A very good illustrated book, plenty of informations about all the signs you could find in a wood, a beach, a street.. Just open the book and you'll be able to find out which species of bird flown on your garden, which one eat your loved flowers... Very nice and veru useful!

This book is a masterpiece when it comes to picture quality and when you are looking for a book that covers the most common species. If you have special interest in one or some species, the book is far from detailed enough

Also, the book makes a great present for a bird lover.

This is a great little introduction for novice birders and armchair naturalists to some of the key birds of the Great Basin. Good photographs and lively text make it a pleasant read. Not a field guide.

As a born North-Sea-coast birder and knowing the work of Lars Jonsson since 1977,(his famous five smaler volumes "Birds in the wild" I realised that preparing for North Africa could not be a mistake in buying this book,even if there is the extra weight of all the North European birds described in the book and not to bee seen in Marocco. His marvelous illustrations are a pleasure for all everyone and the book a must for all foreign birders visitting Europe. As a Belgian , I own a big library with a lot of field-guides, especially Petersons' , but this book rivals them all.

Patrick

If ever you feel to publicise this letter,bee free to correct my english .Thanks.

...however, the option of four and a half was not offered, and I'm not sure this guide rates a perfect score. I was very impressed with it. It is well-written (and well-translated, I guess); covering the points of identification well, and very nicely illustrated. The fact that range maps for species on one page are occasionally placed on the following page may be a minor irritation to some, but range maps, in my view, are largely placed in guides for their interest value. Birds fly, and will turn up outside of their normal range, thus, range maps are not important for field identification (at least not during migration of migratory species; and probably as a general rule), and the necessity to turn a page is not a major problem with this guide. This is, overall, an excellent guide, and I can't wait for the opportunity to use it on the home ranges of the species it covers, in stead of on the occasional vagrant.

I have used this guide in Europe, a region with which I am not (in terms of avifauna) particularly familiar, and I find it informative and useful. I have heard varying opinions on the artwork - some rave about it, others say it is too artificial/unnatural/etc. I align myself with the former camp - intracacies and details of field marks are well illustrated and easily discernible - yes, perhaps more so than they would be in the field, but I have trouble with those who fault a guide for showing features not readily visible in the field - any experienced birder should know this is an eternal pitfall to *any* guide.

The text is excellent - well-written (I of course have only used the English translation, I have seen translations in other European languages as well) and concise. I do have two critiques, however: one, I would like each species description to be subdivided by keywords in boldface to make finding important features such as size, habitat, etc. easier to find in a pinch, and two, the criticisms I have read of the layout are mostly well-founded. It is not always clear to which drawing/painting a given species description applies - range maps are not always on the same page as the text or illustration, etc. This is inexcusable and would have been easily remedied if only by use of large, boldfaced numbers a la Simpson and Day (Aus.) or Grimmett et al. (India/Subcontinent).

As for the size, I almost always carry either a buttpack or daypack into the field - so it doesn't bother me a whit. I can't imagine *not* carrying a pack, in fact, so I disregard this criticism entirely - but those who feel otherwise might want to borrow a copy to see how it works for them. For any birder, however, I would say the use for which this guide is most well-suited is as a prep guide - the book to pore over en route to your birding site, soaking in as much of the extremely informative text as possible. It is by no means without fault as an in-the-field guide, but very good nonetheless.

This book is almost a reminder of howNOT to sail around Antarctica. I read his second book which was even worse,since it had a group of ill-assortedpeople picked at the last moment.

I greatly appreciate people seeking out new sailing adventures regardless of their motivation. From each of their stories of beauty, adventure, fear, skill and humor we can all learn a great deal about ourselves and our own potential. I read stores like this one by David Lewis to live vicariously and to learn. After reading many other true sailing stories and doing some cruising of my own, I have to raise the caution flag for those readers who are new to blue-water cruising and sailing in general. While the writing style kept me turning pages, the content and the actual story raised many concerns for me. I would describe David Lewis' execution of this adventure as poorly thought out, reckless and even dangerous. He buys a boat that is new to him, which he knows next to nothing about and takes it to Antarctica with no sea trial. He tries to justify keeping himself at near dehydration to conserve water while also regularly consuming hard alcohol. Why is it that aft! er being doused in repeated rain squalls, not once does he try to set up a "rain-trap?" Why does he set out for Anarctica with no heater on board? He experiences several storms and even capsizing more than once. Why does he never speak of heaving-to; a basic and necessary storm survival tactic? After finishing each chapter I actually found myself saying aloud, "I can't believe he's still alive!" While I appreciate Mr. Lewis' vision, I believe his actions are a display of carelessness and possibly arrogance. If you were sailing to the Antarctic alone, would you get off your boat in the ice pack to float around on a small piece of ice? I don't think so. This is an extremely poor example of seamanship.

I owned a copy of this book,years ago, but can not find it. A thrilling story about his circumnavigaton of Antartica, alone, in a small steel hulled sailing vessel. Foolhardy or brave? I never could say, for sure. If memory serves, he did not take a transmitting radio, only a receiver for news and weather reports. He said that anyone foolish enough to undertake such a journey, should not be able to broadcast a distress. He sailed '' the wrong way'' (against the winds or currents, of the roaring forties. His story underlines the problems and solutions such a feat produces. Well worth the time and effort to obtain this book! (whether you believe his undertaking was foolish or not). A must read. (By: W.R.Bell, '' Squadcar54@aol.com '' 4-7-1999, St.Pete, FL. *end

This book is very simplistic and does not really provide any useful information. Perhaps if you have never owned a bird before and wanted a very general overview it might be helpful, but I found it to be pretty uninformative.

