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List Price: £16.99
Our Price: £9.14
Author:
Ray Gibson, Ben Hextall, Alex Rogers
By OUP Oxford
 Easy identification,good for amateurs like me., 2001-10-26
I am interested in sea and shore life but I need a book which is easy to use, one that I can understand and which actually does help me identify what I see. We keep a copy on our boat and thanks to the photographs I have "discovered" new jellyfish and crabs.This book made me want to learn more about the wealth under our keel and on the shore when we reach harbour. Congratulations to the trio responsible for this quality guide.
Mary Reed
List Price: £32.50
Our Price: £24.50
Author:
Roger Barry, Richard Chorley
By Routledge
A classic, 2007-12-09
The number of decades this book has been in print speaks for itself - it is a classic in its field. Barry and Chorley manage to explain things clearly and simply, but without 'dumbing things down.' However, it does cover a lot of material, so if you're looking for in depth information on a particular topic or you already have a fairly good knowledge of meteorology you'd probably be better off looking in a more specialist textbook. As an intro to weather and climate though it can't be beaten - in fact it was coming across the first edition of this book that influenced me to study geography at uni.
List Price: £9.95
Our Price: £5.10
Author:
D Macdougall
By University of California Press
Frozen Earth Review, 2007-02-14
In these days of media hype about global warming this book by Doug Macdougall is a breath of fresh air. It is clear, easily read by anyone and brings all the facts of our past ice ages together. I have read a number of books on this subject and this is without doubt one of the best.
List Price: £14.99
Our Price: £7.69
Author:
David Beerling
By OUP Oxford
Arranging carts and horses, 2007-07-30
For many years, as fossil plants emerged from the rocks, it was believed that these records reflected changes in climate. Plants, it was assumed, had to adapt to variations in weather and other conditions. According to Beerling, plant life was instead the major prompter of climate change. The balance of atmospheric gases was determined by the micro-organisms floating in the seas. The ability to absorb carbon dioxide, coupled with the use of sunlight to convert that into nutrients gives plants the power to shift gas quantities. During the early days, plants exhaled oxygen. It was poison to most organisms, but those capable of using it began the drive leading to today's life. In this useful survey of all the forces forming today's world, Beerling traces how plants "changed Earth's history". Following his thesis requires the reader's close attention, since the organisation of the material is necessarily loose - not fixed chronology nor subject. The many topics to cover cannot be neatly niched.
To the author, the biggest mystery lies in the long delay between plants colonising the land and the formation of the first leaves. Leaf structure reflects how the plant is using energy. That, in turn, becomes a signal of how the atmosphere is composed at any given time. This knowledge was assembled over many years through the work of many researchers. Beerling traces the building of data resources and how the information was interpreted. Images of leaves and stems, analysis of the rock chemistry, field observations and laboratory experiments all contributed to the picture of plant evolution. Numerous surprises emerged, sometimes leading scholars to doubt the data and even their methodology. Looking at the life of plants down the ages is, as he puts it, looking "Through a glass darkly". Pervading his presentation is what the implications are for what is occurring in today's atmosphere - on which our life and those of our children, depends.
Beerling deems investigations into ancient atmospheres a form of "breathalyser", such as the police apply to suspected impaired drivers. In this case, however, it's not alcohol fumes that are measured, but carbon dioxide. Other gases are also sought, but they don't often leave sufficient clues. The information must be derived indirectly. Again, it's the plant's leaves that are used as the pointers to how ancient atmospheres fluctuated. Underlying the variations is the mighty force of plate tectonics. The shifting of land masses and changes in surface configuration leads plants to shift their survival strategies. Acting far more rapidly than creeping continents, the ability of plants to accelerate or impair rock weathering shifts the presence of gas quantities. Carbon dioxide quantities have varied markedly, leading to most of the world's history being warm times. Only recently - in geologic terms - has the planet experienced a cool era, which led to the "ice age" that scoured the Northern Hemisphere with massive glaciers.
As with so much in science, the revelation that plants drive climate instead of passively responding to it has produced at least as many questions as answers. There are anomalous circumstances that must be unravelled. The knowledge gained has led to the formation of "Earth system analysis" techniques using various forms of computer modelling. Many details, however, remain to be worked out. Atmostpheric studies are particularly impaired by lack of knowledge of cloud formation and distribution. Carbon itself, both as a greenhouse gas and as a component of plant growth, remains enigmatic. Beerling traces the selectivity of plants in choosing which carbon isotope will be utilised. That choice has impact on which plants will become dominant in a given area, which also has implications for the animal life living from them. There are no simple nor ready answers to what plants have meant in tracing life's development. Yet, as he emphasises frequently, these are questions that must be addressed further, and that, soon. Understanding our atmosphere is essential to our future. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]
List Price: £4.95
Our Price: £2.45
Author:
Richard Edmonds
By Dovecote Press
Fossils, 2003-03-24
An easy read that is very informative about fossil hunting on the dorset coast,lots of details about how to collect and look after fossils and the best places to find them.Also good photographs to accompany the text.
