Books
Category archives for Books
It’s fall. Time to start hoarding bird books.
Posted by Greg Laden on October 24, 2011 Here in the Northern Hemisphere, many of our birds fly away in the fall. Other, very cool birds from even farther north, depending on where you live then arrive. But just about now, where I live, we are at the tail end of the migration out and not quite at the migration in, so this…
You come from Cannibals
Posted by Greg Laden on September 28, 2011 A man “lies crumpled on the sand … Behind him a dark trail leads back to the spot from which he has just been dragged. Looking closer, we notice something slightly odd about the figure crouching over the wounded man. His posture does not suggest a doctor attempting to staunch bleeding, or even to check…
A List Of Lisp and Emacs Books
Posted by Greg Laden on September 26, 2011 Land of Lisp: Learn to Program in Lisp, One Game at a Time! is a book about lisp programming. If you are into programming for fun, artificial intelligence, role playing games, or an emacs user, you should take a look at this book. I’ve got some info on this book as well as a few…
Evolution Book for Kids
Posted by Greg Laden on September 24, 2011 Evolution: How We and All Living Things Came to Be, a kids evolution book, has won the 2010 Lane Anderson Award. The reason I mention this is because of this blog post which discusses how the book is published in Canada but not the US. This bit of the post is interesting: Loxton has reported…
Your Inner Fish
Posted by Greg Laden on September 22, 2011 Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body is a book you should read. With one small caveat I’ll give you below, it can be used as a behind-the-desk supplement for teachers of anatomy or any kind of organismic biology in High School or Intro College. It can be assigned…
The Species Seekers: Free Book Chapter!!!!
Posted by Greg Laden on September 13, 2011 The Species Seekers: Heroes, Fools, and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth sounds like a cool book, though I’ve not read it yet. From Publisher’s Weekly: Until about 1834, the word “scientist” didn’t exist. According to naturalist Conniff (Swimming with Piranhas at Feeding Time), it was likely at a meeting of the British Association…
Created Equal
Posted by Greg Laden on August 28, 2011 I am not specifically recommending the book Created Equal becuase I’ve never seen it up close and cannot vouch for its qualities (and it is not cheap) but it was mentioned, with several photographs from the book, here, some time ago. In Created Equal, photographer Mark Laita pairs images that are in some way “opposite”…
Living Dinosaurs: The Evolutionary History of Modern Birds
Posted by Greg Laden on June 15, 2011 Living Dinosaurs: The Evolutionary History of Modern Birds is an academic anthology of key writing about bird evolution. There are two main things that distinguish this book: 1) It includes quite a bit on fossils and their bearing on bird evolution, a refreshing change from DNA-based phylogenies which can by and large only address later…
The Birds of New Jersey
Posted by Greg Laden on June 8, 2011 I’ve recently reviewed bird or nature books for some fairly exotic places (see this for all the reviews) including the Antarctic and the West Indies. Now, I have a book on the birds of one of the most exotic places ever: New Jersey! OK, if you are from New York like I am, you know…
Antarctic Wildlife: A Visitor’s Guide
Posted by Greg Laden on June 6, 2011 I’m sitting here looking at Antarctic Wildlife: A Visitor’s Guide. I’ve never been to the Antarctic so I can’t tell you what I think of this book from the pragmatic angle of how well it works as a guide, but I can tell you that I’ve learned a number of things just looking at the…
A Bend in the River: Get Bent
Posted by Greg Laden on June 3, 2011 On of my favorite books is A Bend in the River by V. S. Naipaul. It is a story set in at the junction of a native and expat community in an African rain forest country with a not very despotic leader (the “Big Man”) at a time when a civil war was about to…
Guide to Birds of the West Indies
Posted by Greg Laden on June 2, 2011 The West Indies includes the Lucayan Archipelago (Bahamas and Turks and Caicos Islands); the Greater Antilles (Cuba, Hispaniola [Dominican Republic and Haiti], Jamaica, Cayman Islands); the Lesser Antilles (Leeward Islands [the Virgin Islands of Saint Croix, Saint Thomas, Saint John, Water Island, Tortola, Virgin Gorda, Anegada, Jost Van Dyke], Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Antigua, Barbuda,…
The Birder’s Handbook
Posted by Greg Laden on June 1, 2011 I recommend The Birder’s Handbook: A Field Guide to the Natural History of North American Birds. It was written by three serious bird experts and it will serve any bird watcher in North America very well. Here’s how you use it. You go bird watching and later, you look up one or two of the…
“Monkeys on our backs” by Richard Tokumei will not even make good toilet paper
Posted by Greg Laden on May 29, 2011 Richard Tokumei has written a book that is so bad he is ashamed to put his own name on it. “Richard Tokumei” is the pen name of a ‘writer/editor in Southern California [with] degrees in Humanities and Phychology from the University of California Berkeley” and he has produced a book designed to anger everyone who…
No Way Home
Posted by Greg Laden on May 26, 2011 When wildebeest, such as those famous for crossing the Mara River in Tanzania during their annual migration, run into a crocodile or some other danger it is often the first time they’ve seen that particular thing. This is because most wildebeest don’t live very long so many are on their very first migration. One wonders…
