/satellite images and some professional wildlife images. These include the species of trees that you walk through, and the birds and mammals that you're likely to see.

Declaration of interest: I have been involved with this book since our first edition in 2001, and although reviewers are welcome to their own opinion, of one thing I am sure: this third edition, written with a coauthor who actually lives on the Way and walks it regularly, is better than the first.

Go for the walk, skip the book.......2006-07-11

I just finished walking the Great Glen Way in June 06 and it was an amazing trip. I thoroughly recommend it- especially if you have no rain like us!

Having used Rucksack Readers on other long-distance hikes and finding them to be very informative and useful, I did not hesitate to buy this as soon as the latest GGW edition was released in March. And I will admit, I did not really read it before we started, I just put it in my luggage and took off. I trusted it would be as good as the other ones.

And what a waste of luggage space this was! I question if the author ever even saw, much less walked the route. She constantly refers to things off route- or our favourite "below you, but unseen." The majority of the photos (yes, we were angry enough that we sat down and counted) were taken off the trail at detours or other side hikes. We called it the "useless book" because what information we wanted was never there and what was there was useless to us as we were not taking extra days off the walk to see things. And the one time there was something that could have been interesting to see, the way she writes i, it is not mentioned until you've gona a mile past- and who really wants to go back? The last day when the information actually seems to be finally useful, it ended up to be incorrect!

Rucksack Readers are normally really good walking guides so I am amazed they let such a useless piece of junk be released under their name. I will admit, the GGW is not as scenic and point of interest filled as the West Highland Way, but there was definitely information worth emparting. It would have been useful to be told about the hills and other terrain changes. Maybe about the trees we were walking through. Any history in the area? Or at least give us an idea of walk x miles to x.

Trail gossip pretty much corresponded with my disappointing view-everyone had it and everyone hated it. I heard that the Footprints Guide is pretty good. Several people had foldout maps they had gotten at Nevisport in Fort William. That little one page map, which cost about 3-pounds, was more useful than the whole darn book we had. It's even better to walk to the trail without this book- it's well waymarked and the book won't give you any extra knowledge. Just takes up room that could be used for food- which the book fails to make the point that there is really no food en route. Rucksack Reader desperately needs to pay some attention to this wonderful trail and bring its guide up to par with its other publications.

But go and walk the trail! It's 5-star experience- the book just isn't.

Historic castles, spectacular views & the Loch Ness monster.......2002-04-21

Scotland's newest long distance path, the 73 miles/117km long Great Glen Way, links Fort William on the west coast and Inverness on the east coast, and leads walkers through some of Scotland's finest scenery. Highlights include views of Britain's highest mountain, Ben Nevis and two days' walking above Loch Ness, internationally famous as the home of the Monster. The walking certainly isn't for tough mountain climbers - you'll follow canal tow paths, forest tracks and paths for most of the distance.
An ideal companion is Jacquetta Megarry's 64 page, full colour, beautifully illustrated guide, published by Rucksack Readers. It's not a traditional, step-by-step guide but a guide to experiencing the way. The innovative spiral-bound format makes for easy use; it has clear, detailed maps of the whole route and the carefully designed notes are divided into five stages - the number of days most people are likely to take to do the Way.
The many features you'll see along the way and those that you can visit from the villages en route are briefly described.
The guide includes all the info you'll need to organise your walk - transport, food and clothing.
This is one of Scotland's great walks and is well within the reach of anyone who's reasonably fit - and who has a copy of the Rucksack Readers guide in their pocket.

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Great Glen Way
Heather Connon , and Paul Roper
Manufacturer: Mainstream Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 1851588647

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The Great Glen Way
Brian Smailes
Manufacturer: Challenge Publications
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1903568137

Book Description

In his latest book, Vaclav Smil tells the story of the Earth?s biosphere from its origins to its near- and long-term future. He explains the workings of its parts and what is known about their interactions. With essay-like flair, he examines the biosphere?s physics, chemistry, biology, geology, oceanography, energy, climatology, and ecology, as well as the changes caused by human activity. He provides both the basics of the story and surprising asides illustrating critical but often neglected aspects of biospheric complexity.