List Price: £4.79
Our Price: £1.39
Author:
Louis D. Rubin, Jim Duncan, Hiram J Herbert
By Workman Publishing
 A complete easy to pocket carry weather forecasting book, 2002-01-01
The weather Wizards Cloud book lives up to it's name by explaining in an easy to understand way how to predict the weather by looking at clouds.
The novice will learn exactly what clouds are, what they consist off and why they are formed. The book also gives a overal general guide into the science of what our weather really is. Owing to the nature of the book it is assencial to have numerous photographs of clouds. The author has supplied excellent photographic examples of clouds. However I feel the book suffers by the lack of full page colour photographs and would have been worth the extra expence to have produced more pages to accomadate them.
List Price: £37.50
Our Price: £26.54
Author:
Tim Ormsby
By ESRI Press
...and getting to like ArcGIS!, 2002-07-04
As a software instructor I was very impressed with the structure and clear content of this book. I recommend it to everyone who wants to taste GIS. Although, you must have some interest in spatial analysis and geographical issues. The exercises are very well chosen and explained, guiding you through the trial copy of the ArcGIS software, which is included in this textbook and enables you to achieve a very good basic knowledge. Good enough to make you want more!!
List Price: £8.99
Our Price: £1.47
Author:
Simon Winchester
By Penguin Books Ltd
Simon Winchester has a very simple formula, of which The Map That Changed the World is a perfect example--namely that the history we have forgotten is infinitely more interesting than the history with which we are all familiar. After the success of The Surgeon of Crowthorne, which documented the life of WC Minor, the American surgeon and major contributor to the first Oxford English Dictionary, Winchester now turns his attention to William Smith, the 19th-century Briton who can justly lay claim to being the founding father of geology. The book has all the usual attributes of a pacy historical read: a self-educated, unrecognised scientist spends years roaming the British countryside, compiling a map of the geological layers beneath the surface, only to have his ideas ripped off and to wind up homeless and penniless in Yorkshire with a wife who is going bonkers. And it gets better: in a bizarre Dickensian twist, Smith finally gets his just accolades when he is recognised by a kindly liberal nobleman and is reintroduced to London society as the geologist par excellence. Of itself, the story would be more than enough recommendation but there is a subtext runnin...
 Interesting but flawed biography , 2007-01-10
Simon Winchester tells the largely forgotten story of self-taught geologist William Smith, the father of modern geology. Though the "barely educated lower middle class scholar takes on academic and social establishments and (eventually) wins" formula is not exactly original, the book is pacy enough and the human and scientific interests well balanced enough to keep it an enthralling read.
William Smith was the son of an Oxfordshire blacksmith. His childhood fascination with rocks and fossils led to his employment as a surveyor of mines and builder of canals, and to his discovery that the rocks of his native county lay in strata, always in the same order and always bearing the same unique fossils in each layer. He theorised that this pattern would be replicated throughout Britain, and that the fossils themselves showed that the layers of rocks were layed down at different times. Though to the twenty-first century, this does not sound very revolutionary, to the late eighteenth, before Darwin and when Bishop Ussher's dating of the divine creation of the Earth to 4004 B.C. was still popularly accepted, it was unheard of.
Smith's reputation spread, and soon his professional services were in demand throughout the country, allowing him also to test his geological theories; he astonished his patrons by being able to predict almost on sight whether their lands held coal strata. His plan was to produce a map of the geology of the entire British Isles.
Unfortunately, financial imprudence and lack of social standing, as well as possibly the stigma of an apparently insane wife and the professional jealously of his rivals, damaged Smith's career to such an extent that he was imprisoned for debt. These circumstances are not so well covered by Winchester; I suspect that Smith's diary is by so much the primary source here that he is only able to retell the story Smith himself recorded. The details of the "nymphomaniac" wife, for example, are particularly scanty.
This is unfortunate. For the most part, the book is very lively, easy to read, and Smith's story seems to hold a personal fascination for Winchester. In part, this is explained by a central chapter containing a childhood memoir from the author, on his finding of an ammonite on a Dorset beach; this did, I have to say, sit rather uncomfortably in the middle of Smith's biography; it might just have worked better as a prologue. And the assertion that amateur palaeontology is "no more than the mark of the nerd" is hardly appropriate in such a book! We forgive Winchester his failings though; we are too busy routing for Smith.
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