Bird Migration and Global Change
Posted by Greg Laden on May 25, 2011 I’m going to have more to say about this topic and this book at a later time, but I wanted to get a notice of it out for Migration Week. Bird Migration and Global Change by George W. Cox addresses the issue of impact on bird populations under conditions of global warming. This is an…
How Birds Migrate
Posted by Greg Laden on May 24, 2011 As part of Migration Week (inspired by this post), I’m covering migration related books (mainly having to do with birds). How Birds Migrate by Paul Kerlinger (with Illustrations by Pat Archer), Second Edition, is an affordable, up to date (2009 publication) comprehensive and intelligently written book. It is written for the general public but is…
Summer Reading Suggestions: Science
Posted by Greg Laden on May 23, 2011 Here is a short list of what you should read this summer in science and science related topics. Some are old, some are new. There is a lot missing from this list, I’m sure, but the summer is short here in Minnesota and we’ll be busy with the corn, so there is not much time.…
Three Academic Books on Bird Migration
Posted by Greg Laden on May 22, 2011 These are the kinds of books you get if you are either a scientists studying bird migration and related issues, or a very serious bird geek. The first two can be obtained at very low prices used, but the third will set you back at least 50 bucks US$ if you want a used copy.…
On the Wing: American Birds in Migration
Posted by Greg Laden on May 21, 2011 On the Wing: American Birds in Migration is a children’s book suitable for up to Middle School or thereabouts. Remarkably, this ten year old volume is actually fairly accurate and comprehensible, covering most of the major aspects of bird migration, discussion ecological patterns, mechanisms, and methods used to study the phenomenon. It is written and…
On the Move
Posted by Greg Laden on May 20, 2011 On the Move: How and Why Animals Travel in Groups, edited by Sue Boinski and Paul Garber is a compendium of academic research on … well, on how and why animals travel in groups. Notice of this book is a fitting start to a series of reviews of migration-related books that is part of Migration…
The Paleolithic Prescription: A Program of Diet & Exercise and a Design for Living
Posted by Greg Laden on May 10, 2011 A lot of paleolithic diet and exercise books, many how to be a hunter-gatherer guides for the suburbanites, and numerous biologically-based-sounding self-help volumes based mainly on woo have been produced since The Paleolithic Prescription: A Program of Diet & Exercise and a Design for Living was published in 1989. To my knowledge, none of the…
Bring your birding to the next level
Posted by Greg Laden on April 20, 2011 Description and identification of birds, or anything else, can be done in a rote manner with straightforward reference to details. If information about enough details is available, the identification will be accurate. But as humans we hardly ever do that sort of thing. If you ask someone to describe a car they saw recently, they…
Read The Kraken!!!!!!
Posted by Greg Laden on April 15, 2011 Kraken: The Curious, Exciting, and Slightly Disturbing Science of Squid by Wendy Williams is a new book on the science of squid. I wondered at first why a popular science book would be named after a legendary creature (the Kraken) but when I read the book and also read up on The Kraken it became…
Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries
Posted by Greg Laden on March 29, 2011 Yes, yes, I know … Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries by Neil deGrasse Tyson did not just come out, and it is not part of any current news story, so I’m not supposed to mention it in a blog post, because blog posts are only about things that happened during the last…
How To Identify Hawks at a Distance (and a recommendation on binoculars)
Posted by Greg Laden on March 23, 2011 Imma let you hear all about how Hawks at a Distance: Identification of Migrant Raptors is a remarkable and important field guide, but first I want to mention that one of the most interesting parts of that guide is the forward by Pete Dunne, who himself has written a bird book or two. Dunne reviews…
Death of a Russian Cosmonaut
Posted by Greg Laden on March 19, 2011 Starman: The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin is coming out next month and it sounds pretty amazing. …The space vehicle is shoddily constructed, running dangerously low on fuel; its parachutes — though no one knows this — won’t work and the cosmonaut, Vladimir Komarov, is about to, literally, crash full speed into Earth,…
Your next bird book: The Crossley ID Guide (Eastern Birds)
Posted by Greg Laden on March 11, 2011 Three days ago I happen to glance out the front window of our townhouse and found myself staring at a bald eagle swooping by, presumably after picking up one of the neighborhood dogs or small children1 A few minutes later, the doorbell rang. When I opened the door, no one was there but a package…
How to mine data from the Internet for free
Posted by Greg Laden on February 25, 2011 A few years ago I did something utterly stupid. I listened to someone’s advice. Now, I don’t want to sound too cynical, but really, half or more of what people tell you is, shall we say, unconsidered. They don’t stop and think that they are actually telling you something that will affect what you do…
How to make the most out of Facebook
Posted by Greg Laden on February 24, 2011 Facebook: The Missing Manual in its third edition dated February 2011, so this is the time to get it and use it because it won’t stay up to date long
, which is now available for the 
