Author: Paul Selden, John Nudds
By Manson Publishing Ltd

Author: Open University
By Butterworth-Heinemann

Technical but informative, 2003-09-06
Having read this book for the OU course it was compulsory! Like all OU books it takes you through the theory and explains things in laymans terms.
The questions aren't always easy but its not a particularly easy subject. Ideal if you want to go to University to study Oceanography & you want an idea of what you are in for!

Author: John Steinbeck
By Penguin Classics

Great read, 2008-06-20

I read this book when I was 14 and I am now 28 and I have just finished re-reading it (I have never re-read a book) and it was great. Steinbeck really knows how to make characters and areas come alive. Whilst reading this book you cant help but feel your in a boat doing some fishing with the beautiful California sun glistening of the Gulf of Mexico.

I cant stress how excellent this book is, and I feel sad for anyone who doesnt enjoy it and find the charaters interesting. This is one of the best books by one of the best authors in the twentieth century.

Author: Peter Morris, Riki Therivel
By Routledge

Brilliant, 2008-02-26
Excellent book! Really well laid out, good glossary and an easy to use index (which not all text books manage!). Anyone studying conservation/habitat management/ecology would really benefit from owning this. It has some brilliant chapters including a chapter on: Ecology; Fresh Water Ecology and Coastal Ecology and Geomorphology. There's also a whole appendix of Habitat, vegetation and land classifications (including critiques) and another on Phase 2-3 ecological sampling. Brilliant!

Author: Tony Hallam
By OUP Oxford

Author: Mark Lynas
By HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

Furthering the environmental dialogue, HIGH TIDE is far from a primer, ladies & gentlemen...far from it!, 2006-11-02
One of the best things I enjoyed about reading HIGH TIDE, I believe, was a remark author Mark Lynas made somewhere towards the end of this book. It's placement was entirely not the issue--perhaps even random, it was--but its content impressed upon me something vital and rather deeply, at that.

Lynas shared his initial concern over his lack of "complete scientific justification" for many of the things he was discussing with other professionals in the field. At certain points along his journey from enviro-curious to enviro-conscious, it caused him to question his overall motives, internalizing the criticisms he occasionally received from colleagues, friends, and family who began to perhaps think of him as something of a radical fundamentalist, environmentally-speaking.

Lynas told us how he felt slightly emasculated by some of the larger minds in the global environmental movement, and how if he were to take up the mantle of environmentalism, cleaner living, and self-limiting lifestyle techniques, thereby curbing his own contribution to the global carbon sink, how he'd potentially be branded by these same people a dilettante, a novice, a dabbler...even worse.

I'd have to admit that *this* was the line which clinched HIGH TIDE's premise for yours truly.

This--despite all of the fascinating accounts of Mark's globetrotting, his meanderings about the island nation of Tuvalu (itself sufficient, IMHO, for a whole book-length treatment on its own!), and his discoveries that the same Peruvian glacier which his father spied twenty years across a pristine high-altitude glacial lake had simply disappeared due to global warming--was the lone sentiment which I carted away with me from this read. It's the same one which I'll be sharing with my friends when they ask me what I've been reading of late.

It's hard not to admire Lynas, folks.

Global travel is tough on the sojourner. It doesn't matter who's footing the bill, m'kay, so let's just dismiss the commonly held belief that travel is amazing uf you're not the one paying for it. That's poppycock! These days, intercontinental travel is pure hell, and it's not been made any easier by the state of the world we live in...and I'm talking air travel, exclusively.

In essence, the person who does the travelling is forced to adjust to time zones, potential linguistic barriers, radical temperature shifts, lingering political effects, and in poor Mark's case, what can be best described as a "near-death experience."

In vivid detail, Mark describes how he ignored his own best advice regarding too rapid high-altitude ascent in the Andes, with thank goodness only remotely-disastrous consequences.

Mark spun around the globe, literally, spanning every hemisphere: north, south, east, and west. He bore the brunt of the climactic travails and the ravages of their overall toll on his own body, to deliver up this compelling piece of too-true non-fiction.