Smil begins with a history of the modern idea of the biosphere, focusing on the development of the concept by Russian scientist Vladimir Vernadsky. He explores the probability of life elsewhere in the universe, life?s evolution and metabolism, and the biosphere?s extent, mass, productivity, and grand-scale organization. Smil offers fresh approaches to such well-known phenomena as solar radiation and plate tectonics and introduces lesser-known topics such as the quarter-power scaling of animal and plant metabolism across body sizes and metabolic pathways. He also examines two sets of fundamental relationships that have profoundly influenced the evolution of life and the persistence of the biosphere: symbiosis and the role of life?s complexity as a determinant of biomass productivity and resilience. And he voices concern about the future course of human-caused global environmental change, which could compromise the biosphere?s integrity and threaten the survival of modern civilization.

Customer Reviews:

The biosphere.......2007-01-15

A survey of biology (from cell biology to biome-scale ecology) and geography as pertaining to the earth's biosphere - where life on earth came from (as far as it can be known), how it will end, where it has spread, how life affects the natural cycles of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, sulfur and other elements, what are the scaling laws for animals and plants, what is the total biomass of wild mammals, domesticated bovids and humans, and so on. So far as a nonbiologist can understand it, this is very interesting stuff.

The last chapter is about the human influence on the biosphere - human-introduced invasive species (99% of the biomass of the San Francisco Bay), air and water pollution, deforestation and global warming via anthropogenic emission of fossil carbon. I didn't know that the answer to a great many questions about global warming is, "We have no idea", since there are dozens of feedback cycles, both positive and negative, around the increased concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide and its consequences. Will plants photosynthesize more because of greater concentration of carbon dioxide? Some will, some won't. Will the warmer oceans cause the methane hydrates on the ocean floor to melt, releasing large quantities of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, into the athmosphere? Fortunately, we cannot destroy the biosphere; unfortunately, it is within our capabilities to alter it in such a way as to make the earth unlivable for billions of humans.

Smil's Energies is one of the best popular science books I have ever read.

A very useful reference on the Earth's biosphere.......2005-01-03

This is a very readable book about the history and nature of the Earth's biosphere, and ideas about its future.

Smil begins with some fascinating material on the the nature and origin of early life on Earth. That includes a discussion of stromatolites (early life), and some interesting comments about guesses of the odds of life appearing in a stellar system in the Galaxy. While estimates that hold the chances to be small are taken seriously, Fred Hoyle's argument that the chance is outrageously small is shown to be silly.

The author then describes the nature and diversity of life in general, and its resiliance to a variety of natural catastrophes, including bolide impacts and supernovae.

Smil tells us about how the biosphere is energized, by solar radiation and the Earth's internal heat. And we then see the flows of water and materials, including carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, and other mineral cycles. The next two chapters deal with the extent of the biosphere and the biosphere's mass and productivity. There are organisms that range up to 50 km above the surface of our planet, or to the bottom of the oceans, nearly 11 km down. To tens of meters below the land surface. And at temperatures ranging from 110 degrees Celsius to minus 50. pH ranges can be from 1 to 11. Meanwhile, the biomass may be anywhere from 2200 to 4000 Gigatons of Carbon.

There is a chapter on the dynamics and organization of the biosphere, including the quarter-power scaling of animal and plant metabolism "that applies across an entire range of body sizes and metabolic pathways."

After that, Smil discusses the transformation of the biosphere due to human actions, such as the release of sulfur, nitrogen, and carbon into the atmosphere. The book concludes with some ideas about the future of the biosphere. He speculates that the Earth's population will stabilize at well below 10 billion people and that there needs to be a transition "from fossil fuels to solar radiation as the dominant source of human energy needs." Meanwhile, there are problems to face: we humans are awfully prone to violence, there may be a new ice age, we could be hit by a big bolide, and so forth. Still, the author is mentions that the biosphere might prove surprisingly resiliant to what is being done to it at present.

