This is, quite simply, the best set of pictures of North America's west-coast maritime forests that I have come across. These forests are interesting, beautiful, and abundantly alive; they are also very hard to photograph. Through the lens they can seem messy and disordered. The unaided human eye screens out extraneous clutter, but the camera eye does not. There is order there, of course, but it is a chaotic sort of order, with many levels of order-within-disorder. Some photographers strive for excessively neat, tidy compositions, which give an entirely misleading impression of these forests; Graham, on the other hand, conveys the rhythms within the disorder. Many of the pictures are texture-rich without a sharp focus of interest. It is a style well suited to the subject. The text by Wade Davis, what there is of it, is good, but this is most definitely a picture book first.

This book is really special. Ok I am a mate of Graham's which some might see as a bias - but this book is oustanding none the less. Osborne is a biologist (infact a botanist) by trade I believe. It simply doens't matter though, because clearly what he does best is take photos. *Very* good photos. I don't mean as in 'Oh, thats a nice photo' as my mum would say to me when from four packets of snaps I produced one relatively balanced composition. I mean as in drop-that-frying pan, walk-into-that lampost, draw droppingly good photographs. This guy has had three or four calanders of his work produced for goodness sake. The book, which, ok I admit, he gave me, is always on my coffee table, and I must confess, I have chopped up the calendars and made them into nice framed pictures.

Reasons to buy it:

i) it will enhance your life ii) it will take your breath away iii) it is pretty reasonably priced

reasons not to buy it..

i) you hate temporate rainforests...

I read this book when I was very young and it has stayed very close to my heart for many years. Even now at 21 I am desperately looking for a copy. This book was the first book to make me cry all those years ago and it made me realize the power of reading. Thank you Mary Pope Osborne for givong me the gift to love books. I search in anticipation for another book to move me so.

I remembering reading this book when i was like ten and even though the years have gone by, it still remains one of my favourites. The story takes a grab of you and almostly instantly you feel for the characters ups and downs,happy moments and heartbreaks and trials that few humans go through on a daily basis. Pick it up and you will never let it go.....

I have scoliosis and just recently had A/P spinal fusion at the age of 50. I searched everywhere and bought severals books before I chose a doctor and had the surgery. I found this book to be the best and most helpful. It is critical for patients to understand and expect what this surgery means.

Michael Neuwirth has done an excellent job of covering just about everything patients and their caretakers need to know about scoliosis and its treatment. Although there were a few times where I noted Dr. Neuwirth's treatment is different than the treatment received in this part of the country, in general, his wisdom and advise is right on. I'm grateful for such a thorough text to which I can refer.

This is a wonderfully written book. Wilson compacts so much information into sentence after sentence that one cannot help but understand how he is one of the twentieth centuries greatest thinkers. This is an astoundingly detailed, thorough, and demanding publication requiring a scientifically literate audience. It covers basic concepts from altruism, selfishness (a component of all behavior), and spite; including communication, aggression, social roles, sex, and parenting from "invertebrates" to vertebrates. Sentences must be reread many times, but this is simply an artifact of the readers' incompetence. Wilson is simply an astonishing biologist...

an excellent book. although alot of parts may be hard to understand it is relatively easier than the unabridged version.

get this if your intrested in biology

This book does a wonderfull job of depicting the struggles involved in raising a family & building a farm on the great plains. Just 3 or 4 generations ago many of our own families were living the same life as the Ise's.

You can get so lost in this story that you will laugh and cry with the family as they go through the years.through birth and death rain and shine you will enjoy every line of this book.I got a real feeling of what it must have been like to settle the country, and the early years of this century. now that we are leaving the 1900's in the space age learn what it started out like.

This book was very good. It was very interesting. There was always a question in the beginning or middle of the book, but at the end all the questions are answered. My mom got it for me because I liked the Magic Treehouse books so much. I didn't think I was interested till my mother bought it for me but when I started reading it was great. The whole book is about bugs! Everyone in the book is a bug, except Spider Kane, who you can guess is a spider.

I thought this was going to be just another book that my mom and I would read for school but this turned out to be the best book I ever read sending me on a quest for any other spider Kane books. Spider Kane and his band of the MOTH are the coolest bugs ever tracking missing gold and going under cover to help other bugs. I loved the mystry! I loved the suspence I just loved this book. Spider Kane can do anything he is awesome. I wish there were more books to read about him. I couldn't put this book down we read it in 5 days then I lent it out to my friends. Then I read Under the May Apple Tree and I need more, my mom says Mary Pope Osborn is a genius because this is my summer vacation and I'm begging to read this series.

