This is one entralling book! I knew there were meat eating plants, but I never thought of them as "passive" and "active". The book is broken up in cute sections, "Gulp!" and "Slurp!" being my favorite, but the entire book keeps your interest. The drawings are quite excellent and you learn a lot just by looking at the pictures. I really enjoyed it and my little brother just loves it. A hit.

Great subject, and wonderfully presented with interesting scientific facts and beautiful illustrations. This book made learning about insect eating plants a treat.

This is a book for young readers to test their skills but it isa book for all readers to enjoy - fascinating science about insecteating plants, a subject about which we generally know little. No matter what your age, you'll love it and great illustrations, too.

This is one awesome book, for kids and for adults. Not much seems to be offered regarding bioluminescence in mainstream science books and it's very nice to see this beautiful book being offered for kids. It's wonderfully and clearly written, the pictures and photography are literally "out of this world". I bought it for my kids, but to be honest, I really bought it for myself. This is simply one of the best books I've seen for kids in years.

This book is a beautiful amalgam of science and poetry. Not only is it a wonderful introduction for children to the mysteries of the sea, it's a very special aesthetic experience for grownups as well!

This books tells us about sea organisms that glow --all the dinoflaggelates, bright worms, flashlight fish, etc. -- that turn the ocean into fairyland. Mary Batten clearly describes how and why this happens. Intended for children, Mary Batten's book invites ANYONE'S imagination to swim among the weird bioluminescent creatures in the deep underwater sea. Beautifully illustrated. Really neat. (This joint review by readers 53 and 13).

I gave this book to my 3 yr old neice and 6 yr old nephew, and they were as fascinated by it as their mother and father were. The pictures are wonderful and the text really gives you the feel of what the lives of one of the last groups of hunter gatherers in the world are like. And it paints a detailed and fascinating picture of what it is like to be an anthropologist studying and loving a people whose lives are so different from our own. A really enjoyable book.

This biography of the young Venezuelan anthropologist Magdalena Hurtado provides a very clear description of her fieldwork among one of the world's last foraging peoples, the Ache indians of Paraguay. This beautifully illustated book provides the best available introduction for young readers of what it is an anthropologist does. Although the publishers recommend the book for ages 9-12, my guess is that students in junior high and high school --perhaps especially young women -- will find the book both informative and inspirational.

Christopher Pikes 'remember me' is a sad but true story about a girl who arrived home to find out her family was ignoring her. Her family got a phone call and Shari got in the car and followed them to find her body lying on a cold metal slab. She was dead. They said it was suicide. But she knew she had been murdered. This book proves the point. "we respect the living but we owe the dead the truth".

This book is NOT just for kids!! I read it to my baby cousin and reread it after she fell asleep! It was a fascinating read, very well written and well supported by imaginative drawings. My favorite section, about the bugs, is simply amazing and my baby cousin loved it, too! Great stuff.

I read this book 35 years ago and still have my copy. I bought it through the Scolastic Book Service, when I was in 5th grade. I logged on to this web site hoping to locate a copy for a wonderful friend who just completed the adoption process for the latest of six children. He and his wife didn't need the book for inspiration, but it would be the perfect compliment to their own life story. I'll keep searching.

Only my closest friends are given the privilege of borrowing this delightfully written true story; the long out-of-print and (before the days of the internet) irreplaceable book has been one of my most closely guarded treasures since childhood. Any family with several small children, of course, will have a store of hilarious anecdotes; children raised with love combine insouciant joy with freedom from adult assumptions and habits of thought, so that any house full of love and children is a house full of unpredictability and laughter. But Helen Doss, unlike most parents, can capture her children in her writing and pass the joy on to us. I don't know anyone who has managed to read the book through without at some point laughing to the point of tears.

But the book is much more than a connection of Readers' Digest anecdotes strung together. Ms. Doss reveals, through deft and honest touches, her own weaknesses and struggles, her impetuosity and her grit. She communicates with power the pain that can come in so many different ways to a woman with a tremendous need to love, especially when obstacles - infertility, unreasonable adoption agencies, poverty - rise up to keep her from satisfying that need. And the portrait of her husband Carl, who changes as much as the children do, is vivid and telling. The Carl who says, "Let's take 'em all" at the end of the book is a very different Carl from the one who agrees to the first adoption largely to humor his wife and to keep her from moping weepily and endlessly about the house, and whose annual refrain for many years is, "This is the last one!" You expect him to come on board, of course; but his path is a bit surprising and most revealing of the essence of the man. In particular his ability to close ranks against outside inteference shows the degree to which his love for his family is as strong as his wife's, however differently it might be expressed.