There are a few useful appendices, covering milestones in the evolution of the Earth and its biosphere, sizes and masses of organisms, chemical reactions in the carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur cycles, and ocean and land estimates of the biosphere's phytomass, heterotrophic biomass, and net primary productivity, There's also a list of useful websites.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the topic.

A Masterful Survey.......2004-10-05

Vaclav Smil is a geographer, and tries to get some perspective on the life of our planet by taking the large view. This entails a sacrifice of depth to get the necessary breadth. But the task he has set himself is still to provide sufficient rigorous detail on the topics he includes (bichemistry, energetics, geology, geochemistry, etc.) to give the reader a basis for useful understanding of the complex thing that is the biosphere. It is necessary, as he asserts in his preface, to synthesize rather than specialize if we are to address the pressing questions about our living environment, which sprawls -- physically and intellectually -- over the whole world. And if you follow the references -- or just leaf through the bibliography -- you must come to realize the immense amount of learning and research that undergird this presentation.

The patron saint of this volume is the early 20th-century Russian scientist Vladimir Vernadsky, who was the first to use the term "biosphere" (actually, "biosphera") in the grand and inclusive way that the rest of the world is now getting around to doing. He calculated (or estimated or guessed) the primary productivity of the green world, the standing biomass divided into its varous categories of land and water autotrophs and heterotrophs, the interrelationships between life, the sun's energy, the composition and behaviors of sea and air, and the grand geochemical cycles. And Vernadsky was hopeful: he expected a planet-wide consciousness to arise that would manage the biosphere intelligently.

Since then, hope has waned as our knowledge and power have grown. Humanity is stressing the systems of life as much, perhaps, as any catastophe in Earth's long history. Yet this book is a hopeful gesture: it is an attempt to get a grip on the issues in play so we can act with some effect to reverse or slow the degradation of the air, land, and waters, and to restore nature to a state of robust health -- or at least to give nature some breathing room. Smil has chosen to treat in detail the questions of the origins of life, its possible existence elsewhere, and its fundamental biochemistry. He talks about life in the mass -- as a storehouse for sunlight, and as a participant in the great cycles of material through the atmosphere, waters, within the mantle of the earth, and out again. He talks about the physical constraints on life's productivity, the dynamics and organization of the biosphere. And always he is concerned with magnitudes and their relationships: it is not enough to discuss the amount of plankton in the oceans as an isolated fact. Rather, its mass and its turnover, its powers of energy sequestration, should be compared to those of land plants, and productive and unproductive sea areas contrasted.

It is implicit in this approach that the numbers matter. We must know the size and extent of things that we wish to affect or to stop adversely affecting. After all, without some sense of the magnitude of the particular flows of material or requirements of particular facets of the living world, we can waste our efforts on what amount to side issues. However, I wish the presentation had been more user-friendly: many of the charts and graphs were lifted from technical publications, and the others had that feel. The ultimate goal of all this numerizing should be -- let's face it -- a sort of pictoral understanding. To that end, I would have liked some synthesizing graphics that showed (maybe with fat arrows and thin arrows, big, little and even teeny-tiny barrels (or trees or bugs...)) how facets of the system compared, and at a glance showed the relative "importance" of things.

I know that mere magnitude is not always a safe guide to how important something is in the workings of the world. A rather small quantity of CFC's in the stratosphere has had immense effect, for counterexample. Small amounts of bottleneck chemicals like phosphorous control the richness of life in otherwise productive areas. And how unimportant is a rare -- and biospherically useless -- species?