I found this book very interesting and usefull. It tells you how to take care of your bird no mater what kind of bird. It tells you about the feeding, illnesses, selecting, handling and training, breeding, and breefly explains a bit about each kind of bird incase you are unsure of what one to buy.

I am new to Linux but have worked on Windows 95/NT for many years. After reading "Using Caldera OpenLinux 2.2," I was able to do just about everything in OpenLinux 2.2 that I currently do in Windows NT 4.0 Workstation. I was able to connect to the internet, create a WordPerfect document, customize the GUI, and install new applications. One downfall to the book is that it often used "print screens" from OpenLinux 1.3 (the previous version of OpenLinux). For my soundcard, the book recommended that I buy a commercial driver from 4Front technologies; I wish the book would have given me instructions on installing the free OSS sound driver.

The CD included with the book is superb. It includes Caldera OpenLinux 2.2 with WordPerfect 8.0 and hundreds of open source applications. KDE, the graphical user interface to OpenLinux 2.2, is better than the Microsoft Windows GUI. "Que Using Caldera OpenLinux 2.2" and the OpenLinux 2.2 distribution of Linux is a must for anyone new to the Linux community.

When I first installed Caldera OpenLinux on my PC, I was a newcomer to Linux and didn't really know my way around. Caldera does provide decent documentation for its product, but the installation and user's guide is a bit spare fora newbie to make much use of. This book is the one that took me from being a wet-eared newbie to a competent OpenLinux user. The book assumes that you know very little about Linux and gives you an introduction to the history of Linux, the open source philosophy, the distributions of Linux and a host of other pertinent information before taking through Star Office, the K Desktop Environment (using and manipualting), the command line, package management with RPM, the file system, configuring the X Server, configuring sound, the file system, networking (including using Samba and NetWare), connecting to the Internet, reading the XF86Config file, tweaking, programming languages, compiling source code, shell scripting, runlevels, troubleshooting, and a range of almost every possible problem that a home user or small office user will run into. This book can get quite in depth, and is suitable for those who want to get into Linux quite deeply, or for simple casual use as a reference guide. This is the one book that should ship with every version of Caldera. With this book, you'll find that Linux really can be quite fun to learn and quite easy as well.

This is a VERY good book, it covers all versions of linux, but it mainly focuses on Red Hat Linux and OpenLinux, although I was suprised that it didn't come with Slackware linux as it was in the previous edition. You could tell that it wasn't edited extremely well, as it still contains sections which mention the "Slackware" CD that comes with it. I wasn't too disappionted about that there wasn't any mention of 5.2. Ihe CD's contain all the RPMS and the Source RPMS for Redhat linux which I found very useful. The installation process is simplified, even though I had already installed it when I read. I think it's a bit more expensive at £37.49 UK Pounds then it should be and it should contain Slackware, but apart from that it is a flawless book.

Overall: Que made a book which covers mainly two versions of linux. I can't wait until next edition, when I hope it will contain Slackware.

Color photos and discriptions of a broad range of birds and covers basic bird health, training, care, breeding and housing. Helpful for choosing a bird, but not a complete resource.

I liked this book because it had a lot of info but and neat bird breeds. But when I was looking for some info on a VERY common bird it wasn't there. If you just want the general info this is great but not if your'e looking for what kind of bird is right for you. And some of the info is out of date. it says you should use grit and you SHOULD NOT USE GRIT WITH YOU BIRDS!

I think the other reviewers have been a bit harsh. The book is a good resource. It gives general information on a variety of common birds. I think it would be particularly helpful to those new to birdkeeping. It has detailed instructions on cage selection, breeding information, and first aid. P.S. ask your vet about grit

Having achieved great success with his humorous bridge fiction involving the monks of St Titus, David Bird sought to move his bridge tales out into other areas. One of the first was to move the game back several centuries and have the game played by the outlaw Robin Hood in Sherwood Forest near Nottingham.

As with the "Abbot" series, each chapter in the book puts the protagonists into a situation that allows them to play bridge and provides a backdrop for the humour that is what makes up such a large part of the appeal of this genre. Each hand is presented as a play problem and there is an opportunity for the reader to try to tackle it as a double dummy problem before seeing the solution found, or not found, by the players.

One of the things that has changed with the new scenario is the bridge. Here, rather than playing almost exclusively in duplicate tournaments, the characters are almost always seen playing rubber bridge, often for substantial stakes. That does change the nature of the problems that are set and in general, they seem to be easier and less interesting than the puzzles that face the Abbot and his monks. To be picky the bridge problems are not without mistake. On at least one hand the line of play described in the narrative does not lead to the end position shown in tabular form.

The humour changes also. While the St. Titus books are close to the "Yes Minister" school of humour, Robin Hood and his friends come right out of the bawdy end of a "Carry on" film. Keen Bridge players are rarely prudes but they are not so likely to be amused by jokes about which player ends up with which cheap ....

Compared to the "Abbot" books then, this is not so good. If your are new to David Bird, I would suggest one of the books in the monks series as a far better introduction. Fans of David Bird's bridge humour will be interested in this books in any case and, while it is not of the highest standard, it is still above average for the genre.

Well written. Very little on conure behaviors and info to help me understand and relate to my bird. Alot of detail on avaries and breeding. Reads well. More color pictures would enhance this book.