As a family memoir alone, it would be a classic. But because the children were of mixed racial ancestry - in the 'forties and 'fifties - the Doss family became an unwilling catalyst for the ignorance and prejudice of the time. It is part of the Doss magic that the love in the family was strong enough to triumph over the unpleasant incidents, so that those incidents enriched, rather than poisoned, the Doss childhoods. (Not that this made them less unpleasant, of course.)

The book is never preachy. Nevertheless, it is a vivid documentary of how racism was built into the attitudes of even "nice" people of that time. It is a sermon of a kind, a sermon lived out in the lives of the Doss family. It is a primer on how to overcome evil with good, a standing lesson to a nation still struggling with racial resentment.

But the genuinely remarkable thing is that, despite the frequent intrusions suffered by the family from racially prejudiced outsiders, the book is not about race. No doubt this is because the Doss family was never about race. When the book crosses your mind in the days after you've closed it - and it will, frequently - it will not be as a book about race. It will be as a book about a uniquely special family and about the triumph of love and joy and grace and laughter over whatever might vainly try to overcome them.

I first read this book at the age of 10, after ordering it from Scholastic book services. I have since read it uncountable numbers of times, each re-reading bringing warm feelings at the familiar passages. This reprint has been highly anticipated, as I had wondered for years what had happened to the Doss family after the end of the book. It is the story of a man and a woman, and their desire for a family. But it is also much more. It is the tale of the strength found in a loving family, a family made by love and not biology. It is a reminder that we are all family, flesh and blood or not, skin color and ancestry aside. And it is filled with the humor that only small active children can provide! I highly recommend this book for readers of all ages, and would suggest it to families to read aloud together.

Trixie Belden and her new friend, Honey Wheeler, begin their friendship with a mystery and unexpected results from solving it. Trixie's brash boldness and Honey's fears balance into a fine detective duo. This first in the series is a must read for young mystery and adventure fans. I have almost the whole collection and still reread these delightful adventures 25 years after the first reading.

This book is a wonderful introduction to a great series of books for young girls. I read the first six when I was 10 years old, and I fell in love with Trixie and her friends. Those stories were written by Julie Campbell in the 1950's and republished in the 1960's. Kathryn Kenny took over with book seven in the late '60's. Readers will notice a change in Trixie's personality and in the focus of the stories. Kenny introduces more of the history of the Hudson River Valley, and includes more facts and less of the banter and teasing that made me so fond of the original books. However, the books which Kenny continued writing into the '70's and the '80's, which I bought for my daughter, are entertaining, if not quite as much fun as the original six. The Red Trailer Mystery, the sequal to the Secret of the Mansion, is also a must to read for anyone who wants to get the full story of how Jim came to be Honey's adopted brother, The Gatehouse Mystery explains the formation of the Bob White club, The Mysterious Visitor chronicles the advent of Diana Lynch into the group. Book five, The Mystery Off Glen Road is a personal favorite of mine, an absolutely hilarious book telling of Trixie's attempts to become a 'lady', not to impress Jim, but for such convoluted reasons that she has her entire family in an uproar. I hope that like the Nancy Drew mysteries, some publisher who knows a good thing when he sees it, will update the Trixie Belden books and republish them for the next generation. I would hate to see this series that has brought so much pleasure and happiness to so many girls be lost forever.

I grew up reading Trixie Belden. I began reading these novels in sixth grade and I could not get enough of them. I used to stay up late at night and read them aloud to my younger sister in the upper bunk. What great memories we have because of these books! We own the first 10 books of the series in hardback and then have approximately 15 more in paperback. This summer I went to Casville, Michigan and found a used bookstore selling them and I picked up a couple more for my nieces. Like another reviewer, I'm just sorry I didn't have a girls to share them with. My nieces have begun to enjoy them and I eager to share my enthusiasm with them!

A simply lovely book that both my three year old daughter and I both enjoyed reading. Well thought out illustrations are a credit to the artist with an informative text that can be read even to a little one,without "what does that mean,dad" every five seconds. All in all just a nice simple book.

I learned a lot about wolves from this book. And the pictures are sooooo cute! It is my favorite! I would get it if I were you!

This is an intriguing, engaging little tale about a baby wolf who learns how to howl and become part of the pack. The writer, Batten, writes in a lovely, simple way that seems to anticipate the child's next, inevitable question. The story is well augmented by the illustrations which are both pleasing to the eye and informative. A fun, excellent read.