Anyway, I cheer this parade of fact backed by much research and aided immensely by our current generation of planet-spanning monitoring devices. This is hard science, and it gives us baselines and error ranges, without which all discussion finally devolves into opinion and political posturing. Yet, when the last graph is in place, we go right on despoiling the world. The problem is not so much a technical difficulty as it is a matter of societal will. Smil admits as much in his last chapter. All that has gone before is not even really prelude. Without the active cooperation of the political entities that partition this vast human herd the environment cannot be saved. This is the hard part. It is rather a letdown, getting to this point in the book, to realize that science is powerless in the face of a desire to ignore it.

Rich with connections between ideas.......2004-01-05

This is less a review of the book then a plea for more people to read it. Like an idiot, I loaned my new copy of this book to a friend after just reading through it once. I'll be buying another, and keeping it.

Smil connects so many ideas together here that you might find yourself thinking that the dynamics of an interconnected biosphere are obvious. I suppose that's the highest praise I can offer. Complex interactions within geology, geography, chemistry and evolution are made clear in this book. The writing is bright, interesting and yet dense with information. This is large scale popular science writing at its best.

The Earth's Biosphere: Evolution, Dynamics, and Change

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The Earth's Biosphere: Evolution, Dynamics, and Change
Vaclav Smil
Manufacturer: The MIT Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OQHGTI

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The Earth's Biosphere: Evolution, Dynamics, and Change
Vaclav Smil
Manufacturer: The MIT Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OQNPTS

Book Description

The investigation of nonlinear phenomena in acoustics has a rich history stretching back to the mechanical physical sciences in the nineteenth century. The study of nonlinear phenomena, such as explosions and jet engines, prompted the sharp growth of interest in nonlinear acoustic phenomena. In this book, the authors consider models of different "acoustic" media as well as equations and behavior of finite-amplitude waves. The authors also consider the effects of nonlinearity, dissipation, dispersion, and for two- and three-dimensional problems, reflection and diffraction on the evolution and interaction of acoustic beams. This book will be of interest not only to specialists in acoustics, but also to a wide audience of mathematicians, physicists, and engineers working on nonlinear waves in various physical systems.

Book Description

Rich, varied collection of 14 extraordinary Victorian and Edwardian crime stories, many never before published in book form: Kipling's "The Return of Imray"; "The Tragedy of the Life Raft" by Jacques Futrelle; "The Copper Beeches" by Arthur Conan Doyle, plus hard-to-find tales by G. K. Chesterton, Catherine L. Pirkis, Silas K. Hocking, others.

Customer Reviews:

Eclectic Collection.......2004-08-03

Editor Douglas Greene has gathered an eclectic set of Victorian mysteries that is sure to please fans of Victorian literature. Many of these authors are long out of print, and there were several with whom I was completely unfamiliar.

There were of course, stories by Doyle, Orczy and Chesterton to represent the more traditional favorites--Chesterton's "The Eye of Apollo" is especially excellent. Several of the other stories were surprisingly deep and well-written, though there were also a few truly dreadfully written stories, that were quite popular in their day, and reading them was fun in a different way. (I'll not give my opinion as to which stories were which, so as not to influence other readers.)

Overall, this is an excellent set of Victorian stories, giving a wide range of styles and tastes, with a short biography of the author at the start of the story. For anyone who enjoys Victorian lit, these stories (especially the lesser known gems among them) will make a wonderful read.

There's always only one Holmes........1999-08-14

This is an anthology of detective stories in Victorian era, when Holmes and Watson were actively investigating. However, Holmes fans will still be rather disappointed because most are featuring rather commonplace detectives showing off in front of the dumb. Nevertheless, there is still some intelligence in the detectives, which is rarely found in their modern world collegues.

Superlative collection.......1998-05-03

Having spent years combing the used bookstores from Maine to Florida for Victorian era detective fiction, I can vouch for the superlative quality of this collection. You would probably have to time-travel in order to find so many intriguing stories all in one place-including a rare gem by R. Austin Freeman which apparently has never been published before in the United States. The editor is Edgar award-winning author Douglas G. Greene, considered by many the foremost authority on classic detective fiction today. The introductory essay alone is worth the price of the book. Thanks again, Dover-and thanks again, Douglas Greene.

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