It does get depressing at a stage. Though not due to Mark's entertaining authorial style. It has more to do with the vagaries of of the Kyoto Protocol's acceptance (as in, what does it MEAN?), and what its various stipulations and evasive phraseologies will in fact, entail (concretely, in other words) when the time comes to implement things rigidly. And, like Lynas and other climatologists have long since been evangelizing--and they've already purchased jars of white talcum powder to mask just how blue in the face they really are from preaching to us the vital message--the reckoning is certainly coming.

In the British edition of the book, there's this great section toward the end where Mark is himself being interviewed about the latest developments *since* his publication of HIGH TIDE. In what could be best described as "I told you so," things indeed had tumbled precipitously since the 2004 publication year. We had Katrina in New Orleans, the tsunami in Southeast Asia, and restrictions on population flow between Tuvalu and New Zealand as part of those latter two countries' "special [population] arrangement."

SIX DEGREES, Mark's announced next book, will only be better, but only because it will be more vivid, more viseral, and more hard-hitting, as more and more people will identify with its descriptions...all because more people will have been directly affected by the things that Mark's been writing about all along.

Think of all he's seen, done, heard about, and learned in the interim--not to mention the "degree" to which he'd internalized the things he'd seen and heard during his travels. How much better he's improved, though the overall global prognosis has gotten terribly worse.

I'm looking forward to getting my hands on a copy. But "looking forward" is too passive.

Like I said in the subject heading, this is certainly no primer, kids! For a first effort, it's challenged a heck of a lot of preconceived notions, and caused wide swathes of people to start talking. In this reviewer's hands, that's a heck of a lot more than I can say for some other people who don't walk the proverbial talk.

--ADM in Prague

Author: Ray Wood
By Gomer Press

Author: Ian McAllister, Karen Mcallister
By Harbour Publishing

The last temperate rainforest forest, 2004-09-21
This is a great book for nature lovers in general, and an absolute must for anyone thinking of travelling to the northern British Columbian coast of Canada.
I had the good fortune to have this wonderful book as a companion on a journey there this summer and it really is a stunning and inspirational piece of work.
The photos clearly took many years and thousands of miles of hard slog to capture and are truly unique.
The MacAllister's have superbly distilled the essence of this incredible coastal ecosystem - the lush evergreen forest, the salmon runs, the seals, the bald eagles and the towering fiords and soaring peaks -- into a brilliant series of images.
The pictures of wolves and bears - grizzly, black and the legendary white Spirit Bear - are truly outstanding. It's all accompanied by some expert and very readable commentary, spiced up with some very human moments from the authors' travels in the region.
Overall it's an excellent book which you will probably return to time and time again to enjoy. It's also likely that some proceeds from it will go to support the MacAllister's efforts to protect this delicate environment from the current and very real threats of logging, hunting and industrial exploitation. So if you buy it, you'll be doing a bit of good into the bargain.

Author: Peter L. Larson
By Indiana University Press

Not fit for a king, 2008-08-27
This is a specialist volume for scientists and very educated amateurs interested in Tyrannosaurus rex and other dinosaurs. It celebrates an auspicious 100th anniversary of the discovery of the first T. rex bones. Does it live up to The Tyrant King's glory?

Not really. As usual for the Life of the Past series, it is a conglomeration of short articles with tiny nuggets of information (and then sometimes wild scenarios perched precariously upon those), some entertaining pieces that contain little science but are a bit fun, a few longwinded essays that unfortunately have seen little editing, and some decent reviews and summaries of specimens and other data.

If you study T. rex as a scientist, it's a must have. If you're just casually interested, look elsewhere for more general audience-oriented books. It is quite patchy in coverage (not a unified synthesis of T. rex biology), is missing quite a few of the major living experts on T. rex, and is mediocre in overall scientific quality. The peer review of the articles, as is typical for many books, seems not very rigorous; a third rate journal would never publish most of them.

Overall it was a bit disappointing but contained enough nuggets of useful information and extreme viewpoints to engender controversy (or at least raised eyebrows that they were published in the state they're in) to make it an OK purchase. A highlight is the opening review of known T. rex specimens with historical notes and a few pictures.

Author: Carl Moreland, David Bannister
By Phaidon Press Ltd

Great introduction to antique maps, 2006-08-20
This has been my first book on antique maps and I could hardy have had a better one. Now I have a lot of books on maps, a lot of them very good, but this continues to be a great starting point for information.