Like the previous reviewer (who will appear here after my review), I too have read this book twice -- first from the library, then again after buying a copy some time later. There's quite a lot of interesting reading here on animal, primate, and human mating behavior from an evolutionary perspective. This puts the book in pretty good company with such books as Ridley's "The Red Queen" and Cherfas & Gribion's "The Redundant Male", Baker's "Sperm Wars" and Buss's "Evolution of Desire" both being perhaps too focused on just human behavior to be directly comparable. Still there's a lot of overlap of material. Batten's book is perhaps a bit broader than it is deep (it's only 210 pgs), but that adds to its readability, even if it causes frustration at times as certain implications which occur to the reader are not adequately acknowledged, much less explored.

Unlike the previous reviewer, I don't think the book is all that objective at times, and I think there's quite a lot of moralizing. Parts of the chapter on "subverting" female choice seemed to me to be particularly noxious. At least Batten has it right that rape (among humans) is about male powerlessless rather than male power (as we've been hearing from feminists for so long). On the other hand, she seems to buy into the fact that it's about power and not reproduction, which seems curious. Just one example of what I thought were contradictions left unresolved. Another: are males in favor of infanticide, or do the right-to-lifer's show they're against it? I could go on...

It's a common and not entirely unjustifiable complaint about this genre of science (or pseudo-science, depending on ones persuasion) that it merely reflects cultural biases and current fads in thinking. That women control the economy of eros (reproduction) is not exactly a new idea, thought the author makes it sound like this is something revolutionary. That men quite often cooperate with women in this regard perhaps isn't given enough credence here (there's an undertone that females are entitled to their choice...), thus illuminating another critique of this kind of book, namely that it reduces humans to being mere animals. We all like to believe that there is some difference, whether it be in intelligence or the ability to conceptualize the future or some other intangible. The unspoken assumption in sociobiology is that certain things are universal by virtue of their being biological, which I think is debatable.

Still, Batten's book is certain to both entertain and educate the average reader. She has a unique angle on the topic in her choice of objective things to relate and it's refreshing to hear certain sacred cows taken on and sometimes debunked. Even discussing them is an improvement compared to what passes for debate in the marketplace of ideas these days, so I hope I'm not making the book sound worse than it is.

What a breath of fresh air this book is. We live in a society that worships the concepts of love and marriage. It is so enlightening to learn about the natural aspects of animal and human nature without all the distortions of religious and social dogma. I think that a student of evolutionary sexology can probably learn a lot from this book. The average joe will probably be amazed with revelations he gains.

I was first introduced to Mary Batten's "Sexual Strategies" two years ago by a friend, who accurately predicted that the book would give me a breakthrough in understanding the evolutionary basis for all those human mating behaviors and social mores that cause us all so much happiness and grief. I read the book twice and haven't seen it since, but its impact was so great that I've based my morality since then on its major theses. I'm finally ordering a copy for another friend, who will doubtless order some for others. Batten's cross-species comparisons demonstrate certain universal evolutionary principles underlying and/or undermining modern sexual mores and gender politics. The book's greatest value to me was in identifying certain behaviors as evolutionarily-based, such as a female's preference for a high-status male with a willingness to commit resources. Batten's level-headed scientific analysis neatly debunks the classical chauvinist / modern feminist myth of female moral superiority, and places on a morally equal footing the male biological imperative to mate with multiple females. This gave strength to me as a struggling gender egalitarian in a feminist-dominated law school. "Sexual Strategies" is written, in a manner lost since the sexual revolution, with a refreshing absence of Puritan moral posturing. Behaviors that would cause moral outrage if confessed in polite society, such as a females' deception of a non-genetic "father", are treated with commendable neutrality. The development of hierarchical dominance traits through female sexual choice is laid out so convincingly that the male-bashing anti-testosterone politics of today seem to just evaporate in the sunshine of scientific evidence so thoughtfully analyzed. Batten's cross-cultural comparisons also contribute greatly to an understanding that "No, we're not all alike all over the world." Many cultural traditions, marital customs and sexual strictures are exposed as merely arbitrary local rules rather than logically or evolutionarily based traits, and therefore seem destined for the dustbin of social history. When read in conjunction with Robert Wright's "The Moral Animal", Mary Batten's "Sexual Strategies" becomes the cornerstone of a new era of rational morality, and possibly real happiness for a great many people who would otherwise remain stuck in the prehistoric morass of outdated social mores. Thank you Mary Batten.

Not a bad book, easy for kids to understand, good pictures,well worth the money.