Have given this book out to U-6 and U-8 teams as an end-of-season "favor." The kids love it. And it teaches the basics in a way that even the most soccer-challenged parent can understand.

I have coached soccer for 4 years and always had the nagging suspicion that I had no idea of what I was doing. I knew the concepts and I knew the kids but I didn't know how to bring the two together.

This book is great for kids who need something to learn from and it is great for a coach who needs a quick and easy method of bringing a lesson plan together.

Good work!

It was a bit of a shock for me to read this book, because I had already been exposed to the random walks idea long before I found it. I had already learned about Black-Scholes-Merton and had read about "The Holes in Black-Scholes" (that's the name of a paper by Fischer Black). But here we have a physicist who dissected the ideas of economists (mostly statistical ideas) in the 1960s and 1970s, and anticipated a lot of what has been done since.

Osborne repeatedly picks at assumptions that have tripped up those who blindly misapply BSM, such as the idea of "continuous markets". His section on market making is better than anything else I have read on the subject (though I have not been able to find much on this subject). It illustrates that market makers create the illusion of continuity on a price chart, and for them to function the way they do, the market either must have "down time" or they must be able to halt the market occasionally and restart it (or both).

This book is very rough: it's a collection of lecture notes, and the pictures are drawn by hand. This will make any reader uncomfortable who insists on having everything look like it came out of PowerPoint or Mathematica. Younger readers who don't remember what life was like before computers were common would probably find it quaint.

Osborne was a physicist who observed that stock prices appear to be distributed lognormally. Mandelbrot pointed out a year later (1963) that this can't be true, that price distributions look Paretian, have exponentially decaying tails with infinite standard deviation. However, no one has yet been able to turn Mandelbrot's observation about asymptotics of market prices into trading rules (what are the dynamics?). In contrast, the Black-Scholes model, the mathematics of derivatives and option-pricing, follows from the lognormal approximation (see Hull, e.g.). Traders who make money apparently don't use academic option pricing theory (it underprices out of the money trades), but texts and scads of academic papers are written using it because no one knows how to do anything else yet.

Lognormality is the last part of Osborne's book. The first chapters are even more interesting. There, Osborne tears the 'mathemology' of Samuelson's Economics text to shreds by pointing out that the famous supply-demand curve can't be constructed from any sort of data. The main point is that price does not exist as a function of either supply or demand. Example: suppose that 25 tomatoes are available (supply). What's the price? Answer: anything or nothing (nonuniqueness). Even better, Osborne shows that one can obtain data on both supply and demand as a function of price, so that discrete (noncontinuous) supply and demand curves can be plotted for a given commodity in a given market. What a pity that Osborne did not set his mind to discussing 'utility', because (as Mirowski points out in "More heat than light) the differential form that defines utility is generally nonintegrable, meaning that utility dooes not exist. Samuelson wrote papers trying to get around this in the 50's, but the correct underpinning of General Equilibrium Theory was never established. Osborne rightfully points out that people who believe in the approximation of continous price changes and efficient markets are grist for the mill of traders who use just the opposite assumptions to make money off them every day.

I wish that economics students would be required to read Osborne and Mirowski, but that isn't likely to happen. Meanwhile, the Fed keeps hiring those guys to crunch questionable numbers using the CAPM and similar stuff.

They call it "Successful Manager's Handbook". That is correct. But one thing you should know about this beautifully structured text is that it benefits anyone who seeks knowledge from it. Thus, I would not advise you to wait until you become a 'successful manager' before paying attention to it.
Even if you are the most unsuccessful messenger around, the valuable productivity guidelines in this book would go a long way in defining and improving your status. If diligently applied, the principles of this book would enhance your overall potentials: be it official or domestic.
This book is a handbook for all. It is an asset for matured dealings.

I just picked up a copy in an airport bookstore. I looked at one suggestion, and used it when I got back to the office. My productivity has skyrocketed. I think a lot of the suggestions here are commonsense. But do any of us have enough commonsense?

Magnificent book. A wonderful introduction to Maharshi and his teachings. Makes you feel who the man was, what he meant, how your life can be transformed. Never boring, exciting reading. You will not regret buying this one. To be read over and over again when you feel you lose touch...

Send me a copy of the book, and I'll gladly review it, as would any academician.

Jeremy Horne, Ph.D. jhorne1@hotmail.com

(Please do not release my name to would-be spammers.)